Chastity And Transgression In Women's Writing, 1792-1897: Interrupting the Harlot's Progress

Chastity and Transgression in Women’s Writing, 1792–1897 Interrupting the Harlot’s Progress Roxanne Eberle Chastity a...

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Chastity and Transgression in Women’s Writing, 1792–1897 Interrupting the Harlot’s Progress

Roxanne Eberle

Chastity and Transgression in Women’s Writing, 1792–1897

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Chastity and Transgression in Women’s Writing, 1792–1897 Interrupting the Harlot’s Progress

Roxanne Eberle The University of Georgia

© Roxanne Eberle 2002 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0–333–96495–0 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Eberle, Roxanne, 1964Chastity and transgression in women’s writing, 1792–1897: interrupting the Harlot’s Progress/Roxanne Eberle. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–96495–0 1. English literature--Women authors--History and criticism. 2. Sex in literature. 3. Feminism and literature--Great Britain--History--19th century. 4. Women and literature--Great Britain--History--19th century. 5. English literature--19th century--History and criticism. 6. Feminist fiction, English--History and criticism. 7. Man-woman relationships in literature. 8. Sex role in literature. 9. Chastity in literature. I. Title. PR468.S48.E24 2001 820.9’3538’08209034--dc21 2001036993 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

For my father, Raymond Eberle and in memory of my mother, Grace Vaccaro


Contents List of Plates Acknowledgments

viii ix

Introduction: Interrupting the Harlot’s Progress 1

2

1

Imagining the Sexualized Heroine: Mary Wollstonecraft, the Feminist Treatise, and The Wrongs of Woman

21

Coda to Chapter 1: “A Legion of Wollstonecrafts”

55

“To think, to decide, and to act”: Radical Fictions of Transgression and Vindication

76

3

Diverting the Libertine Gaze: Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray 106

4

Victorian Reclamations: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Protective Fictions in Mary Barton and Ruth

136

Rewriting the “vile text”: Christina Rossetti and the Poetics of Social Reform

168

Reaping the Fruits of Resistance: Josephine Butler and Sarah Grand

202

Coda to Chapter 6: Writing the New Wollstonecraft

235

5 6

Notes Works Cited Index

244 257 267

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List of Plates Cover Illustration Nikolas von Heideloff, “Bathing Place” Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection 1

William Hogarth, “The Harlot’s Progress”, Plate 1 (Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California)

2

William Hogarth, “The Harlot’s Progress”, Plate 5 (Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California)

3

Augustus Egg, “Past and Present”, Plate 1 (© Tate, London 2001)

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5


6

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Frontispiece to Goblin Market (Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California)

7

John Opie, Portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft (By courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London)

8

William Heath, Engraving of John Opie’s portrait (Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California)

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Acknowledgments I would like to gratefully acknowledge the members of my dissertation committee at UCLA, particularly Anne Mellor, who has been the friend and mentor every young scholar longs to find. I’d also like to thank the many friends I made while at UCLA, all of whom willingly and lovingly listened to me talk, read drafts of my work, and gave me the benefits of their fine minds and ready wit: Luke Carson, Tim Murphy, Molly King, Kathy Stansbury, Mike Merrill, Geoff Sanborn, Stephanie Bower, John Nuckols, Danielle Price, and Rachel Lee. I’d like to particularly acknowledge my “kindred spirits”, Kristy Carter and Libby Gruner; together we persevered. While at the University of Georgia, where I turned my dissertation into this book, I have further benefited from personal and professional relationships with a group of wonderful colleagues and students, including Anne Williams, Nelson Hilton, Tricia Lootens, Anne Mallory, Sujata Iyengar, Richard Menke, and Elizabeth Kraft. And, while finishing this book, I have incurred further debts. My sincere thanks go to Claudia Johnson and Laura Green, as well as to Eleanor Birne, my editor at Palgrave. Thanks are also due to the larger institutional bodies that have supported this work: the UCLA English Department, the Clark Library, the University of Georgia English Department, the Huntington Library, and the University of Georgia Humanities Research Center. I’d also like to give thanks to Jittery Joe’s in Athens, Georgia, where I always found ready electricity, great coffee, and a table of my own. I was fortunate enough to be nurtured in a family that cherishes the written word, the free expression of ideas, and little girls who love to read. Thanks go to my mother and my father to whom I dedicate this book, and also to my indulgent grandparents, patient brother, and wise sister. I’d also like to thank some of the many other family members and friends who have listened to me talk about this book for what must have seemed like an eternity: Merryl Alber, Valerie Baird Eberle, Annie Garry, Beth Staebell, my Athens “Play” Group, Jean Taylor, and my extended family, the Eberles, the Rosenbergs, and the Vaccaros (particularly my Uncle Angelo, who actually read most of the dissertation). Finally, thanks and love go to Jason and Seamus, without whom life would be infinitely empty.

ix

x


A version of Chapter 3 first appeared as “Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray: Diverting the Libertine Gaze; or, The Vindication of a Fallen Woman” in Studies in the Novel, vol. 26, Summer 1994. Copyright 1994 by the University of North Texas. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Introduction: Interrupting the Harlot’s Progress

Pursued by men who judge her to be a “woman of pleasure”, Frances Burney’s eponymous heroine races through the Vauxhall sequences of Evelina (1778). Her first encounter with threatened sexual violence occurs after she and her Branghton cousins are surrounded by “a large party of gentlemen, apparently very riotous, and who were hallowing, leaning on one another, and laughing immoderately” (195). They “enclose” Evelina and her companions in a “circle” and “keep them prisoner” until one of the men draws the heroine toward him. Although Evelina eludes her first captor, a headlong escape puts her in the path of yet another threat. The heroine breathlessly recounts the second encounter: . . . with a swiftness which fear only could have given me, I flew rather than ran up the walk, [. . .] I was met by another party of men, one of whom placed himself so directly in my way, calling out, “Whither so fast, my love?” – that I could only have proceeded, by running into his arms. In a moment, both my hands, by different persons, were caught hold of; and one of them, in a most familiar manner, desired to accompany me in a race, when I ran next; while the rest of the party stood still and laughed. (196) I quote this scene at length to evoke the quality of sexual danger that pervades many texts from the eighteenth century and Romantic periods. Evelina’s situation is one of acute peril; it is not only her “reputation” at risk here. She is grabbed and manhandled, as well as baited and teased. For many critics, Burney’s work defines the representation of the 1

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ideal eighteenth-century heroine and her inexorable progress toward marriage and domesticity.1 But as the Vauxhall Garden scene demonstrates, Evelina’s scripted narrative path toward marriage first winds through the often treacherous heart of Burney’s London, an ominous landscape of suspected and literal sexual transgression; female modesty when “enclosed” by masculine mockery and violence seems dangerously fragile. The “race” which should conclude with the domestic heroine’s marriage is fraught with risk. Burney’s text accrues narrative power by playing upon the reader’s fears that the heroine – so obviously deserving of the best possible fate – will instead become a victim of male violence and hence an unwilling participant in a far more dreadful story familiar to all eighteenth-century readers: the “harlot’s progress”. Indeed, the lustful men who pursue Evelina insist upon such a narrative; they choose to interpret her desperate attempts to elude them within a sign system of sexual transgression rather than sexual purity. And Evelina remains vulnerable to interpretive and physical violence until she successfully secures the most desirable elements of the domestic heroine’s narrative: first a father and then a husband. Evelina’s quest for the protective security of a publicly established virtuous reputation drives the narrative itself. Until Sir John claims her as his daughter all of her actions remain suspect. Finally, however, Evelina is a success story of virtue rewarded. Burney makes her point about women’s sexual vulnerability and then provides the heroine with a hero capable of recognizing intrinsic goodness even as Evelina’s father eventually acknowledges the true status of both his wife and daughter. Unable to ignore the maternal legacy of wronged virtue reinscribed in Evelina’s features, he casts himself at his daughter’s feet (385). Both mother and daughter are vindicated as “good women” and rewarded with the status of wives, not “whores”. By eluding the sexual violence that threatens her in Vauxhall Garden, Evelina ensures her own progress toward marriage and respectability. To venture off respectable pathways is to run the risk of falling into a much more dangerous narrative; it is a narrative that begins with either seduction or sexual violence and usually ends with death.2 In Evelina we find some evidence to support Nancy Armstrong’s account of women’s writing. In Desire and Domestic Fiction she contends that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries women authored “narratives in which a woman’s virtue alone overcomes sexual aggression and transforms male desire into middle-class love, the stuff that modern families are made of” (6). According to


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Armstrong, writers including Hannah More, Jane Austen, and Frances Burney act as domestic moral agents and promote middle-class values by creating heroines blessed with all the requisite feminine virtues and rewarded with good husbands, sufficient financial resources, and domestic “power”. Armstrong argues for the historical importance of the female pen by reading texts as scripts of cultural hegemony that ultimately serve the political and economic needs of the middle-class couple: the public male entrepreneur and his private angel in the house. To do so, she must applaud the ascendance of a domestic ideology dependent upon conventions of limited female speech and the idealization of domestic influence. For Armstrong, Evelina functions as a “polite novel” that helps to create a “private domain of culture that was independent of the political world and overseen by a woman” (98). Specifically, “the explicitly female narrator [. . .] of Evelina [. . .] [is] more effective in launching a political critique because [her] gender identifies [her] as having no claim to political power” (29). While Armstrong rightly forces us to question the “political innocence” of conservative domesticity, her work trivializes the socio-political criticism of those authors she identifies as celebrants of domestic power and dismisses the overt proto-feminist criticism produced at this time by such radical women writers as Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, and others.3 Armstrong argues that the domestic woman’s authority derives from disciplined self-regulation. By judiciously meting out language, sexuality, and her husband’s financial resources, the domestic heroine attains social influence. But in Armstrong’s formulation, all depends upon the acquisition of an economic man; the heroine “purchases” the status of wife with her well-maintained chastity and the promise to obey a complex set of behavioral rules. She assumes a posture of selfeffacement and immersion in the domestic sphere, while spending just enough money in the public sphere to prove her husband’s powers as a successful economic man and thus maintain her own position. Armstrong contends that by the end of the eighteenth century the authority of the domestic woman was firmly established and the values she represents had been accepted as “common sense” (63). Chastity and Transgression in Women’s Writing turns away from this canonically successful history of the coercive middle-class heroine and her “power of domestic surveillance” (Armstrong 19) and towards an alternative history dependent upon a radically different female subjectivity.4 Rather than submitting to the “common sense” ideological pragmatism of the “domestic woman”, radical women writers

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challenge the “grammar” of the conduct book and domestic novel at the end of the eighteenth century. Beside the “rise of the domestic woman” we find the ascension of a sexually transgressive but articulate speaking subject. In a series of proto-feminist treatises and novels, women authors write into being a virtuous heroine who has been “robbed” of her chastity by men uninterested in a marriage contract.5 In their works we find “Evelinas” who do not escape the “enclosed” circle of aggressive masculine desire but whose subsequent social ostracism generates social critique rather than self-abasement or violence. I argue that the presence of this new sexually transgressive heroine compels us to reconsider our historical constructions of women’s writing at the end of the eighteenth century as well as its ramifications throughout the Romantic and Victorian periods. In response to romances structured by the conventional narrative of courtship and marriage, radical women writers turn toward yet another highly ritualized “heroine’s text”: “the harlot’s progress”.6 The narrative of the “harlot” or “fallen woman” presents itself as an attractive rhetorical tool for early feminists precisely because of its seemingly inevitable trajectory as well as its paradoxical ability to allow for variation. William Hogarth’s 1731 engraved series, entitled “The Harlot’s Progress”, succinctly depicts the dominant narrative of female sexual transgression throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first plate represents the London arrival of a naive country girl, Mary “Moll” Hackabout, who immediately falls prey to a procuress (Figure 1). Subsequent images represent her sinking into ever-increasing degradation and vice until she dies from a venereal disease (Figure 2). Hogarth’s series captures the fundamental textual elements of the prototypical “harlot’s story”: the loss of virginity (and/or reputation), shame and exile from respectable society, and ultimately death.7 As John Bender notes, Hogarth’s series captured the imagination of eighteenth-century England on a grand scale: “The story was retold in variants ranging from the pornographic to the moralistic, and the prints were copied onto articles of daily use such as fan-mounts or cups and saucers. The genesis of the series, the origins of its major characters, and much of its almost inexhaustible density of meaning are embedded in a web of topical reference traceable in newspaper accounts of contemporaneous events” (Imagining the Penitentiary 122). The dominance of Hogarth’s “narrative penitentiary” and its myriad retellings attracts the attention of women writers throughout the nineteenth century. As other literary critics have noted, women writers often employ highly conventional “linear”


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narratives that serve masculine desire even as they transform those narratives to express feminine desire (and I use desire here in the broadest sense to encompass rhetorical as well as sexual desire). Margaret Homans, for example, argues that women writers respond to textual “linearity” with “static” narratives; they deliberately invoke stasis in order to deny a “masculinist” equation between “linear narrative[s]” and “the linear development of the protagonist” (4).8 I would like to argue, however, that the “harlot’s progress” narrative as it is manipulated by some women writers does allow movement (in terms of action, character development, and narrative experimentation) even as it refuses a “feminine” stasis that concludes in either death or marriage. In determining the narrative power of the near archetypal “harlot’s progress” as well as the interruptive techniques employed by women writers when representing it, I have found narrative poetics to be useful in its distinction between “story” and “discourse”. Narratologists have defined “story” as the “what” of the narrative and “discourse” as its “way” (Chatman 9). Jonathan Culler argues that “the theory of narrative requires a distinction between what I shall call ‘story’ – a sequence of actions or events, conceived as independent of their manifestation in discourse – and what I shall call ‘discourse,’ the discursive presentation or narration of events” (169–70). Most significant to my project is narratology’s careful differentiation between chronological time and the sequencing of “story” (for example, innocent girl loses chastity, falls into deeper and deeper vice, and eventually dies) and its representation in “discourse”, where the boundaries of duration (the amount of narrative time between story elements) and strict chronological sequencing are not necessarily adhered to. Instead the narrative might open up at the point of death, the narrator could then return to memories of an innocent time many years before, and conclude by narrating the heroine’s fall into vice. Narrative poetics, then, provides contemporary readers with at least one discourse by which we can describe Romantic-era rhetorical interventions within a seemingly impenetrable and rigid narrative structure.9 Mary Wollstonecraft and others engage in discursive interventions of the “harlot’s story” in particular because that powerful and culturally resonant narrative allows them to address an especially significant element of the late eighteenth-century gender debates. Feminist historians and literary scholars, including Nancy Armstrong, argue that the very construct of the British woman was much contested at the turn of

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the nineteenth century.10 Indeed, in the context of a world at war, fraught with political tension and with Britons increasingly aware of incipient changes to their rural, agrarian, and feudal class system, her very nature as well as her importance to the nation had become a matter of great debate. The two primary forces vying for the power to define the British woman were those voices aligned with “conservative” social forces intent upon positioning the virtuous British woman and her voice of moral rectitude within the private sphere and, on the other hand, “radicals” interested in seeing well-educated women enter the public sphere with a new authority. The “harlot’s progress” narrative preoccupies progressive women writers because it allows them to address what they see as a dangerous conflation of the female “body” and “mind”; whereas the more conservative writers tend to argue that moral rectitude can be read through the body (unchaste women are immoral and hence dangerous members of society), radical women writers want to locate morality within the mind (and occasionally the heart). They then assert that a well-educated woman can take an equal place in society regardless of her admitted physical differences from men. The “harlot’s progress” narrative offers an extreme example of the problems inherent in confusing moral virtue and physical chastity: its logic demands that all sexual transgression be severely and fatally punished. But radical women writers argue that even if a woman is technically “unchaste” – due to forcible rape, dastardly seduction, or even willing compliance – she can still be virtuous, and hence a model of British womanhood. Furthermore, her contact with punitive institutions of power educates her in oppression and necessarily provokes her into resistance. A revisionist “harlot’s story” allows women writers to address systemic sexism, moral hypocrisy, and patriarchal privilege. Romantic-era authors dare to suggest that the sexually transgressive heroine can survive a (mis)identification with the “harlot”. Indeed, I would like to follow them in dismissing the nomenclature of the “harlot” and the “fallen woman” altogether; the texts I examine explicitly contest the use of such linguistic markers as “harlot”, “prostitute”, or “fallen woman”. The sexually transgressive heroine of the Romantic text positions herself as the unnamed; the familiar epithets usually attached to her fail to represent her situation and subjectivity. Furthermore, our own use of such terms tends to elide differences between narratives under the rubric of a story which we think we know: the “harlot’s progress” cited above. In this project, I work at the intersections of narratology, new historicism, and feminist literary


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criticism in the service of an experimental methodology; I employ strategies characteristic of new historicism and cultural studies while emphasizing careful narratological examination of the text. In the chapters that follow I consider the ways in which a specific subset of texts, composed between 1792 and 1897, develop an alternative discourse of sexual transgression by interrupting, disrupting, and contesting more familiar narratives, particularly the influential “harlot’s progress”. Emerging out of specific historical conditions and deployed by activist writers, interruptive discourse allows the authors discussed below to enter larger public debates over the private versus public function of women. In this book I am particularly interested in examining the interwoven and extremely vexed relationship between representations of sexual transgression and what I am calling proto-feminist social activism. I would certainly make no claims for the historical accuracy of any of the texts I am discussing. When I began this project, I was immediately struck by the ways in which overtly reformist and “realistic” texts actively re-write prostitution to suit their specific political and literary agendas. The narratives of “real” working-class prostitutes gathered by Henry Mayhew in the Victorian period, as well as the analyses of historical documents offered by Judith Walkowitz and other feminist historians, would suggest that “literal” prostitution looked very different from its literary representation, and, indeed, very little like the Hogarthian “harlot’s progress”. Most English prostitutes were poor urban women who periodically supplemented their incomes through prostitution. Walkowitz argues that within their own communities, these women were not stigmatized but that their actions were “measured against the standards of their own social class, whose norms were often distinct, if not fully autonomous, from the values of their dominant culture”. Only after prostitution is pathologized and regulated in the 1880s by reformers and medico-moral authorities does the prostitute find herself “isolated” from “the general laboring-poor community” (9). The authors I discuss in the chapters that follow, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Josephine Butler, direct their work at “those in the middle classes” (Wollstonecraft, Vindication 9) with the intent of influencing social attitudes and, hopefully, public policy. Thus, they craft idealized and heroic sexual transgressors operating at the margins of “respectable” society. Chastity and Transgression in Women’s Writing does not examine more familiar literary “fallen women”; the proactive sexually transgressive heroine is neither the seduced victim of the

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novel of manners nor the innocent maiden of ballad tradition, although upon occasion her representation may draw upon those traditions. From the illegitimate and laboring Jemima in Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman to Christina Rossetti’s rural/ allegorical sisters, Laura and Lizzie, the sexually transgressive heroines I discuss in the chapters that follow share an idiosyncratic subject position regardless of individual differences in class (ranging from the upper-middle class to the working class), education (from the selfeducated to the uneducated), and circumstance (from women who choose to live with lovers outside of marriage to victims of rape and seduction). In every case, we find well-spoken, self-reflective, and ultimately proactive heroines who invariably assume that their narratives are significant and, furthermore, indicative of a greater social malaise that the text aims to cure. Although these works depend upon the cultural authority of dominant ideology, they continually challenge its constraints and hypocrisies. My project is grounded in the lifework and legacy of Mary Wollstonecraft. In the first chapter, I read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and Maria; or The Wrongs of Woman (1798) together in order to lay out the grounds of Wollstonecraft’s influential construction of “true” virtue in both the political tract and prose fiction. The status of the sexually transgressive heroine takes on an added valence after Mary Wollstonecraft’s death in 1797. In a coda to the first chapter I discuss the ways in which Wollstonecraft’s life and work provide her proto-feminist defenders with a uniquely heroic model at an important historical moment in the construction of “woman”. In her posthumous Wrongs of Woman, Wollstonecraft writes into being a proto-feminist heroine who is both fallen and redeemed; a victim and a vocal cultural critic; a devoted mother and an author. Wollstonecraft’s literary representation gains further force through William Godwin’s editorial apparatus to the text, as well as his Memoirs, both of which explicitly link “Mary Wollstonecraft’s” biography to that of Maria Venables, the heroine of The Wrongs of Woman. Yet even without Godwin’s intervention, it is evident that Wollstonecraft herself intended to challenge her reader’s concept of the fictional “heroine”; it is a project which she begins in A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796) and which prematurely concludes with the experimental but unfinished Wrongs of Woman. If the Vindication provides the philosophical foundation of proto-feminist rhetoric, The Wrongs of Woman places it within the mouths of sexually transgressive but morally admirable heroines such


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as Maria Venables, a runaway wife, and Jemima, a former prostitute and thief. And finally, even without Godwin’s romanticized memoir, Wollstonecraft’s biography fascinates and subsequently fuels further representation because of the ways in which it consistently both conforms to and yet diverges from familiar narratives of a woman’s life. Wollstonecraft herself treads dangerously near the “harlot’s path”. Indeed, she survives the “fallen woman’s” prototypical death by drowning only to emerge from the Thames with a more potent vision and voice. At the same time, Wollstonecraft’s biography also details the delights and dangers of the domestic heroine. As Godwin narrates her life, Wollstonecraft makes tremendous sacrifices in the name of filial loyalty, maternal solicitude, and romantic love. And yet, ultimately, she succumbs to the most tragic of the domestic heroine’s possible fates, dying after giving birth to her husband’s child. Wollstonecraft’s major texts, published over a seven-year period, as well as her own personal experience, model a sexually transgressive woman unafraid to critique the socio-political structures which mark her as such; sympathetic, outspoken, and yet not chaste, the sexualized heroine adamantly insists upon her right to voice social protest in a variety of rhetorical forms and refuses to acknowledge the constraints of physical, intellectual, or social boundaries. In Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel, Claudia Johnson suggests that the increasingly conservative climate of Britain during this period made the “philosophical woman” extremely suspect; her political transgressions were increasingly associated with the bogey of sexual transgression (19). The vilified figure of Mary Wollstonecraft, in particular, became the conservatives’ iconic warning to women writers. Wollstonecraft’s political and sexual experimentation was a well-known scandal after Godwin’s publication of the Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1798. Nonetheless, I would argue that women writers continued to articulate proto-feminist tenets even as Wollstonecraft’s biography was being rewritten as yet another example of the fatal “harlot’s progress”. The coda to Chapter 1 ends with an examination of the proto-feminist political tracts offered to the public just after Wollstonecraft’s death but intent upon continuing the legacy of her Vindication. I draw upon insights from feminist narratology as I examine the discursive interruptions deployed by Romantic women authors in such works, particularly Mary Hays’s Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women (1798) and Mary Robinson’s Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination (1799), and a series of novels in which “fallen

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women” appear as heroic outcasts. While the polemical form of the treatise allows the woman writer to address both men and women in a genre most closely associated with the public realm of politics, the popular form of the novel offers them the opportunity to reach out further to the reading public and – I would argue – explicitly targets women readers in a métier consistently gendered female and located in the private sphere. My method here mirrors that of Nancy Armstrong, only I address the interrelationship between proto-feminist polemic and fiction rather than the form’s debt to the conduct book. By deploying both the treatise and the novel the radical woman novelist draws upon separate but equal arsenals of powerful rhetorical and narrative tools to challenge her readers. Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria (1798), as well as Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice (1799) and Amelia Opie’s Father and Daughter (1801), the texts discussed in the second chapter, all disrupt the conventional plot line, or the story, of transgressive female sexuality through a range of structural and discursive strategies, including framing narratives, flashbacks, and the delineation of a sexualized heroine capable of surviving the fatal plot of the unmarried sexual woman. They contest the hegemony of the domestic novel and its conservative social mores by representing sexualized and politicized heroines exploited by husbands, raped by strangers, seduced and betrayed by lovers. These virtuous heroines sometimes resort to prostitution and thievery yet they remain admirably self-conscious social critics who persist in declaring their worth. They steadfastly reject social judgments based upon their sexual status as virgins, wives, or prostitutes even as they continually struggle to define truly virtuous thought and action against hypocritical false delicacy, dependent solely upon a public reputation for chastity and socially approved behavior. Wollstonecraft, Hays, and Opie disrupt and interrupt the “harlot’s” generic progression toward death and dishonor – girl is seduced, girl suffers, girl repents, and girl dies – without forcing her upon the path of domestic idealization. Women writers of the 1790s make explicit what Burney suggests earlier in the period: a woman’s economic and political powerlessness leads to her sexual vulnerability. In Evelina, episodes of threatened sexual violence are merely temporary obstacles impeding the heroine’s inevitable movement toward marriage. In the novels of Wollstonecraft, Hays, and Opie, actual acts of sexual transgression irrevocably mark each heroine’s subjectivity. And yet these later, overtly radical texts exist on a continuum with that of Evelina. In The


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Victim of Prejudice, for example, the heroine’s situation inverts that of Burney’s protagonist. Mary Raymond loses her devoted guardian, discovers that she is an illegitimate child, and is then raped by an unscrupulous lord. Although Mary lacks traditional markers of virtue, including masculine protection and virginity, and never acquires them, Hays nevertheless insists upon her first-person narrator’s virtue and launches a cultural critique against a society which names sexualized women “whores”. In the third chapter I return to the work of Amelia Opie as I consider Adeline Mowbray; or, The Mother and Daughter (1805) specifically in the context of the anti-Wollstonecraft rhetoric that emerges after 1797. Opie’s representation of a freethinking “philosophical” heroine subverts both the radical and conservative establishments responsible for tarnishing the “character” of Wollstonecraft in particular and rebellious women in general. For the woman writer, Mary Wollstonecraft’s position as a forthright proponent of female speech remains significant into the early 1800s in spite of – and perhaps because of – her increasingly outcast status. The second half of Chastity and Transgression in Women’s Writing charts the ramifications of Romantic experimentation upon later nineteenth-century representations of female sexual transgression. Once a ritualized narrative is interrupted it can no longer function as it once had; the interruptions become a part of the narrative. I argue that this is so in spite of the ways in which the “fallen woman” narrative seemingly coalesces into a generic formula of dishonor and death during the Victorian period. A return to the visual arts again proves useful in identifying the key elements of the mid-century’s dominant narrative of sexual transgression. In the 1850s and 1860s we find a vogue for “fallen woman” paintings. For example, Augustus Egg’s trilogy, “Past and Present”, presented to the Royal Academy in 1858, details the life of an adulteress. In the trilogy’s first image, “Misfortune”, a formerly respectable wife and mother appears face down upon the carpet. Her face is averted from both the viewer and her innocent children, while the stony glare of her husband dominates the frame (Figure 3). The second painting, “Prayer”, shows the two children now grown but deep in mourning; their father is lost to death and their mother to the streets (Figure 4). The third image, “Despair”, depicts the mother sheltering an infant while cowering near the Thames; the river lies in the background as her probable fate (Figure 5). Other paintings of this genre include Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Found” (1853–82), George Frederic

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Watts’s “Found Drowned” (1848), and Abraham Solomon’s “Drowned! Drowned!” (1860). In every case, the “fallen woman” finds herself upon an irrevocable path of seduction, prostitution, and death. Her consistently passive subject position indicates her inability to stem her own descent. Egg’s adulterous wife and mother, for example, keeps her gaze steadfastly directed into the frame and away from both the accusatory gaze of her husband and the viewer. In the final image of the trilogy, her back again to all onlookers, she appears to watch the very approach of her inevitable death, foretold in the judgmental “eye” of the rising moon; a broadsheet affixed to the wall behind her identifies she and the child in her arms as “VICTIMS”. Her only hope for redemption seems to reside in the second image of the series. If her daughters, caught in the same moonlight, can move into the public realm outside of their window, perhaps they can recover their “lost” mother and sibling. However, their averted faces – one despairing sister hides her face in the gown of the other, thus evoking the image of their mother in the first frame – hardly suggest that they possess the energy necessary for such a task. But even as Egg’s series reinscribes the fatally linear progression of the adulterous woman, the second image of the trilogy introduces a characteristic Victorian disruption of her fatal trajectory: the morally upright domestic woman can join the “fallen” upon her narrative path and thus deliver redemption. While much theorizing around the Victorian “fallen woman” focuses on a discursive history dominated by male voices (including Egg, William Acton, William Lecky, and W. R. Greg), women reformers (for example, Marion Reid, Anna Jameson, and Emma Sheppard) were also active in constructing programs of sexual reclamation.11 Indeed, I argue that the burgeoning realm of social work, dominated by women, provides women authors interested in critiquing the sexual status quo with a new way of representing sexual transgression once they are forced to abandon the strategies of their radical predecessors. My contention is that even as Victorian authors inherit the sexualized heroines of Wollstonecraft, Hays, and Opie, their legacy also includes a politically effective construction of Mary Wollstonecraft and other proto-feminists as “fallen” and hence discredited women. Consequently, Victorian authors invest social, moral, and narrative authority within a morally irreproachable reformer while retaining the powerful cultural critique inherent in earlier retellings of the “harlot’s progress”. Rarely (if ever) the philosophical and self-conscious speaking subject found in Romantic texts, the Victorian “fallen” woman tends to be the object of reformer discourse. Her narrative is


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significant in that it informs us of a great “social problem” of which she is invariably a victim and hardly ever a critic. Power instead resides in the figure of her (usually) female auditor and potential savior. Victorian texts further disempower the sexually transgressive figure by reinscribing a more rigidly Hogarthian “harlot’s progress”. Such narrative shifts speak to the history of nineteenth-century feminism. Once overtly political agitation based upon a demand for the Godgiven “rights” of the individual is stigmatized for women, activists interested in changing women’s status necessarily turned toward more socially acceptable spheres of influence. Social reform activities, even those on behalf of the prostitute, could be defended as emerging from the private rather than the public realm; the Victorian social reformer justifies her vocation by pointing to her concern for the health of the “family” and the “nation”. Although mid-century texts are less likely to interrupt “story” chronology through the framing devices, flashbacks, and embedded narratives characteristic of Romantic texts, the overtly polemic interruptions of the earlier period continue to resonate throughout the century. I would further suggest that the Victorian “fallen woman”, even when she possesses none of the agency attributed to her by Wollstonecraft, Hays, and Opie, still evokes the specter of early feminism, female desire, and political unrest, hence fueling more generalized concerns about British womanhood. While Amanda Anderson’s excellent work in Tainted Souls and Painted Faces has taught us to read the “fallen woman’s” narration as representative of Victorian anxiety about “self-hood, character, and society” (1), she limits her discussion to a small number of texts produced between 1840 and 1860. What difference is made, I ask, by putting texts from the “hungry forties” in conversation with those of the tumultuous 1790s? In Chastity and Transgression in Women’s Writing I read literary works in the context of the larger discursive shifts that occur at moments of social activism on the part of prominent women authors. Hence, I begin by looking at material from the 1790s before moving to work produced during the 1840s and 1890s. Social unrest marks each historical moment, but the status of the “political” woman intellectual is significantly different during the Victorian period.12 In the 1790s, treatises on the “rights of woman” are authorized by their emergence out of a larger philosophical and political discourse. Although the 1840s witness the nascent stirrings of a woman’s movement, early activists worked for social reform within the limitations of separate sphere discourse, even as they set the stage for later incursions into the “public” sphere.

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My project thus shifts in a corresponding manner, from the political novel and polemic prose tract of the Romantic period to the “blue book” and “social problem” literature of the mid-Victorian era, where the debate over chastity, transgression, and female agency continues to be waged. Chapters on Elizabeth Gaskell and Christina Rossetti examine the literary strategies employed by authors intent upon social critique in the context of feminized social reform and its deployment in contemporary journals, popular poetry, and philosophical treatises. Gaskell and Rossetti are of particular interest here because they were both actively involved in the actual reformation of prostitutes.13 Their literary productions document the transformation of social work into literary work as they explore interruptive strategies on behalf of sexually transgressive women both inside and outside of the text. And while their discursive interruptions are less radical and more infrequent than those of their Romantic predecessors, they do employ some narrative and poetic techniques which disturb the storied progression of the “harlot’s progress”. Gaskell, for example, utilizes some flashback narration in Mary Barton (1848) when recounting the history of the “fallen” Esther, aunt to the novel’s chaste heroine. And Rossetti de-centers the conventional realism of the “harlot’s progress” by evoking an otherworldly realm in Goblin Market (1860) where the “fallen woman” is punished but not eventually sacrificed. In spite of their interruptive strategies, however, Gaskell and Rossetti participate in the continual splitting of the Romantic era’s sexually transgressive social reformer into her mid-nineteenth-century counterparts. Their texts inevitably pair the victimized and voiceless “fallen woman” with a more vocal and authoritative sister savior. In the final chapter I turn to Josephine Butler’s successful crusade against the Contagious Diseases Acts of the late nineteenth century, a socio-cultural event I read as the moment when the “resisting” discourse opposed to overtly punitive responses to sexual transgression becomes “dominant”. When the repeal movement began, it had little influence upon public opinion, but eventually it managed to effect a change in governmental policy. Feminist historians have also noted that Butler’s campaign led to greater openness on the subjects of sexuality and venereal disease and broke down prohibitions against public speaking for women. In part, Butler achieves the success she does through a canny manipulation of a range of narrative structures, including that of the “harlot’s progress”. Most significantly, perhaps, for my purposes, Butler elevates the figure of the “reformer” to previously unimaginable heights, thus fueling fin-de-siècle representations


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of the New Woman as both inextricably linked to social reform issues (especially those concerned with “social purity”) and yet far above the concerns of any single political campaign. Thus the legacy of Butler’s rhetorical genius can be seen as ideologically coercive as it is emancipatory. If, on the one hand, the reform movement she spearheaded can be seen as a triumph for “resisting” discourse, it also reinforces hierarchical systems that raise one woman above another, hence succeeding (perhaps) only because of its rearticulation of dominant ideology. In The Beth Book (1897), Sarah Grand re-establishes the figure of the philosophical “woman of genius” after a long exile serving as an “angel in the house”. Although the novel is set just prior to the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts in 1886 and Grand makes the fate of the Acts key to the novel’s plot, she largely ignores the figure of the prostitute herself. Instead Grand explores how the existence of a successful reform movement reclaims not only the socially outcast woman but also her exceptional “sister”, trapped within the “legalized prostitution” of an unrewarding marriage. Grand’s novel, even as it exults in the power of female agency, does nothing to heal the rupture between the sexually transgressive woman and her sister savior. The Beth Book accrues narrative force by alluding to sexual transgression even as it places its feminist heroine at some distance from it. In a coda to the final chapter, I turn to the “reclamation” of Mary Wollstonecraft at the end of the nineteenth century. Beginning in the 1870s we find prominent British feminists, including Mathilde Blind and Millicent Garrett Fawcett, turning Wollstonecraft into an ideological model. But even as they “resurrect” Wollstonecraft, they “purify” her biography of its more troubling sexual elements. Wollstonecraft must emerge as a virtuous heroine suitable to late nineteenth-century feminist activism, hence her biography is carefully purged of any overtones of the “harlot’s progress” in the name of representing her as the prototypical “womanly [New] woman”. In the spirit of Butler and Grand, an important distinction must be made between the “harlot” and the “heroine”. Yet, fin-de-siècle authors cannot fully divest Wollstonecraft of her past and, hence, the charge of sexual transgression continues to persist in depictions of feminist social activism. It is my contention that such a “charge”, although it indicts, also resonates with power. In Chastity and Transgression in Women’s Writing I have deliberately sought out narratives in which sexually transgressive figures emerge as the primary actors in the text. In addition, they ultimately become

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more effective heroines because of their contestation of institutions of power, both formal and informal; they inevitably turn from self-abasement to cultural critique. I do not discuss narratives in which the “fallen woman” is primarily a vehicle through which other characters accrue knowledge and power, and I have also chosen not to discuss texts in which sexually transgressive women irrevocably descend into madness and violence. The sexualized heroines of an experimental “harlot’s progress” do not commit suicide, murder, or infanticide, although the power of those threatening possibilities often informs the text. Thus, for example, I do not address William Wordsworth’s “The Thorn” (1798), Sir Walter Scott’s Heart of Midlothian (1818), or George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859). In such texts, we find narratives of sexual transgression that hinge upon violence rather than reformation, endurance, or social protest. Just as Frances Burney’s Evelina, with which I began this Introduction, illuminates the narrative of the domestic heroine and her consanguinity with a “fallen” double, Adam Bede represents the darker narratives against which interruptive discourse also poses itself. Hetty Sorrel, incapable of exerting her will in a positive way, descends into murder and a curiously amoral blankness. Poor wandering Hetty, with the rounded childish face, and the hard unloving despairing soul looking out of it – with the narrow heart and narrow thoughts, no room in them for any sorrows but her own, and tasting that sorrow with the more intense bitterness! My heart bleeds for her as I see her toiling along on her weary feet [. . .] What will be the end? – the end of her objectless wandering, apart from all love, caring for human beings only through her pride, clinging to life only as the hunted wounded brute clings to it? (391) Hetty’s narrative encompasses two traditions of sexual transgression left relatively untreated in my project. On the one hand, in her animalistic carnality, she seems to point toward sensation literature’s “demon” figures, including Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley, as well as Emile Zola’s Nana. In such narratives, the heroine serves as a repository of society’s darker impulses as well as a vehicle for greater self-awareness on the part of erring but ultimately moral figures. Although Adam Bede and Arthur Donnithorne develop greater “depth of soul” in the wake of Hetty’s actions, she does not. Even after the cathartic confession extracted by Dinah Morris, Hetty manages to attain only a limited broadening of her “heart” and “thought”. Dinah,


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on the other hand, like the narrative voice that interrupts the above description of Hetty’s “objectless wandering” after the infanticide, does attain a deeper comprehension of human nature. And, in her charismatic and inexorable “pleading” with Hetty, Dinah accrues even more narrative power. Hetty may be saved from a criminal’s death, but she is cast out of England with little or no self-knowledge won; she alone pays the price of exile as the force of her potent beauty is expunged from the text. Yet Hetty does not fit tidily into a tradition of demon-women; her beauty is too tame. She is the “little lamb”, the “little puss”, and most often, “a distracting kitten-like maiden” whose child-like beauty disguises a heart “as hard as a pibble” (155). She is driven less by cunning and malice and more by a simple animal drive toward luxury and life unaffected by guilt or conscience. The narrator notes that Hetty possesses a “little trivial soul” that leaves her “struggling amidst the serious, sad destinies of a human being” (340). Incapable of rising above the circumstances that threaten to overwhelm her, all of Hetty’s movements are simultaneously static: “she was ready for one of those convulsive motionless actions by which wretched men and women leap from a temporary sorrow into a life-long misery” (340). And, in her “objectless wandering” across the English countryside and even in the murder of her child, Hetty remains steadfast only in her instinctual desire for life. By dressing Hetty in a red cloak, Eliot explicitly alludes to William Wordsworth’s representation of sexual transgression and the voyeuristic interest it arouses in “The Thorn”. Indeed, Adam Bede begins in 1799 with Arthur Donnithorne presenting a copy of Lyrical Ballads to Mr Irwine; significantly, he recommends “The Ancient Mariner” but not “The Thorn”. As surely as Arthur becomes a “wiser and sadder man”, Hetty changes from a rosy English lass into her feared double, a madwoman wandering the fields like a ghost. Hetty consistently evokes a tradition of suspiciously unbalanced or even manifestly mad sexually suspect women derived from both traditional balladry and Romantic poetry. And in her innocent carnality, as well as her almost accidental act of violence, Hetty foreshadows later representations of post-Romantic wanderers, including Thomas Hardy’s Tess, although without that figure’s greatness of soul. The text’s refusal to condemn the conditions that shape Hetty complement a representation of the “fallen woman” that stresses her lack of agency and undeveloped moral sense. Although George Eliot is certainly one of the great Victorian humanist-philosophers and, not incidentally, a “fallen woman” herself, she, unlike Gaskell and

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Rossetti, does not explicitly engage in rescue work nor does she employ redemptive narrative strategies within the text. Adam Bede is not a social-problem novel intent upon inciting change; ultimately Eliot’s historical novel celebrates an idealized view of the Romantic era as a time of great social harmony rather than unrest. Hetty’s disruptive sexuality is dismissed from the world of Hayslope and calm once again prevails. Individual men acquire more self-knowledge and self-discipline, hence becoming better masters, but overall systems are not contested, let alone changed. More significantly, perhaps, Eliot’s novel remains deeply ambivalent about even the “virtuous” woman’s claims to agency and voice. Although the spiritual Dinah Morris is not transported to the colonies like the carnal Hetty, whose soul she recovers as much as is possible, she is exiled from her vocation as minister. Dinah moves from a public expression of the “Divine Presence” to an exercise of maternal influence within her husband’s kitchen. She seemingly fulfills the trajectory of the “domestic heroine” charted out by Nancy Armstrong. Indeed, all disruptive forces of female sexuality, agency, and voice are somehow subdued at the end of the novel, even though the text goes to some pains to evoke their loss. Hetty suffers a criminal’s death in the colonies, the irascible Lisbeth Bede passes on, Dinah is forbidden to preach, and the irrepressible Mrs Poyser descends into silence. Yet my argument in Chastity and Transgression in Women’s Writing does speak to those texts that do not choose to “interrupt” the “harlot’s progress”. For example, Eliot’s novel finally remains deeply indebted to alternative narratives of sexual transgression that insistently confound “virtue” and “vice”. At the end of the text, when one would imagine that the twinned heroines would be farthest apart, they are eerily linked: both characters “wander” through the English countryside and the woman imprisoned for the crime of infanticide could be named either “Hester Sorrel” or “Dinah Morris” since both names appear on the criminal’s person. The presence of Evelina and Hetty in the history of women’s writing does not erase the literary tradition discussed in the chapters that follow. Indeed, I would argue that the insistent voice of the sexualized heroine echoes only more loudly in the context of the overwhelming silence that characterizes both the domestic woman and the prototypical “fallen woman”. The nineteenth-century woman writer, in even alluding to an unchaste woman, runs the risk of “speaking the unspeakable”; hers is a story which women should not tell, stories


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which in the telling reveal too much forbidden knowledge about female desire and female desperation. And yet, some Romantic and Victorian representations of the sexually transgressive heroine emphasize rather than diminish the raw power of her narrative, while the texts themselves revel in the telling. In his first volume on The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault suggests that embarking on forbidden discourse even in the interests of science or morality always involves a certain degree of pleasure: “What sustains our eagerness to speak of sex in terms of repression is doubtless this opportunity to speak out against the powers that be, to utter truths and promise bliss, to link together enlightenment, liberalism and manifold pleasures; to pronounce a discourse that combines the fervor of knowledge, the determination to change the laws, and the longing for the garden of earthly delights” (7). Although the texts I examine throughout this project encourage the reader to halt the “harlot’s progress”, they never invite interruptions of the narrative itself. Stories of sexual transgression and the contestation of social wrongs compel attention and demand to be heard. And although the tradition of interruptive discourse I trace here survives only as a whisper throughout most of the century, it is also true that by the century’s end, for better and for worse, this resisting discourse of intervention becomes dominant.


1 Imagining the Sexualized Heroine: Mary Wollstonecraft, the Feminist Treatise, and The Wrongs of Woman

In her notes toward a preface for The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria (1798) Mary Wollstonecraft differentiates between her use of the novel form and that of those authors working before her. She explicitly positions herself as an experimental novelist, intent upon disrupting established narrative structures and plots, claiming that The Wrongs of Woman will be a novel of “passions” rather than “manners” (21). A passage from her 1792 political treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, gives us a better sense of what Wollstonecraft might have meant by a novel of the “passions”. In a critique of Lord Chesterfield’s letters she argues that youth need “experience” more than mere “precepts”: “The youth should act; for had he the experience of a grey head he would be fitter for death than life [. . .] Besides, it is not possible to give a young person a just view of life; he must have struggled with his own passions before he can estimate the force of temptation which betrayed his brother into vice” (Vindication 112). Wollstonecraft genders her critique by arguing that “men have superiour judgment” because “they give a freer scope to the grand passions, and by more frequently going astray enlarge their minds” (110). In The Wrongs of Woman, then, Wollstonecraft promises the reader a new heroine – representative of all of “woman” – who must exercise her “passions” before she can “enlarge her mind” with a more comprehensive understanding of virtue, vice, and temptation. Indeed, Wollstonecraft’s gender-bending novel of the “passions” takes as its protagonist a new type of female character. The prefatory notes further reflect the author’s frustration with the idealized heroines found in the sentimental novel of manners as well as the domestic tale: “In many works of this species, the hero is allowed to be mortal, and to become wise and virtuous as well as happy, by a train of events and circumstances. The heroines, on the contrary, are to be born 21

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immaculate, and to act like goddesses of wisdom, just come forth highly finished Minervas from the head of Jove” (21). In defiance of such narrative norms, Wollstonecraft insists that fictional women, and by extension women readers, must be allowed mortal status; they too must confront their passions in order to achieve the self-knowledge and status afforded to the hero. Although heroes are fallible, their stories are ones of transformation; experience leads them to greater wisdom and thus the joys of virtue. Women characters, however, have been represented as mythic creatures born innately perfect or flawed; their narratives allow no opportunity for change. They are not allowed to “become wise and virtuous” but are marked as either intrinsically moral or immoral, hence they remain static, “becoming” nothing at all. In many ways, then, Wollstonecraft’s narrative theory, as expressed in The Wrongs of Woman, corresponds to the political theory she elaborates in the Vindication. Indeed, she first rejects the conventional heroine in the Vindication: “For man and woman, truth, if I understand the meaning of the word, must be the same; yet the fanciful female character, so prettily drawn by poets and novelists, demanding the sacrifice of truth and sincerity, virtue becomes a relative idea, having no other foundation than utility, and of that utility men pretend arbitrarily to judge, shaping it to their own convenience” (51). The fictional heroines of late eighteenth-century novels and tales, like the middle-class women discussed in her political treatise, fail to learn “true” virtue because they are ensconced in the conventions of ideal behavior. According to Wollstonecraft, women must develop “independence of character” and take action rather than merely “play-act” appropriate social behaviors. In the Vindication she argues for a new pedagogy, which teaches women to both learn and value the difference between chastity and virtue. In The Wrongs of Woman, she creates two heroines who successfully achieve self-knowledge by rejecting society’s facile estimation of their complex lives in which sexuality, personal morality, and social status are inextricably interwoven. Furthermore, in representing two such radically transgressive heroines, she challenges the reader’s ability to distinguish between “true” virtue and vice, hence enacting the textual education only hypothesized in 1792. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman has long been a site of interpretive contest among feminist literary critics. For the purposes of my argument both here and in a later discussion of The Wrongs of Woman, I am interested in examining two significant questions raised by the text. Firstly, what role does Wollstonecraft ascribe to sexuality in her

Imagining the Sexualized Heroine

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vision of a reformed British womanhood and what were her attitudes toward transgressive sexuality in 1792? And, secondly, where does Wollstonecraft envision the “new” British woman carrying out her duties, within the public and/or private sphere? There has been much critical debate over Wollstonecraft’s attitudes toward female sexuality and feminine desire. One school of thought argues that Wollstonecraft practices what Susan Gubar identifies as “feminist misogyny”, in which the feminist critic, intent upon challenging conventions of womanhood, and working within a tradition of prose writing hostile to women, errs in condemning womanhood itself (457). Other critics, including Joan B. Landes, Mary Poovey, and Timothy Reiss, link Wollstonecraft’s alleged distrust of femininity and female sexuality to her investment in Enlightenment ideology. Landes, for example, describes Wollstonecraft as both a “victim” and a participant in the “culture of Enlightened public rationality”, in which women’s actions are understood to emerge out of “feeling” while those of men originate from “reason” (55). Critics who subscribe to this highly critical view of Wollstonecraft tend to focus upon A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which they read as expressing Wollstonecraft’s misogynist suspicions of womanhood and/or her corresponding fear of sexuality. Poovey suggests that in response to a sense of heightened passion within herself, as well as her determined contestation of a cultural vision of women as “all sexuality”, Wollstonecraft “comes close to arguing that women have no innate sexual desires at all” (74). Poovey goes on to argue that Wollstonecraft responds by “desexualizing [the] imagination”, particularly in such early works as the Vindication (77). In her influential “Wild Nights: Pleasure/Sexuality/ Feminism”, as well as in other work, Cora Kaplan represents Wollstonecraft as fatally constrained by class-based notions of sexuality. Kaplan argues that Wollstonecraft represents sexuality as a “gothic villain” to her middle-class readers and seductively offers them a highly “libidinized self-denial” instead (36). Hence, Kaplan convicts Wollstonecraft of burdening modern feminism with the baggage of the sexually repressed if “radical, reformed bourgeoisie” (35): “By tampering with the site of degrading sexuality without challenging the moralising description of sexuality itself, Wollstonecraft sets up heartbreaking conditions for women’s liberation – a little death, the death of desire, the death of female pleasure” (39). As Kaplan’s statement suggests, once Wollstonecraft is identified as a “feminist misogynist”, she is also inevitably condemned for failing to envision “female solidarity” as well.

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With the exception of Cora Kaplan, who extends her argument to The Wrongs of Woman and which I discuss later in this chapter, most of the above critics employ a Vindication to construct their critique of Wollstonecraft’s “misogyny” but exempt her other works from the same charge. Indeed, Susan Gubar describes Wollstonecraft as suffering from a rhetorical, as well as an ideological “schizophrenia”. “The odd juxtapositions between A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the novels”, she argues, “imply that the misogynist portrait of the feminine penned by the feminist may, in fact, represent Wollstonecraft’s efforts to negotiate the distance between desire and dread, what she thought she should have been and what she feared herself to be” (461). Poovey also portrays Wollstonecraft as beset by a radical split between her early and inexplicable attraction to the potential of “reason” and her “proper” desire to celebrate the “imagination”. For Poovey, Wollstonecraft’s greatest achievement remains A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, because there the author embraces her “femaleness” and the “imagination” (89). While acknowledging Wollstonecraft’s attempt to negotiate the dangers of separate sphere ideology in The Wrongs of Woman, Poovey dismisses the text as a noble failure. The novel’s investment in the conventions of romantic love and bourgeois sensibility, she argues, disallows a serious critique of marriage: “In this novel Wollstonecraft insists – to a degree remarkable for any late eighteenth-century novelist – on the importance of female sexual expression, yet, despite her insistence that sexual fulfillment is not only necessary but possible, every sexual relationship she depicts is dehumanizing and revolting” (110). According to Poovey, Mary Wollstonecraft remains trapped within the ideology of the “proper lady”, and hence never quite fulfills her potential as a “woman writer”. Critics opposed to readings of Wollstonecraft as a “feminist misogynist” respond by examining the entire sweep of the author’s career and tend to represent her as an experimental writer intent upon negotiating, and often transgressing, the binaries of dominant discourse. Furthermore, such critics insistently place Wollstonecraft’s attitudes about sexuality in a historical context.1 In A Vindication of Political Virtue: the Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Sapiro reminds her readers that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries “Sexuality was – materially and not just conceptually – a life and death matter for women” (xix). Most significantly, however, Sapiro argues against readings of Wollstonecraft’s life and work that chart an increasing embrace of passion, sexuality, and the imagination. Instead,


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she suggests that Wollstonecraft develops an ideal of the “reasoned, passionate self” (43) over the course of her career as she engages in a lengthy consideration of the relative merits of “thinking, reason and passion” (xxi). Syndy McMillen Conger also stresses the ways in which Wollstonecraft negotiates seemingly insurmountable “polarities”: Competing doctrines and revolutionary ideas of her day meet and collide in her works: reason and passion; self-interest and compassion; rights of men and women; divine right and social contract; expanding commerce and endangered sensibility; decorum and confessional self-expression. There can be little wonder that she fails to synthesize all these polarities; the wonder is that she brazens it out so memorably, leaving behind her a legacy of literary encounters with her enemies. (181–2) It is my contention that in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft addresses the gendered dynamics of the mind/body split – associated with the corollary binaries of male/female, reason/ feeling (and/or sexuality) – as well as virtue/vice, in an attempt to “ungender” the functions of mind and body (as well as all of their concomitant binaries) without privileging either term. She particularly confounds the assumed boundaries between virtue/vice and public/ private through both rhetorical and social structures designed to make a space for an alternative vision of womanhood. Wollstonecraft’s much debated use of analogy is particularly central to my argument about the Vindication. While Kaplan contends that Wollstonecraft’s use of analogy indicates her essentially conservative vision, Orrin N. C. Wang argues that the Vindication’s insistent employment of comparison unsettles not only the duality of “male reason and female imagination” but also categories of race, gender, and class: “That is, in each example of women’s empowerment or victimization, power is constituted by a different combination of codes of age, class, and gender. The result is a concrete depiction of the condition of women in the late eighteenth century that simultaneously repudiates the idea that there is any essential character to its catalogue of women’s empowered and victimized identities” (132). For the purposes of this chapter, as well as the larger argument of this book, I shall focus upon Wollstonecraft’s guiding metaphor throughout the Vindication: conventionally educated women in England are like “alluring mistresses” rather than “affectionate wives and rational mothers” (7). According to Wollstonecraft, contemporary

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education for women that stresses the wisdom of pleasing men results in superficially respectable young women more like their “fallen” sisters than any “virtuous” ideal. “Till more understanding preponderates in society,” she argues, “there will ever be a want of heart and taste, and the harlot’s rouge will supply the place of that celestial suffusion which only virtuous affections can give to the face” (165). Indeed, the metaphorical structure of the Vindication insistently equates seemingly “virtuous” British women with a series of sexually suspect analogs: kept women, slaves, prostitutes, and harem women. For Wollstonecraft, the state of “things as they are” in late eighteenthcentury England necessarily positions all women as prostitutes; even the “blush” signifies a self-conscious and predatory employment of marketable sexuality rather than “true” virtue. According to Wollstonecraft, her contemporaries are deprived of the gainful employment that would allow respectable economic independence even as they are taught to exalt in their status as sexual objects. I would suggest that in employing such a contentious metaphor, Wollstonecraft challenges not only the construction of the first term (“good” women) but also the second term (“bad” women). If “good” women are like sexually transgressive women, then what are sexual transgressors like? According to the logic of Wollstonecraft’s Vindication, sometimes sexually transgressive women corrupt the innocent, sometimes they are good mothers and faithful partners, and sometimes they are innocent and doomed victims; very occasionally, however, they are exceptional women. Although Wollstonecraft is primarily interested in constructing a new educational program for respectable women in the “middle class”, a Vindication also begins to enact the actual agenda of the text; that is, Wollstonecraft seeks to change her readers’ attitudes about both conventionally expected sexual behavior (the relative merits of chastity versus “true virtue”) but also their attitudes about sexually transgressive women and their relationship to the “proper lady”. Ultimately, Wollstonecraft’s educational ideal would produce Englishwomen incapable of bartering either their minds or their bodies for marriage and/or money. And although a Vindication perhaps underestimates the effects of class, it is certainly invested in producing a model of social change that (if fully enacted) would reinvent class relations. Much of the Vindication is preoccupied with the importance of distinguishing between “manners and morals” (4). Wollstonecraft argues throughout her prose treatise that instead of teaching women


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to be truly “virtuous” by developing their hearts, minds, and bodies, society settles for the appearance and the reputation of virtue instead. In order for women to fully realize their potential as “improvable souls” they must learn to discriminate between mere physical “chastity” and virtuous “modesty”. Wollstonecraft dismisses the significance of chastity as a virtue when it is preserved solely through ignorance, concern for public opinion, or the desire to attract an eligible husband. Furthermore, given the cultural pressure for women to cultivate a seductively refined sensibility, a conventionally chaste woman continually participates in her own moral degradation by preoccupying herself with “gay pleasures or schemes to conquer hearts”. According to Wollstonecraft, truly “modest” women become so when they “dedicate” themselves “to pursuits purely intellectual” and “exercise” their “affections” with “humane plans of usefulness”: “The regulation of behaviour is not modesty, though those who study rules of decorum are, in general, termed modest women. Make the heart clean, let it expand and feel for all that is human, instead of being narrowed by selfish passion; and let the mind frequently contemplate subjects that exercise the understanding, without heating the imagination, and artless modesty will give the finishing touches to the picture” (123). Here Wollstonecraft seems to remove women from the active pursuit of “true” modesty by describing it as an “artless” adornment. Yet in the next paragraph, Wollstonecraft returns to the individual’s deliberate cultivation of modesty as well as the motivation behind it: “She who can discern the dawn of immortality, in the streaks that shoot athwart the misty night of ignorance, promising a clearer day, will respect, as a sacred temple, the body that enshrines such an improvable soul” (124). On the one hand, the above passages could be read as privileging the mind and the “understanding” over the imagination, and yet, their lyric intensity suggests that in order to “discern the dawn of immortality”, one must also exercise the imagination. Hence, women must learn to “imagine” themselves as simultaneously rational, physical, and spiritual beings in order to resist the degrading cultural forces intent upon constructing them as frivolous, beautiful, and soulless bodies, important only for the male attention they might attract. Because women are not taught the intrinsic value of “modesty”, but only the importance of reputation, they run the risk of erring in several ways. While poorly educated women might actually meet their appropriate “destiny” and successfully marry, their education does not teach them how to fulfill subsequent marital duties. According to

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Wollstonecraft, women schooled in “the art of pleasing” are actually more vulnerable to making bad marriages in which they will either become “tyrants” or “victims”. In either case, they fail to achieve their potential as rational beings. Wollstonecraft goes on to argue that conventionally educated girls are also more susceptible to seduction and hence prostitution. “Bashful, shame-faced innocents” wander into Hogarth’s urban landscape and run the risk of becoming the “prostitutes, who infest the streets of this metropolis”. Once corrupted, they then “trample on virgin bashfulness with a sort of bravado” (122). Wollstonecraft re-creates Hogarth’s bleak scenario of “fallen” women corrupting other women, just as she evokes images of poor mothers raising up yet another generation of “weak” British women. Indeed, the unhappily married respectable woman, untutored in “true virtue”, is likely to become as dangerous in the private sphere as the prostitute in the public sphere. Wollstonecraft sometimes frames the “unfortunate female” as a depraved woman and willingly draws upon her metaphorical value in the service of her larger thesis. In 1792, Wollstonecraft had not yet abandoned her belief in the emancipatory potential of marriage; in her ideal British state, well-educated women, possessing both well-developed reason and feeling, marry good husbands who help them fulfill their duties as “affectionate wives and rational mothers”. Yet, even in the Vindication, Wollstonecraft acknowledges that some women are wrongly precluded from fulfilling that ideal in the private sphere and find themselves sexual transgressors exiled to a dangerous and predatory public sphere. Wollstonecraft carefully acknowledges the ways in which the social construction of both men and women creates an unhealthy erotic dynamic in which arousal depends upon fantasies of seduction and domination. Women, in their “present infantine state [. . .] pine for a Lovelace; a man so witty, so graceful, and so valiant” rather than seeking a man with “the virtues of a husband” (120). Given the difficulty of immediately changing the psychosexual underpinnings of seduction, Wollstonecraft boldly recommends extending the benefit of law to some sexually transgressive women when education has failed them. In the fourth chapter of the Vindication, “Observations on the State of Degradation to Which Woman Is Reduced by Various Causes”, Wollstonecraft begins a discussion of polygamy in other cultures – as an example of the “physical degradation” of women – only to turn to “seduction” and “prostitution” within British society. Wollstonecraft calls upon the power of British law to address abuses within social custom. She suggests that


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“seducers” should be forced by law to support “innocent” women “ruined before they know the difference between virtue and vice” (71). Although she insists that “these women should not, in the full meaning of the relationship, be termed wives”, she also argues for a careful distinction between some seduced women and actual “prostitutes”: “The woman who is faithful to the father of her children demands respect, and should not be treated like a prostitute” (71). Wollstonecraft carves out a space for the “good” woman accidentally cast out from her rightful realm as wife and mother. She further bolsters her claim for some special exceptions given middle-class society’s inordinate emphasis upon a “public reputation for chastity” and its neglect of other female virtues. If in the above figuration, Wollstonecraft’s “high respect for marriage” leads to the suggestion that “real” prostitutes (those who are not faithful to the husbands of their children) are, after all, undeserving of “respect”, she admits to a persistent and “lively” feeling of “compassion for those unfortunate females who are broken off from society” (71). But even as Wollstonecraft suggests that both the law and compassion should intervene to interrupt the “fallen woman’s” fate, she finally remains cynical about the psychological and socioeconomic conditions that underlie the sexual transgressor’s irremediable descent into first vice and then death. As in the case of the respectable woman, who embraces the very chains which bind her to a “soulless” existence, the “fallen woman” cannot “imagine” an alternative narrative script for her continued existence: A woman who has lost her honour, imagines that she cannot fall lower, and as for recovering her former station, it is impossible; no exertion can wash this stain away. Losing thus every spur, and having no other means of support, prostitution becomes her only refuge, and the character is quickly depraved by circumstances over which the poor wretch has little power, unless she possesses an uncommon portion of sense and loftiness of spirit. (71–2, my emphasis) Wollstonecraft seemingly reinscribes the conventional Hogarthian “harlot’s progress” in the service of her educational thesis: ordinary women are “ruined” because they have not been taught to distinguish between virtue and vice and are thus unjustly punished for their sexual naiveté. They further do not possess the ability to “imagine” redemptive scripts for themselves. Yet Wollstonecraft does reject at

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least one premise of the Hogarthian “harlot’s progress”. In a brief aside, she critiques Samuel Richardson’s already canonical representation of sexual transgression in Clarissa. According to Wollstonecraft, Richardson’s portrayal of Clarissa’s “fall” conforms to standard rather than ideal norms of feminine subjectivity and virtue: “When Richardson makes Clarissa tell Lovelace that he had robbed her of her honour, he must have had strange notions of honour and virtue. For, miserable beyond all names of misery is the condition of a being, who could be degraded without its own consent!” (72). According to Wollstonecraft’s logic here, a woman with real “honour and virtue” cannot ever “lose” it regardless of the horrors perpetrated upon her. Hence, Wollstonecraft continues to untangle the confounding of physical “chastity” with moral behavior: virginity does not equal virtue. Although she suggests that when women are “truly” degraded they are complicit in that degradation, she also implies that some “fallen” women, when they cultivate and possess “honourable” souls, become capable of “rising”. Indeed, in one passage, Wollstonecraft even suggests that some sexually transgressive acts are “noble”. Women “like Heloisa [. . .] give up all the world, deliberately, for love” and must be considered “modest” if not “chaste” because they make “a sacrifice to affection, and not merely to sensibility” (126). If, in the Vindication, Wollstonecraft seems to suggest that only the exceptional woman, she who “possesses an uncommon portion of sense and loftiness of spirit”, can rise above the forces seeking to destroy her, the author’s later work will literally “imagine” for her readers how more ordinary women may escape both the “harlot’s” path and (perhaps) Heloisa’s as well. In Wollstonecraft’s metaphorical equation of the “harlot” and the “good” woman both figures are negatively inflected, contaminated, if you will, by the metaphor of undesirable sexual transgression. Both figures fall victim to the “mind-forg’d manacles” of eighteenthcentury educational practice and its insistent confounding of “manners and morals”. Furthermore, Wollstonecraft does not suggest that a “chaste” woman is any more likely than a “fallen” woman to escape the psychological manacles of her education: they are equally burdensome to both. At the same time, both female figures are also potentially emancipated, although in either case, escape can be achieved only through a significant exercise of the will and in defiance of social custom, economic realities, and the law. Wollstonecraft’s most radical use of a metaphorical equation between the “fallen” and the “virtuous” remains relatively undeveloped in the


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Vindication. Nonetheless, she does introduce the comparison between “common and legal prostitution” which will become central to The Wrongs of Woman. In her “Advertisement” to the Vindication Wollstonecraft indicates that in a proposed second volume, she will “investigate the laws relative to women”, but even in 1792 she rejects the validity of coverture and indicates that women should have control over the money they earn and better opportunities to pursue economic independence: “Business of various kinds, they might likewise pursue, if they were educated in a more orderly manner, which might save many from common and legal prostitution. Women would not then marry for a support [. . .] nor would an attempt to earn their own subsistence, a most laudable one! sink them almost to the level of those poor abandoned creatures who live by prostitution” (148). In the following passage, Wollstonecraft continues to develop an argument already raised in the text: Necessity never makes prostitution the business of men’s lives; though numberless are the women who are thus rendered systematically vicious. This, however, arises, in a great degree, from the state of idleness in which women are educated, who are always taught to look up to man for a maintenance, and to consider their persons as the proper return for his exertions to support them. Meretricious airs, and the whole science of wantonness, have then a more powerful stimulus than either appetite or vanity; and this remark gives force to the prevailing opinion, that with chastity all is lost that is respectable in woman. (72) Deprived of gainful employment, all women are best secured of an income through either “common” prostitution or marriage (“legalized prostitution”) and subsequently all women are forced to cultivate “the whole science of wantonness”, whether they practice it in the putative public sphere as prostitutes or private sphere as wives. In either case, society places women in the position of property bought and paid for by men, whether or not the transaction involves “fallen” or “chaste” women and whether or not it takes place in the street or in the home. Indeed, the law of coverture legislates the married woman’s loss of economic and legal selfhood as surely (and with more finality) as a contract between prostitute and customer suspends a woman’s agency over her own body. Thus, all women must grapple with a debased vision of their own sexuality as a marketable commodity. Toward the very end of the Vindication, Wollstonecraft turns her

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attention from the figure of the “prostitute” to the “libertine” who corrupts her and the chaste woman who subsequently “spurns” her. Wollstonecraft thus expands on her suggestion that men support the women they seduce by insisting upon male guilt: “all the causes of female weakness, as well as depravity, which I have already enlarged on, branch out of one grand cause – want of chastity in men”. Wollstonecraft characterizes lustful men as cannibals feasting on the flesh of fallen women, “standing dishes to which every glutton may have access” (138). Furthermore, she rejects the notion that prostitutes protect “chaste” women from male lust. Seemingly “chaste” women sully themselves by “consigning” the “fallen” to vice; they are complicit in the system that prostitutes other women and thus fail to meet the demands of Wollstonecraft’s rigorous standard of personal morality. Indeed, Wollstonecraft continually links her idealization of marriage to a critique of prostitution; companionate marriage cannot exist if any woman functions as a purchased soul mate. In her ideal state “The father of the family will not then weaken his constitution and debase his sentiments, by visiting the harlot, nor forget, in obeying the call of appetite, the purpose for which it was implanted. And, the mother will not neglect her children to practise the arts of coquetry, when sense and modesty secure her the friendship of her husband” (6). The above statement exemplifies Wollstonecraft’s negotiation between the public and the private responsibilities of her ideal British woman. According to Virginia Sapiro, “It is a mistake to read an unambiguous separate-spheres argument into Wollstonecraft’s formulation. She said that women must be patriots, which, she argued, is impossible if they are only bound up in domestic pursuits without any larger association with the ‘moral and civil interest of mankind’” (176). Finally, Wollstonecraft places the responsibility of reclamation from “the science of wantonness” upon the individual. If each woman reforms herself she simultaneously reforms the world: her husband will not seek out “harlots”, her sons will not become libertines, and her daughters will not practice the dangerous “art of pleasing” in their turn. Indeed, Wollstonecraft explicitly rejects institutional attempts to reclaim the “fallen”. In her view, “Asylums” and “Magdalenes”, the social institutions erected to reclaim sexual transgressors, treat merely the symptoms of a society which fails to initially teach its children the difference between “virtue and vice” (Vindication 72). Mere philanthropic sympathy fails to address the underlying causes of seduction and prostitution: poverty, poor education, and a treacherous sexual


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double standard. “It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world!” (71), Wollstonecraft exclaims. In spite of the heightened rhetoric here, a Vindication does not argue strenuously for a re-imagined state for the “fallen” woman, although it doesn’t inexorably condemn sexual transgression either. In 1792, Wollstonecraft focuses upon providing the middle-class woman with a redemptive educational script that will (eventually) improve the condition of the “fallen” woman and perhaps even eradicate prostitution. But in suggesting that women should value “virtue” as a quality of the mind rather than the body, Wollstonecraft opens up a space for the virtuous sexualized heroines found in the novel she writes five years later.2 Maria Venables and Jemima, the heroines of Wrongs of Woman, struggle to attain “wisdom and virtue” (21). In each case knowledge is hard won, yet this too conforms to the educational program espoused in the Vindication: “The world cannot be seen by an unmoved spectator, we must mix in the throng, [. . .] If we mean, in short, to live in the world to grow wiser and better, and not merely to enjoy the good things in life, we must attain a knowledge of others at the same time that we become acquainted with ourselves” (112). Maria and Jemima err and suffer; visions of romantic love repeatedly impair Maria’s vision and Jemima exercises sexual power against other women in her struggle for survival. In their progress towards “wisdom and virtue”, however, they eventually become self-aware and eloquent social critics. By shaping their own pasts into narratives and through the exchange of those autobiographies, Maria and Jemima simultaneously learn to generalize about the condition of “woman” in their society. The telling of their personal narratives becomes a way to critique the social mores that literally and metaphorically imprison them. But even as Jemima and Maria learn to narrate compelling stories, they also discover that such stories may not find a sympathetic audience. Wollstonecraft herself notes the hazards of truth telling within the preface, acknowledging that the majority of her audience will reject the tale. She writes instead for the “few, who will dare to advance before the improvement of the age, and grant that my sketches are not the abortion of a distempered fancy, or the strong delineations of a wounded heart” (21). Not surprisingly, much of The Wrongs of Woman is itself concerned with the pains and pleasures of storytelling. Just as Wollstonecraft writes for an audience to whom she need not justify the tale she tells, Maria and Jemima must find sympathetic listeners in the madhouse before they can be freed.

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How does the social critic win over her audience? In the first scene of the novel Wollstonecraft liberally borrows conventions from Gothic and Sentimental novels.3 By employing familiar devices from late eighteenth-century fiction, Wollstonecraft draws upon her readers’ habits of sympathy toward the beleaguered heroines of their favorite narratives: “Abodes of horror have frequently been described, and castles, filled with spectres and chimeras, conjured up by the magic spell of genius to harrow the soul, and absorb the wondering mind. But, formed of such stuff as dreams are made of, what were they to the mansion of despair, in one corner of which Maria sat, endeavouring to recall her scattered thoughts!” (23). Wollstonecraft’s familiar representation of Maria’s distressed state simultaneously challenges the reading experience of an audience accustomed to novels that ignore the material horrors of “sublime” terror. Maria’s “abode of horror” is not an imaginative diversion but instead literally encloses her within its decayed walls. Furthermore, George Venables’s very real political and economic power holds her there. And, as Edmund Burke had observed in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful: “When danger or pain press too nearly, [sublime scenes] are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible” (40). The delights of Gothic machinery, as well as the seductive allure of male power, lose their charm when the heroine finds herself in a real madhouse where the “terrific inhabitants” emit terrifying “groans and shrieks”. Rather than the “sounds of whistling winds, or startled birds, modulated by a romantic fancy, which amuse while they affright”, Maria is tormented by “tones of misery as carry a dreadful certainty directly to the heart” (23). Wollstonecraft, although willing to manipulate familiar Gothic conventions in a gambit for reader sympathy, jolts her readers out of their complacent acceptance of the “horrors” inflicted on the fair heroines of their favorite novels. Indeed, in a letter to Mary Hays, Wollstonecraft indicates a marked frustration with a voracious, but easily satisfied, female reading audience: Your description of the females, of your happy family, makes me hug myself in the solitude of my fire side. I was really fatigued at only hearing of their animal spirits; and the contents of the dozen novels, they devour in a week, whirled round my head till it ached again. In short when you call them an amiable set you have contrived to give me an idea of a party destitute of sentiment, fancy or feeling, taste is, of course, out of the question. (Letters 385)


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In The Wrongs of Woman, Wollstonecraft sets out to provoke and politicize her readers, rather than merely stimulate their “animal spirits”. The novel’s opening disturbs even as it reassures: the reader finds the familiar “damsel in distress” already the denizen of a madhouse, marked as transgressive even before she relates her story. Neither virginal nor particularly naive, Maria is also already a wife and mother whose troubles begin after her marriage to George Venables. Unlike most novelistic heroines, then, Maria quests not for a good husband, but rather the means by which to get rid of a bad one. Furthermore, she acts as a political agitator, openly proclaiming the injustice of British social mores and concluding her search for justice with a passionate, albeit unsuccessful, public appeal to the legal system. As many critics have pointed out, Wollstonecraft also evokes sympathy for the politically rebellious Maria by stressing her suffering as a mother criminally bereft of her child.4 Unlike the virginal heroines of popular romance, memories of a flesh and blood daughter rather than mere “spectres” or “chimeras” haunt her. Wollstonecraft further evokes reader identification with her heroine by emphasizing the material nature of Maria’s loss. The text solicits a physical as well as an emotional response to the heroine’s anguish. Her breasts throb with drying milk even as she attempts to gather her “scattered thoughts”: She heard her [infant] half speaking half cooing, and felt the little twinkling fingers on her burning bosom – a bosom bursting with the nutriment for which this cherished child might now be pining in vain. From a stranger she could indeed receive the maternal aliment, Maria was grieved at the thought – but who would watch her with a mother’s tenderness, a mother’s self-denial? (23) Wollstonecraft draws upon the conventionally appropriate images of the “good mother” and compounds it through a visceral association between physical and psychological torment. Only after the reader’s own breast aches in unison with the heroine’s does Wollstonecraft introduce the more troubling source of Maria’s outcast status as well as revolutionary rhetoric: “Now she endeavoured to brace her mind to fortitude, and to ask herself what was to be her employment in her dreary cell? Was it not to effect her escape, to fly to the succour of her child, and to baffle the selfish schemes of her tyrant – her husband!” (24).

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At the very beginning of the novel, then, Wollstonecraft establishes her heroine as an “outcast” subject who rejects the very goal of the “domestic woman”: the grateful acquisition of a husband. Through a series of embedded life stories narrated by sympathetic female characters, The Wrongs of Woman dismantles the machinery of romance, courtship, and marriage which fuel most Gothics by revealing their underpinnings of greed and sexual violence.5 Narration then, throughout the text, becomes the means by which to escape the literal manifestation of an oppressive romantic ideology that serves the interests of husbands and not wives. Maria determines that in order to get out of the madhouse she must find a sympathetic auditor who will listen to her tale of “wrongs” and then aid her escape. Not insignificantly, her personal dilemma reflects the condition of “the sex” generally: “Was not the world a vast prison, and women born slaves?” (27). If Maria is to escape the madhouse, figured as the metaphorical equivalent of her prejudiced society, she must convince her auditor of the injustice inherent in both systems, hence her biographical tale must necessarily politicize even as it creates sympathy for Maria’s personal situation. In employing the novel to mount her most radical critique of the condition of women in late nineteenth-century England, Wollstonecraft turns from “reason” and towards “sympathy”, as well as from political prose to imaginative fiction. Maria’s own practice as a politicized storyteller reflects Wollstonecraft’s change in allegiance. The Wrongs of Woman is at least partly about finding the appropriate medium for a political message. Once the heroine determines that the only means out of the madhouse is a compelling story she embarks on a search for both the perfect auditor and the best version of her narrative. And Maria learns that overt statements of political defiance – based upon what is rational and right – do not necessarily work. Maria directs her first appeal to the “master” of the madhouse, who silences her without words: “To [him], she had, soon after her entrance, raved of injustice, in accents that would have justified his treatment, had not a malignant smile, when she appealed to his judgment, with a dreadful conviction stifled her remonstrating complaints” (25). In order to successfully tell a tale of betrayal, oppression, and sexual exploitation the sexualized heroine must have a sympathetic listener and preferably one whose sense of “judgment” is not overly impeded by self-interest. Even as Maria accepts the master’s obdurate resistance, she wonders: “By force, or openly, what could be done?” (25). As if in response to her unasked question, “A woman


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entered [. . .] with a firm, deliberate step, strongly marked features, and large black eyes, which she fixed steadily on Maria’s, as if she designed to intimidate her, saying at the same time – ‘You had better sit down and eat your dinner, than look at the cloud’” (25). Although Jemima provides Maria with the pragmatic advice she requires in order to escape from the madhouse, the heroine cannot initially trust such an injunction, which might be “designed to intimidate” rather than help her. Indeed, she contentiously responds to Jemima’s advice by invoking her class privilege and thus her supposedly superior sensibility. In reply to the sound suggestion that she eat or be judged mad, Maria contends that “grief” operates like madness and implies that her jailer could not know true grief. But Jemima counters with a shake of her head and “a ghastly smile of desperate fortitude” which Maria acknowledges as a grimace of kinship (26). Inference rather than assertion characterizes their first encounter. Once Maria recognizes that Jemima represents her best hope for salvation, she makes a concerted effort to shape her tale of “wrongs” into a compelling and reasonable story capable of wooing Jemima over to her cause. In transforming herself into a storyteller of authentic experience who will be believed by a skeptical auditor, she must throw off the shackles of her exquisite sensibility. Maria’s heroic task requires her to transform herself into an articulate political prisoner, rather than remain an easy victim of those who would turn her painfully acute sense of injustice into a sign of madness. At the same time, however, it is the emotional component of Maria’s affect that initially attracts Jemima’s attention. Although she too has formed definitive ideas about the shortcomings of England’s socio-economic system, Jemima ignores Maria’s political disquisitions. Maria’s story does not, at first, inspire in her a “sense of injustice” but rather it “touched her heart” (28). Nonetheless, Jemima is a tough audience. She vacillates between objective critic and sympathetic listener as Maria learns to direct her appeal to the fellow “sufferer” visible in Jemima’s “ghastly smile”. The Wrongs of Woman acknowledges that not every woman with a story of sexual oppression is capable of acting as a social critic. Rife with embedded tales of female suffering, only Maria and Jemima actually transcend the horrors of their personal narratives. In the first place, not all women are reliable narrators. The horrors suffered by the “lovely maniac” are just as evocative as those of Maria or Jemima; she is sold to a rich man and goes mad during childbirth. But once mad she remains trapped in the prison of her own disturbed sensibility. Although she serves as an important warning to both Maria and

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Jemima, they leave her behind. Secondly, women auditors do not necessarily translate into sympathetic compatriots. After leaving Venables, Maria first seeks refuge with a woman whom she had earlier assisted in setting up a haberdasher’s shop. Although also trapped in an abusive marriage – her husband robs and beats her – she refuses to hide Maria from Venables. She subscribes to the opinion that “when a woman was once married, she must bear every thing” (120). More significantly, however, her loyalty to her husband exceeds her allegiance to Maria. She chooses to “obey” him when he decides to return Maria to Venables for financial remuneration. The husband justifies his greed by reminding Maria that “A husband and wife were, God knows, just as one, – and all would come round at last” (121). Maria escapes this particular threat to her newly found freedom, but leaves without informing the landlady of her departure, recognizing that Johnny’s claims upon his wife are greater than hers: I knew that she had a sincere affection for me, and would willingly have run any risk to show her gratitude; yet I was fully convinced, that a few kind words from Johnny would have found the woman in her, and her dear benefactress, as she termed me in an agony of tears, would have been sacrificed, to recompense her tyrant for condescending to treat her like an equal. [. . .] And this thawed sternness, contrasted with his habitual brutality, was the more acceptable, and could not be purchased at too dear a rate. (122) In the embedded tale of the interaction between Johnny’s wife and Maria, Wollstonecraft carefully weaves the tangled strands of socially sanctified marriage and its financial underpinnings as understood by husbands and wives. Johnny defends his decision to “sell” Maria back to her rich husband by mouthing conventional platitudes about the sanctity of marriage. But his statement that a husband and wife are “one” could just as easily allude to the economics of coverture. The greater social authority of George Venables trumps Maria’s actions as a woman of monetary wealth, including her attempts to buy Johnny’s silence as well as her philanthropic gifts to his wife. In order for Johnny to continue his own practice of regularly usurping the fruits of his wife’s labor – and enforcing that right through regular beatings – he must turn Maria back over to Venables, whose own violence takes the institutional forms of forged legal documents and persistent lawyers. If, on the one hand, the inset narrative of Johnny and his wife


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indicates that gender privilege transcends class, linking as it does a working-class man with one from the gentry, it simultaneously indicates that women are not yet able to take action based upon gender solidarity. Whereas Johnny (like Venables) ultimately privileges economic power, his wife “invests” in the only currency she can rely upon. She “sells” out Maria in order to protect herself, relinquishing both Maria’s financial and emotional support in exchange for the dubious joys of “thawed sternness” rather than physical “brutality”. Maria, in her turn, learns that she is a marketable commodity to both women and men, but she is slower to realize that feminine solidarity can only exist apart from conjugal economics. Although Maria’s former ally betrays her, it could be argued that Maria has no right to expect any deeper loyalty than the market can bear. Her relationship with Johnny’s wife is primarily an economic one, rather than a friendship, and Johnny merely offers better terms than Maria does. The latter economic lesson takes on particular resonance in Maria’s interactions with Jemima. While their relationship stands as testimony to the need for alternative bonds between women of different socio-economic backgrounds it also demonstrates the difficulty of achieving such an alliance. The nature of Maria’s relationship with Jemima has been one of great critical speculation. Wollstonecraft’s own stated intention was to “show the wrongs of different classes of women, equally oppressive, though, from the difference of education, necessarily various” (The Wrongs of Woman 22). While some critics have accepted Wollstonecraft’s own position, it has also been challenged, most successfully in the work of Cora Kaplan. Kaplan argues that even as Wollstonecraft poignantly gives voice to the “wrongs” perpetrated upon a working-class woman, she employs that voice to shore up the privileges of her middle-class “sister”: “. . . in the end the legitimacy of the authorial voice depends on just those invidious distinctions between women that are being queried within the narrative” (“Like a Housemaid’s Fancies” 61). Kaplan goes on to assert that the “double narrative” of Maria and Jemima “maps” onto working-class women the “excess, transgression and degraded passion” considered undesirable by the middle-class reforming woman, even as it sympathetically relates Jemima’s story. In Equivocal Beings, however, Claudia Johnson recuperates the utopian potential in the relationship of Maria and Jemima by focusing upon Wollstonecraft’s increasingly critical stance toward the revolutionary politics that she had celebrated in the early 1790s, as well as its compulsory heterosexuality. According to

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Johnson, Wollstonecraft “grimly” turns from idealizing the “emancipatory potential of republican masculinity and domesticity” to reexamine the female body “in all of its creatureliness, and it is offered as the basis for solidarity with other women and as the spring of moral sentiment from which men will ultimately be excluded” (59, 58). Arguing that “the emancipated, sturdy, purposive and rationally loving republican couple that Wollstonecraft spent her career imagining is a female couple” (69), Johnson supports her argument by noting the ways in which Jemima’s narrative deconstructs Darnford’s, who woos Maria by telling a story of hitherto unsuccessful romantic love and purchased sexual pleasure. Significantly, Jemima chooses to tell her story of exploited sexuality just as Maria and Darnford appear on the brink of consummating their own illicit relationship. Johnson convincingly suggests that in choosing that particular moment to unfold Jemima’s narrative, Wollstonecraft opens up her previously heterosexual love story in order to challenge it at its very foundation. Jemima and Maria thus break the cycle of woman–woman violence by bonding over their shared experience of “blighted motherhood” and “blighted daughterhood” (68). While Johnson’s reading of The Wrongs of Woman convincingly captures the quality of intimacy that characterizes the relationship forged between Maria and Jemima, Kaplan correctly identifies the way in which class interests threaten that unity. Wollstonecraft consistently works against an easy classification of either Maria or Jemima on the grounds of class. Both women exist on the peripheries of their purported worlds. Maria is a runaway wife with a reputation for madness while Jemima’s illegitimacy, when married to her father’s disdain and stepmother’s malice, marks her as an outcast as well. Wollstonecraft also plays with each woman’s relative position of power. While Maria is from the upper classes, in possession of a seemingly superior education and personal wealth, she is also in a position of absolute abjection as the prisoner of the madhouse. In contrast, Jemima, although a self-educated working-class woman with a questionable past, acts as Maria’s “keeper”; she wields more authority within the confines of the asylum. And although Jemima does not have the inherited wealth ascribed to Maria, neither does Maria herself. Indeed, Jemima could be said to possess more financial security since she is unmarried and there are no claims on the money she earns. As Wollstonecraft deconstructs conventional distinctions between women from different classes, however, she also goes to some pains to create parallel experiences. Jemima and Maria are each


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exploited within the domestic sphere by negligent fathers and resentful stepmothers. Both carry physical marks of their outcast sexual status as single pregnant women and both are hounded from “respectable” society. At one point the narrator describes Jemima’s history as an exile: she has been “hunted from hole to hole, as if she had been a beast of prey, or infected with a moral plague” (28). Maria later employs the same analogy when relating her own story: “I was hunted, like an infected beast, from three different apartments” (128). And as the women reveal more information about their lives it becomes evident that even their educations are more similar than they first appear. Maria has had no more of a formal education than Jemima. The libraries of men with more economic and social power provide both of them with knowledge, and more importantly perhaps, the delights of reading. Indeed, both characters go to some lengths to satisfy their desire for narrative pleasure and I would like to turn to their mutual interest in storytelling as perhaps the most important element in their unlikely alliance. Jemima and Maria establish a somewhat intangible rapport before they share any material details about the lives they led outside of the madhouse. Even as they assume certain “differences” based upon their obvious class affiliations, each woman also yearns toward the potential narrative power of the other’s story. As I mention above, Jemima enters the text as if in answer to Maria’s query: “By force, or openly, what could be done?” (25). But one could also argue that Maria enters Jemima’s “text” in a similar manner: “When [Jemima] was told that no person, excepting the physician appointed by family, was to be permitted to see the lady at the end of the gallery, she opened her keen eyes still wider, and uttered a – ‘hem!’ before she enquired – ‘Why?’” (26). These paired questions – Maria’s “what could be done?” and Jemima’s “Why?” – lead to a tentative exploration of each other’s lives in the context of their own needs; both women are looking for an emancipatory narrative which will free them from the madhouse. Jemima begins to listen to Maria’s story out of curiosity but also to avenge herself against an employer who foolishly chooses halftruths over full disclosure. The narrative makes it clear that Jemima would have enforced the master’s rules if he had trusted her (and perhaps pleasured her) with the whole story. Both Jemima and Maria must, however, “resign their dear-bought knowledge of the world” before they can actually trust one another with their biographies. In a certain sense, they each must re-learn what they think they know to be true about women from classes not their

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own. Both Johnny’s wife and a maid in the employ of her husband have betrayed Maria, while Jemima has never had any reason to trust women with more social power than she. Furthermore, each woman must guard against the dangers of very different sensibilities from their own. Even after Jemima accepts the injustice of Maria’s imprisonment, she questions her narrative authority: “Was truth to be expected from one who had been entrapped, kidnapped, in the most fraudulent manner?” (32). Jemima clings to the lessons of her difficult life as strongly as Maria had clung to her refined sensibility. Both women must abandon their previous belief structures before they can meet as equals and share their narratives. Jemima decides to aid Maria even as she ponders the wisdom of further action: “she still resolved not to be wrought on to do more than soften the rigour of confinement, till she could advance on surer ground” (32). Again, metaphorical echoes continue to connect the two women. Jemima’s desire to “advance on surer ground” parallels Maria’s nearly simultaneous musings on the “wrongs” of society: “The view of what has been done by man, produces a melancholy, yet aggrandizing, sense of what remains to be achieved by human intellect; but a mental convulsion, which, like the devastation of an earthquake, throws all the elements of thought and imagination into confusion, makes contemplation giddy, and we fearfully ask on what ground we ourselves stand” (32). The nascent relationship between Maria and Jemima holds revolutionary potential but before it can be fully realized there needs to be a purging of antiquated ideas, narratives, and social constructions. Significantly, Jemima first helps Maria – not by seeking out her daughter – but by providing her with books and writing materials. Although much critical attention has been directed at Maria and Darnford’s shared love of reading, less has been given to Jemima’s. As we discover from her narrative, as a child she had risked punishment to hear the songs of a ballad-singer. And as an adult, she reads in order “to beguile the tediousness of solitude, and to gratify an inquisitive, active mind” (61). Yet the “reading” cure she recommends to Maria is hardly a gentle one. Brutally cathartic, Wollstonecraft’s formulation of the therapeutic benefits of Maria’s immersion in narrative hearkens back to the Vindication’s stress upon the proactive search for experience and hence virtue: “[Maria] descanted on ‘the ills which flesh is heir to’, with bitterness, when the recollection of her babe was revived by a tale of fictitious woe, that bore any resemblance to her woes; and her imagination was continually employed, to conjure up and embody the


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various phantoms of misery, which folly and vice had let loose on the world” (30). Although Maria’s reading first reminds her of her own “woes”, it also angers her and inspires her to document her personal experience with “folly and vice”. Maria’s memoirs are initially intended to inoculate her daughter from the manipulations of a prejudiced society. But eventually she rewrites this familial text of mother and daughter as the explicitly political statement addressed to the judge at the very end of the novel. Wollstonecraft’s “new” heroine moves from weeping over fictitious tales, to constructing her own history, to political action. In articulating Maria’s reading experience, then, Wollstonecraft also indicates how her own “fictitious tale” can effect social change. It is not meant to comfort its readers but rather to incite them.6 Even as Maria constructs her memoirs as “a retrospect of sorrows that had assumed an unalterable character” (31), she simultaneously acts to interrupt her own hitherto unhappy ending. She deliberately draws Jemima into her narrative: “Maria did not allow any opportunity to slip of winning on the affections of Jemima; for she discovered in her a strength of mind, that excited her esteem, clouded as it was by the misanthropy of despair” (31). But, as I have already suggested, Maria only slowly comes to an understanding of how best to woo Jemima. She struggles to find the right currency with which to “purchase” Jemima’s trust; the former prostitute and social outcast is initially reluctant to “buy” a prisoner’s narrative: “she would listen to her with earnestness, and then suddenly interrupt the conversation, as if afraid of resigning, by giving way to her sympathy, her dear-bought knowledge of the world” (31). Maria eventually discovers that neither political rhetoric nor money bribes serve her purpose. Significantly, both women are slow to reveal the details of their pasts both to the reader and to each other. Maria merely alludes to the “tyranny” of a greedy husband, while Jemima remains utterly silent as to her own history. Ultimately, they forge an alliance by telling stories which are not their own. Although Jemima initially refuses to reveal anything about her own life, she readily recounts the experiences of others: “Jemima would labour to beguile the tedious evenings, by describing the persons and manners of the unfortunate beings, whose figures and voices awoke sympathetic sorrow in Maria’s bosom; and the stories she told were the more interesting, for perpetually leaving room to conjecture something extraordinary” (42). Finally, her persistent “testing” of Maria’s skills as a sympathetic listener come to fruition through the medium of Darnford’s tale.

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The first of the triad to fully reveal the details of his life outside of the asylum, Darnford does so without any of the cautious hesitation that characterizes the storytelling of Maria and Jemima. As Johnson points out, his story is a particularly familiar one of “intrepid republican manhood, part self-pity [. . .] and part braggadocio” (65). Well read in the domestic and republican narratives that figure “heroes” like Darnford as ideal lovers, Maria readily accepts his tale. She has read what he has read, as well as his marginalia, and that reading convinces her that he could be her appropriate savior. Yet Maria remains a pragmatist; even as she measures his sexual desirability, she weighs his usefulness to her scheme of escape: “Of what use could I be to him, or he to me, if it be true that he is unjustly confined? – Could he aid me to escape, who is himself more closely watched?” (36). She also acknowledges that she must woo him, even as she has attempted to win over Jemima: “[Darnford] might prove a friend, could she but find a way to interest him in her fate” (38). Indeed, given their shared taste in republican narrative, Maria finds Darnford as culpable an auditor as he finds her. He displays none of the caution evidenced by Jemima and he is easier to charm because he expects far less. Initially, then, Maria maintains some objectivity in her dealings with Darnford, even as she simultaneously proves herself to be dangerously enmeshed in the romantic conventions that conspired in her initial attraction to George Venables. Darnford tells his tale with disarming sincerity and insistently positions himself as hero, yet his rather sordid narrative reveals the teller’s scant respect for women. Maria responds with passion nonetheless; she proves herself to be still too enamored with narratives of male–female romantic attraction. She listens avidly but filters all she hears through far more evocative tales: he is potentially the St. Preux to her Julie, as well as the Guiscardo to her Sigismunda. Both lovers thrill to the intimacy engendered by shared books, yet neither seems to have been a careful reader. The texts idealized by Darnford and Maria do not promise escape from oppressive social norms but merely emotional and sexual pleasure prior to heroic death, for either one or both of the lovers. The danger, for both Maria and Darnford, is that they will too fully follow the romantic plotlines that enthrall both of them. Jemima effectively counters Darnford’s Rousseauistic attractions by detailing her own very unromantic life and thus revealing the ways in which the promises of philosophers fall terribly short of salvation. Nonetheless, the romantic atmosphere that she counters simultaneously facilitates her own impulse toward autobiography. She makes


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her life into narrative because she positively responds to the “paradise” of throbbing sexual sympathy created by Darnford’s narrative and Maria’s receptivity: “Horror still reigned in the darkened cells, suspicion lurked in the passages, and whispered along the walls. The yells of men possessed, sometimes made them pause and wonder that they felt so happy, [. . .] They even chid themselves for such apparent insensibility; still the world contained not three happier beings” (51). Into this emotionally charged “heaven”, Jemima “voluntarily” offers an “account of herself”. Jemima’s narrative consequently deconstructs Darnford’s tale even as it provides insights into his ease in offering it. Darnford’s sexual history, which dominates his autobiography, has been determined by his easy employment of prostitutes: I will not disgust you with a recital of the vices of my youth, which can scarcely be comprehended by female delicacy. I was taught to love by a creature I am ashamed to mention; and the other women with whom I afterwards became intimate, were of a class of which you can have no knowledge. I formed my acquaintance with them at the theaters; and, when vivacity danced in their eyes, I was not easily disgusted by the vulgarity, that flowed from their lips. (44) In spite of his initial promise, Darnford does indulge in a “recital” of his “vices”, but in such a way as to free himself from any personal responsibility: he dismisses his first lover as a “creature”; he assumes that “good” women like Maria would have no such knowledge of prostitutes; and finally, he suggests that the words of profligate women are given away as cheaply as their sexual favors. Since Maria should have no personal knowledge of such women, and they are unreliable storytellers anyway, Darnford’s account of his easy “commerce” with prostitutes is the only trustworthy narrative. That is, until Jemima tells her story. Her autobiography inevitably extracts Darnford from the context of the “Romance” and “Philosophical Novel”, in which he figures as a hero, and realigns him with the many men in Jemima’s life who enthusiastically exert their power to rape and abuse women. Into an atmosphere redolent with sexual promise, Jemima unfolds a horrific tale of two generations of exploited female sexuality. The daughter of a seduced servant, her desperate mother nearly aborts her and eventually dies in childbirth. Jemima steadfastly articulates the details of a life characterized by abuse, rape, and prostitution, but her narrative also charts the processes by which such a story is customarily silenced: “I was the filching cat, the ravenous dog, the dumb brute,

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who must bear all; for if I endeavoured to exculpate myself, I was silenced, without any enquiries being made, with ‘Hold your tongue, you never tell truth’” (56). The only currency allowed to the “outlaw of society”, in Jemima’s experience, is her sexuality. As a prostitute, she exchanges her silent laboring sexual body for the cooperation of the “watchmen of the town” who threaten her with imprisonment if she fails to “silence the growl of [their] avarice” (60). Men with power – in this case they hold the literal “keys” to Jemima’s freedom because they can always arrest her – are allowed to choose between silence and speech and they hold that privilege over her. As in the stories of the lovely lunatic and her rich older husband, Johnny and his wife, and Maria and Venables, male desire is inextricably entangled with greed, as well as social and narrative power. Women are left to negotiate their price by what their body is worth in comparison to other women. And, although the watchmen doubly prostitute themselves (for both money and sex), only women are ever marked as “whores”. Jemima briefly embraces the barbarity of such gendered economics. Unable to survive in respectability as a laundress – she discovers that a sexually laboring body that works outside the domestic sphere generates more income than one that cleans within it – Jemima barters her sexual desirability for shelter. But the price she negotiates from her admirer exacts its toll upon the pregnant body of the tradesman’s mistress: “I advised him – yes, I did! would I could forget it! – to turn [her] out of doors: and one night he determined to follow my advice. Poor wretch! She fell upon her knees, reminded him that he had promised to marry her, that her parents were honest! – What did it avail?” (66). Her pleading to “no avail”, the tradesman’s mistress retreats into silent spectacle in order to reveal her “wrong”. As a fellow sufferer, Jemima successfully “reads” that story: “I passed by, just as some men, going to work, drew out the stiff, cold corpse [. . .] I recognized her pale visage; I listened to the tale told by the spectators, and my heart did not burst. I thought of my own state, and wondered how I could be such a monster!” (66). If the ability to shape one’s tale of “wrongs” through language is denied, then the body itself most effectively demonstrates that tale. Jemima, more than capable of reading the narrative inscribed on her dead rival’s body, responds by entering a state of “fever”. She never returns to prostitution but becomes first a thief and then a warden in the madhouse. When presented with a graphic tale of the fatal “harlot’s progress”, writ large on the body of the tradesman’s mistress, Jemima recognizes her own complicity as well as her own danger of replicating the dead woman’s fate.


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Earlier in Jemima’s narrative, we are given an account of the rape she suffers at the hands of her first “master”, the owner of a slop-shop. Her account of a subsequent pregnancy resonates with the experience of the tradesman’s mistress. When Jemima becomes pregnant, her master begins to fear the consequences of his crime; her “altered shape”, when read by others in the community, could lead to “public censure at the meeting” (57). Although the mistress of the slop-shop discovers her husband raping Jemima, it is Jemima who is beaten and evicted from this “honest family”. Her rapist leaves her “destitute” until she begins to relate his crime: “One of the boys of the shop passing by, heard my tale, and immediately repaired to his master, to give him a description of my situation; and he touched the right key – the scandal it would give rise to, if I were left to repeat my tale to every enquirer” (58). The master responds by silencing Jemima with “half-a-guinea” and a promise to supply her “brat” with a nurse. He also threatens her with the “house of correction” if she continues to tell her tale. Jemima turns away from the cathartic consolations of narrative and toward suicide and abortion. Although she survives the suicide attempt, she erases the evidence of sexual violation implicit in her unborn child and she also stops telling her tale. It is a narrative that fails to find an audience until her much later encounter with Maria. Only after she becomes an advocate of action, survival, and fortitude can Jemima again articulate her own tale of “wrongs”. In finally trusting others with her story, she thus (hopefully) rewrites the conclusion of her own narrative of sexual transgression and ensures an escape from the madhouse that imprisons her as surely as it does Maria. Jemima’s tale successfully disrupts the utopian promise implied by Darnford’s reading of Rousseau and other republican authors. In her experience, the philosopher is no more immune from hypocrisy and self-interest than any other man. Her one other attempt to tell her tale occurs after the unexpected death of an elderly protector. She approaches an “advocate for unequivocal sincerity” and “friend of freedom and the improvement of morals” with her tale but receives only a pompous essay on self-reliance in return. Indeed, at times Maria and Darnford sound dangerously like the unnamed philosopher. They periodically interrupt Jemima’s story to comment woodenly upon her brutal history. At one point Maria “sighs”: “The culture of the heart ever, I believe, keeps pace with that of the mind. But pray go on, [. . .] though your narrative gives rise to the most painful reflections on the present state of society” (65). By the end of Jemima’s narrative, however, Maria acknowledges her own contested place within the

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brutal “society” from which, in the above statement, she seems to remove herself. Jemima concludes her narrative with a series of angry questions: “what should induce me to be the champion for suffering humanity? – Who ever risked any thing for me? – Who ever acknowledged me to be a fellow creature?” (69). Maria, at this point, abandons the vocabulary of the social critic; she extends first her hand and eventually her own narrative. Jemima’s story, a tribute offered to the climate of passion generated by Maria and Darnford, succeeds in staving off the sexual consummation of their attraction: “The opening buds of hope closed, as if they had put forth too early, and the happiest day of her life was overcast by the most melancholy reflections. Thinking of Jemima’s peculiar fate and her own, [Maria] was led to consider the oppressed state of women, and to lament that she had given birth to a daughter” (70). Serendipitously, Jemima reawakens in Maria the maternal feelings later employed to further interest Jemima in her fate. In the narrative jousting between Darnford and Jemima, it is the latter tale that initially wins Maria’s favor. Consequently, Maria turns away from the traditional, but also dangerous, succor of romantic love toward the unproven and far more complex demands of motherhood and political sisterhood. Jemima’s narrative inevitably returns Maria to her own memoirs, in which motherhood serves both a social and a political function. They briefly unite over the potential implicit in Maria’s lost daughter; hopefully their “comaternity” will allow them to interrupt and thus rewrite the story of the unloved and unmothered daughter (Johnson, Equivocal Beings 68). Yet news that Maria’s daughter has died momentarily (and perhaps permanently) interrupts the stunningly unorthodox family envisioned by them. Maria once more pragmatically relegates Jemima to a secondary role in her relentless quest to escape the madhouse and again embraces the more conventional compact she can make with Darnford. Believing the promise of shared motherhood destroyed, Maria allows Darnford to read her memoirs before passing them along to Jemima. Jemima’s tale illuminates the socio-sexual dangers that threaten unprotected working-class women. Wollstonecraft unflinchingly reveals the brutality of sexual violation and prostitution, as well as the socio-economic conditions that make “whores” out of decent but poor young women. She thus deromanticizes the generic story of workingclass seduction, betrayal, and prostitution, which she had once reiterated in the Vindication. At one point Jemima says: “I have since read in novels of the blandishments of seduction, but I had not even


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the pleasure of being enticed into vice” (59). Wollstonecraft’s workingclass heroine also defies the “harlot’s progress” narrative by surviving her tragic “fate” and emerging as a more rational and more feeling woman. The novel traces an ascent into virtue rather than a linear progression into further vice. Indeed, Jemima’s story exemplifies the narrative of improvement outlined in the novel’s preface and models an alternative vision of British womanhood based upon the acquisition of “virtuous” morality rather than sexual history. Whereas Jemima’s history reveals the “wrongs” which characterize “common” prostitution, Maria’s tale uncovers the duplicitous condition of marriage, or “legalized prostitution” (Vindication 148). Wollstonecraft’s readers would expect a heroine of Maria’s class and background to possess a heightened sensibility; the unexpected and hence transgressive aspect of Maria’s tale is her willingness to acknowledge the hypocrisy of middle-class society and its social mores. Her memoirs serve as an antidote to the conventional lessons young women were likely to encounter in traditional conduct book literature aimed at helping them procure appropriate husbands. Indeed, just as Jemima’s story revises Wollstonecraft’s position on prostitution in the Vindication, the account of Maria’s conjugal miseries explodes her earlier idealization of marriage. Wollstonecraft had once argued that an “unhappy marriage is often very advantageous to a family” (Vindication 31) and even “a rough inelegant husband” could never “impede” a rational woman’s pursuit of “virtue” (32). In The Wrongs of Woman, however, Wollstonecraft thoroughly rejects her earlier optimism about regulated conjugal relations. Maria enters the “turbid stream” of marriage primarily to escape the twin tyrannies of a neglectful father and a “vulgar” stepmother, but she does so under the sway of romantic notions about both George and marriage itself: “[I] thought more of obtaining my freedom, than of my lover. But, when George, seemingly anxious for my happiness, pressed me to quit my present painful situation, my heart swelled with gratitude – I knew not that my uncle had promised him five thousand pounds” (89). Maria’s uncle and George employ legal contract and gentlemanly agreement to enclose Maria in a doomed marriage of convenience. Here then is the “Gordian knot” of legalized prostitution made more complex by the fact that it is George who appears to have been purchased. As in the Vindication, Wollstonecraft employs analogy in order to confound and refigure conventional stereotypes and belief structures. Maria’s critique of marriage consistently links George’s avarice to his “habits of libertinism” (80). He accompanies his love of an

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“ostentatious display of riches” with an enjoyment of “profligate women”, because both prove his worth as an “economic man”. Indeed, Wollstonecraft insistently undermines the idealization of separate spheres ideology by pointing to the “public” man’s propensity toward possessing both “public” and “private” sexual partners. Maria responds to George’s spendthrift habits by conserving financial and sexual resources; she refuses to borrow money from her wealthy uncle and she tries to deny her husband his conjugal rights: personal intimacy without affection, seemed, to me the most degrading, as well as the most painful state in which a woman of any taste, [. . .] could be placed. But my husband’s fondness for women was of the grossest kind, and imagination was so wholly out of the question, as to render his indulgences of this sort entirely promiscuous, and of the most brutal nature. My health suffered, before my heart was entirely estranged by the loathsome information; could I then have returned to his sullied arms, but as a victim to the prejudices of mankind, who have made women the property of their husbands? (94) In striking contrast to the lessons of the Vindication, Maria declares that women cannot love where there is no sexual attraction. Rejecting a moralistic equation which celebrates “coldness of constitution” because it allows wives to “love their husbands” solely out of “duty” rather than suspicious sensual pleasure (101), Maria refutes the economics of sexual duty which “barter” physical compliance for the “protection” of marriage. She argues that such an agreement turns women into “property” and marriage into “a mere affair of barter”, although she has “nothing to do with the secrets of trade” (101). Yet in spite of Maria’s repeated attempts to reclaim her husband and preserve the sanctity of the private sphere, her married life continually exposes her to the “secrets of trade”. Indeed, she (like Jemima in her sphere) eventually succumbs to its corrupt economics by exchanging sexual compliance for motherhood: “The greatest sacrifice of my principles in my whole life, was the allowing my husband again to be familiar with my person, though to this cruel act of self-denial, when I wished the earth to open and swallow me, you owe your birth; and I the unutterable pleasure of being a mother” (102). And just as Maria cannot prevent her husband’s access to her body, she cannot protect her financial resources: “a wife being as much a man’s property as his horse, or his ass, she has nothing she can call her own. He may use any


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means to get at what the law considers his, the moment his wife is in possession of it, even to the forcing of a lock, as Mr Venables did, to search for notes in my writing desk” (107). Venables’s financial and sexual avarice continually compromise Maria’s philosophical position as a free and rational being. Slowly and painfully, her experience as “property” also politicizes her. Whereas Darnford contends in his narrative that a good woman would have no knowledge of adulteresses and whores, Maria’s story reveals that as a wife she could not help but be aware of such women and, furthermore, nearly becomes one. Her experience with the “bastille” of marriage makes her sympathetic to those “outlaws of the world”: “adulteresses” and sexually transgressive governesses (104). While Maria continually expresses scorn for the “courtezans” purchased by her husband, the greediest “whore” in The Wrongs of Woman is finally the heroine’s own husband. Ultimately, Venables tries to market Maria’s sexuality just as he sold his own; indeed, under the rubric of coverture he owns both Maria’s body and the income it can produce. More significantly, Venables attempts to manipulate Maria’s desire in order to prostitute her without her agreement. He introduces his wife to a “gentleman of large fortune and of polished manners” whom Maria finds attractive, but Venables overestimates his wife’s desire and underestimates her moral fortitude. Maria enjoys her suitor’s attentions until it becomes clear that Venables has “sold” him her sexual affections for five hundred pounds, a mere 10 percent of George’s initial price. George’s willingness to extend Maria’s “legal” prostitution into the open marketplace leads to Maria’s final disenchantment with marriage and her decision to “free [herself] from [her] ignoble thralldom” (116). Yet even as a Godwinian epiphany frees her soul, she remains unable to convince society of her vision. Maria releases herself from the “adamantine fetters” (114) of her marriage only to be persecuted by those who read in her pregnant and unescorted body evidence of transgressive sexuality. Of course, this is Wollstonecraft at her most ironic: society labels Maria a “whore” because she has refused to barter her body. In a world where marriage is always “legalized prostitution” all wives tread the “harlot’s” path. Wollstonecraft further challenges her readers, however, by having her heroine actually become a sexual transgressor. Maria’s acceptance of Darnford as her lover has been the subject of great critical debate: is she “seduced” even after she throws off the “false consciousness” of the married woman, hence undercutting the very lessons supposedly learned during her marriage to Venables? Or, does her acceptance of

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Darnford as a lover signify a necessary sexual experiment in which Maria lays claim to her own body and its desires, even though Darnford eventually betrays her?7 Mary Nyquist suggests that “A distinction between kinds of deception is implied. Though Maria may be deceived about Darnford’s character – he is definitely not an angel – she is not deceived about her experience of sexual happiness” (76). Nyquist goes on to argue that in The Wrongs of Woman “even sexualised female sensibility is to become a political resistance” when “[h]arnessed to rational, radical female speech” (77). Maria’s transformation into a self-conscious political subject demands that she act upon her sexual desire for Darnford independently of her husband’s will, society’s mores, and, perhaps even her own skepticism. While Maria tolerates the “loveless familiarity” of her repulsive husband, with his “tainted breath, pimpled face, and blood-shot eyes” (102), she is entranced by the “rapturous” sympathy she feels for Darnford. And just as Maria’s escape from Venables fuels her “memoir” of wrongs, it could be argued that her vexed relationship with Darnford furthers her development as a social critic. Wollstonecraft foregrounds Maria’s independence from her lover at two critical junctures: during her escape from the madhouse and during the trial for “seduction and adultery”. In the later instance, Darnford’s absence from both England and the text allows Maria to enter legal discourse as an active participant rather than a passive victim. She defiantly rejects the court’s attempts to treat her as a civil nonentity, claiming sovereignty over both her body and its desires. The narrator never entirely condemns nor celebrates Maria’s acceptance of Darnford as her lover:8 There was one peculiarity in Maria’s mind: she was more anxious not to deceive, than to guard against deception; and had rather trust without sufficient reason, than be for ever the prey of doubt. Besides, what are we, when the mind has, from reflection, a certain kind of elevation, which exalts the contemplation above the little concerns of prudence! We see what we wish, and make a world of our own – and, though reality may sometimes open a door to misery, yet the moments of happiness procured by the imagination, may, without a paradox, be reckoned among the solid comforts of life. Maria now, imagining that she had found a being of celestial mould – was happy, – nor was she deceived. – He was then plastic in her impassioned hand – and reflected all the sentiments which animated and warmed her. (139)


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Too much “prudence” can impede the heroine’s progress toward greater wisdom, hence Maria’s initially passionate response to Darnford secures her “happiness”. Indeed, the most dangerous aspect of Maria’s relationship with Darnford lies not in its sexual intimacy but rather in Maria’s desire to freeze it at the moment of consummation, thus turning a transcendent escape from physical and social constraint into yet another prison. She initially resists Jemima’s invitation to leave the madhouse because Darnford cannot accompany them. In an inversion of the earliest scenes of the novel, it is Jemima who claims Maria as a savior and so goads her to action: “I have perhaps no right now to expect the performance of your promise; but on you it depends to reconcile me with the human race” (140). And, in her turn, Jemima thus rescues Maria. Darnford’s departure from the madhouse remains unnarrated and he never really returns to the increasingly fragmentary narrative. Wollstonecraft’s detailed description of the two women’s flight foreshadows the novel’s concluding fragment. As they make their way through the “garden gate” an inmate grasps Maria’s arm. In a return to the Gothic imagery of the novel’s opening, he strikes her as a supernatural being. His form is “scarcely human”, his eyes “ghastly”, and his voice “sepulchral” (141). She demands to be let go: “If you are made of flesh and blood, [. . .] do not stop me!” (141) A figure for all of the men in both Maria and Jemima’s lives who fail to interrupt their narratives of betrayal and violence, but desire them sexually, the madman holds her fast even as he rejects her assertion of sameness (they are both “flesh and blood”): “‘Woman [. . .] what have I to do with thee?’ – Still he grasped her hand, muttering a curse” (141). Wollstonecraft employs biblical allusion in several complex ways here. The madman who detains Maria employs the words of Jesus at the Wedding of Cana but turns them into a “curse”. In John 2:4, Jesus initially resists his mother’s injunction to aid wedding celebrants, saying, “Woman [. . .] what have I to do with thee?” But he finally does turn water into wine for them. Upon an occasion that weds “man” to “woman”, he thus recognizes “sameness” with his mother even as he performs a miracle that irrevocably confirms his difference from her. Wollstonecraft’s madman, however, turns Jesus’s query into a curse and then acts against Christian precepts: “The being, from whose grasp she had loosed herself, took up the stone as they opened the door, and with a kind of hellish sport threw it after them. They were out of his reach” (141). Wollstonecraft’s refiguring of John 2:4 and 8:7 foreshadows the

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increasing isolation of Jemima and Maria. Unlike the biblical adulteress, Wollstonecraft’s heroines encounter no Christian tolerance; no intervening male voice validates their existence as human “flesh and blood”. It is also painfully evident that Darnford, Maria’s putative savior, will perform no miracles for her. It is instead upon Jemima’s neck that Maria flings herself, crying out: “Save me!” (141). Textually, Jemima is further positioned as Maria’s appropriate savior because she too had echoed the language of John 2:4 at the very end of the autobiographical account of her life, asking: “Still what should induce me to be the champion for suffering humanity? – who ever risked any thing for me?” (69). Maria must “risk” entering a new narrative of solidarity between women if she will successfully rescue Jemima. And Jemima, in her turn, must also enact her own miracle. In the most optimistic ending of the novel, she resurrects both Maria’s daughter and Maria, bringing them both back from the dead; she goads Maria into life by reminding her of the revolutionary promise of comaternity aimed at interrupting their daughter’s reenactment of her mothers’ lives. Jemima stops Maria from fulfilling both the tawdry suicidal fate of the “common” seduced woman and the heroic death of an “exceptional” Heloisa; instead she insists upon an imagined third option of survival dependent upon rescuing others. The Wrongs of Woman’s fragmentary ending does not quite guarantee miraculous change but it does herald possible survival achieved through the solidarity of women. The narratives of Jemima and Maria continue to be ignored by everyone but them. The British court bluntly rejects Maria’s poignant appeal and Darnford forgets the lessons of her memoirs. But Jemima’s last words reawaken Maria to the necessity of survival for her child and point back to the life histories of both women: “I snatched her from misery – and (now she is alive again) would you leave her alone in the world, to endure what I have endured?” (153). Even as Maria again hovers on the brink of error – she takes the laudanum in the hopes of finding a “father” (152) – Jemima reminds Maria of the lessons each had learned through narrating their stories of societal “wrongs” and personal responsibility. And Maria’s young daughter redirects Maria’s attention back to the claims of the maternal by naming her “Mamma!” (153). Finally, The Wrongs of Woman ends with a vision of female community isolated from masculine structures of law and social convention and grounded on the ability to both tell one’s own story and listen to that of another. Ironically, however, Wollstonecraft’s posthumous text appears before a readership increasingly skeptical that such stories should be told at all.

Coda to Chapter 1: A “Legion of Wollstonecrafts”

It has become a critical commonplace that Mary Wollstonecraft’s death in 1797 and William Godwin’s subsequent account of her life in the Memoirs of the Author of the Rights of Woman (1798) marks the end of revolutionary feminism.1 Indeed, Godwin’s revelations about Wollstonecraft’s passion for the painter Henry Fuseli, her love affair with Gilbert Imlay and two suicide attempts after its end, as well as the philosophers’ own pre-marital relationship, gave rise to slanderous attacks against Wollstonecraft in the conservative press. The AntiJacobin Review carried out an extensive campaign to discredit Wollstonecraft’s political ideas by identifying her as a “prostitute” and “whore” rather than as a writer and social critic. In a review of the Memoirs, the Anti-Jacobin makes the following judgment: “We must observe, that Mary’s theory, that it is the right of women to indulge their inclinations with every man they like, is so far from being new, that it is as old as prostitution” (1: 97). And as late as 1801, the magazine printed “The Vision of Liberty”, a poem that included the following lines about Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman: Such license loose-tongued liberty adores, Which adds to female speech exceeding graces; Lucky the maid that on her volume pores, A scripture, archly fram’d, for propagating w—s. (9: 518) Wollstonecraft’s posthumous reputation does demonstrate how threatening the “political” woman was at the end of the eighteenth century and provides a case study of the ways in which the prostitute is constructed out of the body of the transgressive woman writer. The 55

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barrage of moral condemnation that followed the publication of Godwin’s Memoirs overwhelmed the evidence of Wollstonecraft’s own “female speech”. Wollstonecraft’s accusers largely ignored the implications of her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which advised against the indulgence of sexual desire and critiqued nineteenthcentury educational practices for women as, precisely, “a scripture, archly fram’d, for propagating w—s”. As I argue in Chapter 1, Wollstonecraft herself insisted that the entire British nation was suffering from “a false system of [female] education” which produced women more like “alluring mistresses than affectionate wives and mothers” (Vindication 7). Nonetheless, the conservative press seized upon Wollstonecraft’s biography as an ideal weapon in the war of ideas ignited by the excesses of the Reign of Terror and waged against suddenly dangerous Enlightenment ideals; the intent was to discredit all “jacobin” writing by specifically targeting the life and work of two of its most prominent practitioners: Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. Using Godwin’s revelations about Wollstonecraft’s sexual practices after 1792, fin-de-siècle conservatives practice a type of creative reinterpretation of the author’s early work in order to rewrite even her most temperate works as dangerously radical. Indeed, the British public was invited to ostracize and fear the outspoken women who had emerged in the radical 1790s. Any statement of feminine self-assertion – aimed at either political freedoms or sexual fulfillment – could be interpreted as both treasonous and licentious. Claudia Johnson has suggested that the conservative reaction against Wollstonecraft jeopardized all women writers of the period. Mere association with the author of the Vindication could lead to charges of being a “treasonous Jacobin” (Jane Austen xxiii). Consequently, Johnson argues, women authors intent upon further forwarding Wollstonecraft’s political agenda do so through “subversion and indirection” (19). According to Johnson, authors including Jane Austen, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Amelia Opie “smuggle” revolutionary ideals associated with Wollstonecraft back into their novels, hence creating doubled texts acceptable to both conservative and more radically inclined readers (xxiii). Claudia Johnson’s work has been instrumental in the reclamation of Wollstonecraft’s influence upon her contemporaries. However, Johnson’s ground-breaking account of feminist history and women’s writing focuses almost exclusively upon Jane Austen and other women novelists, thus eliding a significant and celebratory response to Wollstonecraft published between 1798 and 1801. Indeed the years

Coda: A “Legion of Wollstonecrafts”

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just after Wollstonecraft’s death saw not only the now familiar vituperation found in the Anti-Jacobin, where she was indexed under “p” for “prostitute”, but also the publication of several treatises inspired by Wollstonecraft’s revolutionary philosophy and intent upon continuing her legacy. Proto-feminist tracts published after 1797 often embrace an even more radical vision of British womanhood than that envisioned by Wollstonecraft five years earlier. Although most accounts of nineteenth-century zeitgeist insist upon the dominance of the appropriately feminine inhabitant of the domestic sphere, several fin-de-siècle proto-feminists make a definitive move away from the allure of the domestic and the consolations of marriage promised by the Vindication. In her Appeal to the Men of Great Britain on Behalf of Women (1798), for example, Mary Hays rejects the notion that women have significant influence over their husbands in domestic concerns. She instead suggests that wives are treated like “upper servants”: “And though it is often alleged, that the public influence of the men, is balanced by the private influence of the women; yet if there is truth in this remark at all, it is that kind of back stair influence, which is enjoyed rather by the unworthy, than the virtuous part of the sex” (89). Furthermore, proto-feminist theorists writing immediately after Wollstonecraft’s death were quick to point out that many women never marry or are trapped in abusive marital relationships, in which they are denied the exercise of any power at all. Hays and others critique the idealization of a heterosexual partnership that depends upon securing an ideal economic man and they contend that British women need – in fact, have the right to – an alternative form of authority derived from financial and psychological independence. While Mary Hays acknowledges an increasingly hostile reading public, coyly presenting her treatise as perhaps inappropriate given that “times and circumstances” are different from when she began it in the early 1790s, she nonetheless goes on to present her essay anyway. Indeed, she asserts: “many myriads of books of every different degree of merit, are absolutely necessary, [. . .] before the public opinion is influenced to any degree, far more before any new doctrine can be firmly established” (Appeal e). Priscilla Wakefield, also writing in 1798, unapologetically offers her Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex as yet another contribution to a new “branch of philosophy”: “The diffusion of Christianity, and the progress of civilization, have raised the importance of the female character; and it has become a branch of philosophy, not a little interesting, to ascertain the offices which the different ranks of women are required to fulfill. Their rights

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and their duties have lately occupied the pens of writers of eminence” (8). In a Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination (1799), Mary Robinson adds her critique of “custom” to others; “it requires a legion of Wollstonecrafts”, she argues, “to undermine the poisons of prejudice and malevolence” (2). And in the same year Mary Ann Radcliffe offers The Female Advocate: Or, an Attempt to Recover the Rights of Women from Male Usurpation. In her introduction, Radcliffe denies possessing “the Amazonian spirit of a Wollstonecraft” but insists that “unremitted oppression is sometimes a sufficient apology for throwing off the gentle garb of a female” (399). Radcliffe then goes on to argue for the establishment of Magdalen charities for “repentant” prostitutes. She effectively implements Wollstonecraft’s critique of “false modesty” in the name of practical social reform, albeit without her predecessor’s skepticism about institutionalized reform. Three years later, in the United States, another Female Advocate appears; its author enthusiastically invites her readers to re-read their bibles for an alternative vision of woman’s work which transcends divisions between the public and the private sphere: “Behold [Deborah] wielding the sword with one hand, and the pen of wisdom with the other; – here sitting at the council board, and there, by her superior talents, conducting the arduous affairs of military enterprise! Say now, shall woman be forever destined solely to the distaff and the needle, and never expand an idea beyond the walls of her house?” (10). The anonymous lady also recommends Wollstonecraft’s work to her readers, even as she acknowledges that Wollstonecraft will be seen by some as too “masculine” for merit, “though her writings be highly original and enterprizingly [sic] literary” (25). I would suggest that while the growing myth of Wollstonecraft as a dangerous sexual transgressor can be seen as ultimately destructive to proto-feminist activism in the first decades of the nineteenth century, it initially produces an outpouring of treatises intent upon continuing Wollstonecraft’s critique of educational practices and social custom. Furthermore, since the Wollstonecraft they are responding to (as well as defending) is the author of not only the Vindication but also The Wrongs of Woman and A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, as well as the heroine of Godwin’s Memoirs and the favorite temptress of the conservative press, their work is marked by an even more insistent focus upon sexuality and subjectivity. Proto-feminist women writers working after 1798 continue to grapple with the complex interrelationship between education, employment, chastity, and marriage made manifest by Wollstonecraft in her early work, but


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they must also address the ways in which those issues are further complicated by the divisive battle waged over the construction of “Mary Wollstonecraft” in both the radical and conservative press. Ironically, both Wollstonecraft’s most avid defender and her most effective slanderer seemingly agree on her “essential” nature. In the Memoirs Godwin constructs Wollstonecraft’s biography in order to stress her “luxuriance of imagination and a trembling delicacy of sentiment” (232); he further suggests that Wollstonecraft’s tragically thwarted destiny was to harness that “imagination and sentiment” in the service of interpersonal relationships. He idealizes Wollstonecraft as a “worshipper of domestic life” (262) and celebrates A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark because in that Wollstonecraft text he sees the author of the Vindication “softened and improved, thus fraught with imagination and sensibility” (Memoirs 249). Similarly, Richard Polwhele’s The Unsex’d Females envisions Wollstonecraft as emotionally enslaved; she is a “love-sick maid” (142), falling prey first to Henry Fuseli and then to Gilbert Imlay. Both accounts of Mary Wollstonecraft turn the reader’s attention away from her literary work and toward a female body in thrall to feminine feeling. While Godwin celebrates Wollstonecraft’s sensuality, Polwhele excoriates her for it. In support of their biographical constructs, both authors turn the reader’s gaze toward Wollstonecraft’s appearance, thus conflating her “true” textual self with her body. Godwin asserts that the “rigid and somewhat amazonian temper of some passages” in the Vindication do not accurately reflect “[Wollstonecraft’s] fixed and permanent character”: “In the champion of her sex, who was described as endeavoring to invest them with all the rights of man, those whom curiosity prompted to seek the occasion of beholding her, expected to find a sturdy, muscular, raw-boned virago and they were not a little surprised, when, instead of all this, they found a woman, lovely in her person, [. . .] feminine in her manners” (232). In The Unsex’d Females, Polwhele perverts Godwin’s loving – if misguided – descriptions to suit his anti-Jacobin agenda; he salaciously envisions Wollstonecraft in sexual thrall: “Bath’d in new bliss, the Fair-one greets the bower, / And ravishes a flame from every flower; / Low at her feet inhales the master’s sighs, / And darts voluptuous poison from her eyes” (151–4). Godwin and Polwhele are both intent upon “re-forming” Mary Wollstonecraft, although to very different ends and with radically different agendas; they make her a woman rather than a philosopher, an atheist rather than a Christian, and a victim rather than a heroine.

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Both authors also stress the ways in which Wollstonecraft’s personal experience influenced her professional writing. According to their biographical constructs, her political commitment originates in an early resistance to the domestic tyranny of her father and ultimately results in the Vindication; while her tragic love affair with Imlay serves as the basis of both A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark and the unfinished Wrongs of Woman. For Polwhele, Wollstonecraft’s willingness to confound the boundaries of public and private experience, as well as her ability to seize public discourse, provides evidence of her dangerous nature. Although Godwin celebrates Wollstonecraft’s ability to move between the public and private spheres, he stresses that she does so to satisfy the demands of family loyalty and romantic passion, as well as “Romantic” genius. Indeed, he argues that her greatest talent lay in a superior deployment of appropriately feminine and domestic powers, for “Domestic affections constituted the object upon which her heart was fixed” (Memoirs 243). According to Godwin, “The strength of her mind lay in intuition” as well as in “feeling and taste” (272). In his revisions to the second edition, published in the summer of 1798, Godwin explicitly posits himself and Wollstonecraft as an idealized and conventionally gendered, if exceptional, couple: “Her taste awakened mine; her sensibility determined me to a careful development of my feelings” (277). Godwin’s biographical representation of Wollstonecraft extends into his editing of her posthumous work. Although I ended my own discussion of The Wrongs of Woman by focusing upon its most optimistic ending, it is certainly true that Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novel never truly rests on the “surer ground” Jemima seeks. It is impeded within the text as Maria repeatedly turns from Jemima to Darnford and in the fragmentary and radically inconclusive nature of the ending. Because of its unfinished state and Godwin’s editorial decision to include multiple concluding fragments, The Wrongs of Woman invites readers to compose their own endings. I, like most modern feminist critics, argue that Jemima, Maria, and Maria’s daughter form an alliance and survive, but yet I must also acknowledge that I impose that reading upon the text. Indeed, the text’s accidental incompleteness has invited its readers to “finish” Wollstonecraft’s story ever since Godwin’s initial recovery of the novel in 1798. Godwin’s editorial orchestration encourages the reader to choose the final fragmentary conclusion by positioning it where readers expect to find an ending. Throughout the Memoirs as well as the Posthumous Works, Godwin supports his interpretation of


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Wollstonecraft as a “worshipper of domestic life”; he stresses her maternal solicitude for her daughter Fanny, as well as her romantic passion for first Imlay and later himself. He further encourages us to read “Maria Venables” as a biographical reflection of the author (and heroine of the Memoirs) by placing Wollstonecraft’s “Lessons for Children” immediately after the conclusion of The Wrongs of Woman in the first volume of the Posthumous Works. Indeed, he precedes the “Lessons”, with a short “Advertisement” in which he explicitly confounds Wollstonecraft and Fanny with Maria and her unnamed daughter, noting a similarity “between the affectionate and pathetic manner in which Maria Venables addresses her infant, in The Wrongs of Woman; and the agonizing and painful statement with which the author originally bequeathed these papers, as a legacy for the benefit of her child” (Posthumous Works 1: 173–4). In choosing the fragment in which Maria survives her suicide attempt, Godwin evokes his readers’ awareness of Wollstonecraft’s own unsuccessful attempts in taking her own life, further stressing the biographical links between Maria Venables and the heroine of the Memoirs: “Mary Wollstonecraft”. Significantly, Godwin elides biographical evidence that might cause readers to associate Wollstonecraft with Jemima, the rational pragmatist, rather than Maria, the romantic sentimentalist. He fails to detail only one significant event of Wollstonecraft’s life. In 1784, Wollstonecraft encouraged her mentally fragile sister Eliza to abandon an abusive husband; Wollstonecraft accompanied Eliza into her social exile, acting as both nurse and liaison with husband and family. By suppressing her active role in Eliza’s flight from marriage, Godwin leaves Wollstonecraft as the sole “Maria” figure and thus builds upon his image of her as a “worshipper of domestic life” abandoned by Imlay and thus driven to suicide until she finds her “true love”, Godwin himself. Significantly, Wollstonecraft’s Letters to Imlay comprise the majority of the Posthumous Works, and Godwin lauds them as “the offspring of a glowing imagination, and a heart penetrated with the passion it essays to describe” (Posthumous Works, 3: ii). In idealizing her relationship with Imlay, Godwin reinforces his representation of Wollstonecraft as a doomed Romantic genius rather than a proactive survivor intent upon changing social custom; she is both blessed and led astray by an exceptional feminine sensibility. Indeed, Godwin’s rhetorical choices further imply that Wollstonecraft’s greatest works – her most significant offspring – are Fanny and the letters to Imlay, rather than any of her literary progeny.

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Polwhele and Godwin both avoid addressing Wollstonecraft’s complex and often contradictory attitudes toward sexuality, virtue, religion, and political activism by situating her biography into familiar narrative frameworks. Polwhele associates her with mythical “fallen women”; she is a modern-day “Duessa” or “Eve” entreating men (and her women readers) to dangerous sin. For Godwin, she is a philosophical heroine in the tradition of Goethe and Rousseau; she is a “female Werther” and St. Preux’s “Julie”. Tilottama Rajan has argued that Godwin’s heavy-handed editorial work in the Posthumous Works effectively “encrypts” Wollstonecraft even as it “enshrines” her, thus situating her and her work within history and draining it of some of its revolutionary potential (The Supplement of Reading 181).2 However, in proto-feminist treatises published by Mary Hays and Mary Robinson in the years just after Wollstonecraft’s death, we find them attaching alternative “epitaphs” to her “crypt”. In their work there is a concerted effort to re-shape the image of the “female philosopher” in ways that counter Godwin’s representation; each addresses an aspect of Wollstonecraft’s lifework left unexplored by Godwin in his Memoirs. In an Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women, as well as in her own “Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft” (1800), Hays focuses upon the philosophical, political, and social aspects of Wollstonecraft’s legacy and stresses her work as author and social activist. Mary Robinson assumes the mantle of the educational reformer in Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination but more explicitly politicizes Wollstonecraft’s vision. Both authors participate in the generation of a new body of texts that model a radically new vision of British womanhood, and which derive not a little rhetorical energy by both overtly and obliquely evoking the increasingly mythic charge of Wollstonecraft’s life in their imagined narratives of female power. Sexually “fallen” and yet a beloved wife, Wollstonecraft commanded the attention of the reading public as a respected social critic even as she mothered a young daughter. Again and again, Wollstonecraft defies the very model of gendered binary oppositions that lies behind social prescriptions based upon a masculine public sphere and a feminine domestic sphere. Furthermore, her own written statements and personal actions suggest a quickly changing, and perhaps even fluid, model of womanhood. All of Wollstonecraft’s commentators, including her most recent, grapple with her seemingly contradictory attitudes about “virtue and vice”, as well as strictures concerning woman’s “rightful” sphere and work. Wollstonecraft insists upon


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regulated sexuality, companionate marriage, and a dutiful assumption of maternal obligations in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, but she later publicly embraces the role of a “free” woman whose sexual, romantic, and professional choices were determined by a complex combination of both personal morality and desire, rather than by the state or social custom. Finally, Wollstonecraft moves between life and death; she survives the suicidal impulse of the “fallen woman” only to die of childbed fever within the domestic sphere. From the Vindication onward, every fin-de-siècle treatise engages in an extended discussion of the myriad dangers in the public and private spheres, as well as the ways in which their seemingly sacrosanct boundaries bleed into each other. While seduction, prostitution, and poverty lurk outside the boundaries of the home, the private sphere also contains its own threats, including tyrannical husbands and unfulfilled emotional and intellectual aspirations. As I’ve already shown, Wollstonecraft’s 1792 Vindication merely inaugurates her own study of the interrelationship between the public and private spheres; chastity, virtue, and vice; prostitution and marriage. The collective force of Wollstonecraft’s lifework, as well as William Godwin’s problematic representation of her biography and the subsequent anti-Jacobin backlash, all initially fuel proto-feminist opposition to the rise of the domestic heroine and initially increases its commitment to acquiring emancipatory access to better education, employment, and civil law. The life and the work, revisited again and again in the first years of the nineteenth century, provided Wollstonecraft’s fellow writers with a powerful model of forthright public expression, which perhaps derived energy as well as injury from her already vexed and very public sexual reputation. Indeed, the debate over Wollstonecraft’s life made manifest the elastic nature of gender construction. Regardless of their political orientation, all those contributing to the volatile discourse surrounding Wollstonecraft were forced to negotiate the ways in which her life confounds any single model of womanhood. Her premature death and the subsequent maelstrom of public discussion it provokes open a discursive space for sympathetic women writers intent upon taking the opportunity presented by her death to further address the “rights of woman” issue and to insert their voices in the dangerously divisive battle between male biographers and critics. On the one hand, women writers must enter the conversation in order to interrupt discourse intent upon conflating all proto-feminists with Wollstonecraft. On the other hand, it can be argued that in the years immediately following her death they initially embrace

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Wollstonecraft’s radically disruptive persona because in its very contradictions it allows them to continue her critique of female education, sexuality and social custom and thus imagine a new ideal of womanhood. In her “Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft”, published in the Annual Necrology for 1797–1798, Mary Hays immediately addresses the philosopher’s already contested biography. Hays and Wollstonecraft first met one another in 1793 and their friendship lasted until Wollstonecraft’s death in 1797. The two women were avid correspondents and their letters chronicle an exchange of manuscripts, novels, and ideas. Although an intimate acquaintance, Hays carefully crafts her memoirs as an objective account of an exceptional and misunderstood public figure. She notes that Wollstonecraft, as one of the “possessors” of “superior talents”, suffers the fate of all “persons of the finest and most exquisite genius”. Wollstonecraft’s death exalts her to a “dangerous pre-eminence” and she becomes subject to the “exaggerated panegyric” of her admirers, as well as the slander of detractors who dwell upon her “errors” of human frailty and the unique “excesses” which “belong to ardent characters” (411). In sketching out the extreme positions of both Wollstonecraft’s admirers and her detractors, Hays represents herself as of neither camp but instead intent upon delineating the complicated nature of Wollstonecraft’s biography in a moderate and truthful account of her life. Hays casts her subject as one of Wollstonecraft’s own experimental heroines: “Vigorous minds are with difficulty restrained within the trammels of authority; a spirit of enterprise, a passion for experiment, a liberal curiosity, urges them to quit beaten paths, to explore untried ways, to burst the fetters of prescription, and to acquire wisdom by an individual experience” (411). While Hays frequently notes that “strong light and shade” were “blended” into Wollstonecraft’s “character”, she also reminds her readers that “if the excess of certain virtues encroach on the limits of vice, yet faults of this description have generous source” (412). Hays, like many later feminist biographers, begins by arguing that Wollstonecraft’s individual failings finally matter less than the legacy that she leaves behind her. Ironically, it is Hays and not Godwin who stresses Wollstonecraft’s significance as the “Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman”. Whereas Godwin emphasizes Wollstonecraft’s significance as a “woman of feeling”, Hays repeatedly subsumes the personal into the political work: “The efforts of the extraordinary woman whose life we are about to review, were directed to the emancipation of


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her own sex” (412). Although she goes on to reiterate the same biographical information found in Godwin – the brutality of Wollstonecraft’s father, the negligence of her mother, her efforts to establish independence through a series of unfulfilling “feminine” careers, as well as her early experience with the unrewarding hack work of the professional writer – Hays sees Wollstonecraft’s life experience as most significant to the development of the writer rather than the woman. Consequently, Hays notes the way in which Wollstonecraft’s greatest work, the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, arises out of her early and unsatisfying professional writing as surely as it emerges from the conditions of her personal life: “A just confidence in her own talents, increased probably by the success of [. . .] publication, now induced her to essay her strength on a subject that affected her still more; a subject which she had keenly felt, on which she had deeply meditated, which her sex, her situation, all the circumstances of her life, irresistibly led her to consider” (422). Although Hays certainly represents Wollstonecraft as an exceptional talent, she also suggests that the author merely puts into language what all women know: “There are few situations in which a woman of cultivated understanding has not occasion to observe and deplore, the systematic vassalage, the peculiar disadvantages, civil and social, to which she is subjected, even in the most polished societies, on the account of her sex” (422). Indeed, Hays constructs a genealogy of social critics, noting Catherine Macaulay’s influence upon Wollstonecraft, even as she implicitly positions herself as Wollstonecraft’s descendant. She subsumes all of their work into a larger historical tide impervious to either the “blind enthusiasm” of unthinking admirers or the “malignant envy” of their detractors. Hays employs a metaphor of natural generation to represent the effect of the Vindication, and by extension Macaulay’s earlier Treatise on Education, as well as her own work: “seeds were scattered that promised, when the ferment had subsided, a rich and abundant harvest” (423). At the end of her “Memoirs” Hays returns to the nature of Wollstonecraft’s legacy, but the body of her memorial necessarily addresses particularly disturbing aspects of Godwin’s biography. In addition to the obvious subject of Wollstonecraft’s sexuality, Hays repeatedly returns to the question of her religious sentiments. Although Hays acknowledges Wollstonecraft’s rejection of institutional religion, she represents her subject as imbued with a “natural” Christianity: “Possessing in an exalted degree those devotional affections so congenial to ardent and tender natures, her religion, for she laid no stress on creeds and forms, was a sentiment of humility,

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reverence, and love [. . .] she adored the Creator in the temple of the universe” (416). Godwin’s description of Wollstonecraft’s death had attracted particularly virulent attention in the anti-Jacobin press because of his triumphant account of a deathbed scene unmarred by a “superstitious” turn toward the comforts of religion: “during her whole illness, not one word of a religious cast fell from her lips” (Memoirs 270). Drawing upon her own authority as one of Wollstonecraft’s nurses, Hays explicitly rewrites Wollstonecraft’s deathbed scene as one of religious surety. According to Hays, “The religious sentiments she had imbibed in her youth, had in them no terrors that could discompose a dying hour; her imagination had embodied images of visionary perfection, giving rise to affections in which her sensibility delighted to indulge” (457). Wollstonecraft’s unorthodox sexual behavior gives Hays far more pause and she does not justify her heroine’s decision to take Gilbert Imlay as a lover, nor does she represent it as a form of either social or political critique. Indeed, although Hays’s Wollstonecraft appears as an “exceptional woman” throughout most of the text, in the author’s representation of her “heroine’s” interactions with Imlay, Wollstonecraft makes a cameo appearance as a rather conventional “fallen woman”. Indeed, in Hays’s account of the affair between Imlay and Wollstonecraft, the woman who loves Imlay hardly resembles the author of the Vindication, published the year before they begin their affair. The woman portrayed by Hays surely could not have read the Vindication, let alone written it. “[Wollstonecraft],” Hays insists, “had yet to learn that sensuality hardens the heart, blasts its best affections, absorbs it in selfish gratification, rendering it callous to every sentiment of justice and humanity” (438). Hays’s characterization of Imlay casts him in the role of a Lovelace-like seducer. His failure to respond to Wollstonecraft’s persuasive employment of language in A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark marks him as without sufficient mind or heart to be worthy of Wollstonecraft’s love. In her own turn, Wollstonecraft appears as “victim” to a dangerous sensibility: “Hope, a thousand times frustrated, at length seemed extinguished; fortitude was exhausted by suffering; the tone of her mind destroyed (as she believed) for ever. Once more she resolved to die. She addressed on her knees the man to whose libertine habits she had become a victim” (447). Hays lingers upon her heroine’s experience as a debased and selfabasing “fallen woman”; Wollstonecraft appears on her knees before Imlay and then struggling in the waters of the Thames. But Hays


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dwells upon Wollstonecraft’s “fall” only to celebrate her ascension: “However weakened by her sorrows, her active spirit had not suffered itself, as in ordinary cases, to be engrossed by them: this capacity of exertion, in seasons of distress and difficulty, affords perhaps the strongest characteristic of a superior mind. Her letters from Norway had been written and prepared for the press, and a comedy sketched, the serious incidents of which turn upon her own story within the last ten months, during which she had twice been prompted to suicide” (452). Significantly, Hays stresses Wollstonecraft’s return to authorship in the wake of Imlay’s desertion and her own suicidal desperation. Furthermore, she emphasizes Wollstonecraft’s ability to transform personal experience into textual representation, particularly the transformation of “tragedy” into “comedy”.3 Although Hays, like Godwin, idealizes the final months of Wollstonecraft’s life and her immersion within the domestic sphere, she continues to focus upon the literary production which emanated from it: “happy in the bosom of domestic peace, her heart once more expanded itself, her genius resumed its tone and vigour” (455). Hays goes on to carefully detail Wollstonecraft’s final literary work, paying particular attention to The Wrongs of Woman and its representation of Jemima rather than to Maria: “the most finished part of the work, the ‘Story of Jemima’, an abandoned female infant, trained up through oppression and calamity, to vice and infamy, is conceived and executed with originality and spirit” (457). Hays’s focus upon Jemima is consistent with her intentional conflating of “Wollstonecraft’s” biography with the narrative of the “harlot’s progress”, rather than that of the philosophical heroine. Indeed, Hays takes the opportunity of Wollstonecraft’s memorial to reiterate arguments she makes on behalf of the sexual transgressor in her own prose treatise of 1798, as well as in The Victim of Prejudice (1799), a novel discussed in the next chapter. In an interesting rhetorical construction, Hays links the fate of the respectable unmarried woman to that of the “fallen woman”, typically conceived of as antithetical to one another: Those who, without guilt or imprudence, find themselves excluded from the common solace of their species, will be led to consider the reasonableness of this privation, of which its injustice tends to aggravate its importance. From the expensive habits of society, and its consequent profligacy, a large proportion of women are destined to celibacy, while their importance, their establishment, their

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pleasure, and their respectability, are (with few exceptions) connected with marriage. Woe be it to these victims of vice or superstition; if, too ingenuous for habitual hypocrisy, they cannot stifle in the bottom of their hearts those feelings which should constitute their happiness and their glory [. . .] in submitting to their destiny they rarely escape insult; in overstepping the bounds prescribed to them, by a single error, they become involved in a labyrinth of perplexity and distress. In vain may reflection enable them to contemn distinction, that, confounding truth and morals, poison virtue at its source: overwhelmed by a torrent of contumely and reproach, a host of foes encompass their path, exaggerate their weakness, distort their principles, misrepresent their actions, and, with deadly malice or merciless zeal, seek to drive them from the haunts of civil life. (454–5) I quote this lengthy and obscure passage at length because of the way in which it conflates the experience of the “celibate” woman with that of the “fallen”, both are “excluded from the common solace of their species” and both (it could be argued) are beset by “a host of foes” intent upon keeping them immured in a “labyrinth of perplexity and distress”. Indeed, the difference between them seems to be that the “fallen woman” is “too ingenuous for habitual hypocrisy” and thus pays a heavier social price than the celibate unmarried woman trapped in an equally liminal and degraded position, but less willing to brave public censure for “happiness” and “glory”. Hays thus insists upon the ways in which the “fallen woman” and the “spinster” necessarily operate outside of an idealized domestic sphere. I would suggest that in her linkage of these two female figures Hays foreshadows later nineteenth-century representations of feminized social reform dependent upon a sisterhood forged between the “pure” and the “fallen”. After presenting her readers with an image of the “celibate” woman and the sexual transgressor caught within a “labyrinth of perplexity and distress”, Hays concludes her essay with a celebration of Wollstonecraft’s complicated and contradictory history. She paints a final portrait of her “heroine” as a rising woman: “An obscure individual, unknown and unsupported, she raised herself by her own exertions to an eminence that excited, in an extraordinary degree, public attention, and afforded her celebrity extending beyond the limits of the country that gave her birth” (458). Hays stresses Wollstonecraft’s Romantic synthesis of “contrary” states. An “obscure individual” who became a celebrity, Wollstonecraft possessed both


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“feminine sensibility and tenderness” as well as “masculine strength and fortitude”. Hays goes on to argue further: “With an unconquerable propensity to individual attachment, which, concentrating its feelings, has a tendency to narrow the heart, her’s cherished the most expanded philanthropy, and glowed with the warmest benevolence. She thought and felt on a comprehensive scale” (458). After evoking the unique power of Wollstonecraft as both woman and writer, Hays turns to her reader with a question: “Her own sex have lost, in the premature fate of this extraordinary woman, an able champion; yet she has not laboured in vain: the spirit of reform is silently pursuing its course. Who can mark its limits?” (459). Although Hays emphasizes here the irrevocable progress of change, the interrogative structure of her sentence also seeks from the reader a defiant rejection of those who were seeking to “limit” the “spirit of reform” at the turn of the nineteenth century. Working within the tradition of Wollstonecraft and Godwin, Mary Hays takes up the role of “champion” in her own Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women. Like Wollstonecraft’s Vindication, the Appeal ranges over many topics; indeed, Hays revisits many of the same lessons as those found in the 1792 essay but recasts them in the discourse of radical dissenting Christianity. In a lengthy preface, Hays informs her readers that the Appeal was ready for publication in the early 1790s but that the publication of other works on the subject of woman’s education, particularly Wollstonecraft’s Vindication, led her to suppress it. While acknowledging the “genius” of the 1792 essay, as well as that of its author, Hays also suggests that it suffers from an “error but too commonly attendant on genius; who seldom deigns, by managing, and sympathizing with, the prejudices of mankind, to make new and unexpected truths palatable to common minds” (e). Hays, on the other hand, offers a mere “sketch” to her readers and through “gentle means and by degrees” recommends a “gradual reformation” (f). Although framed as a “gentle appeal” in which she will plead the “cause of men” as much as that of women, Hays’s text does not treat her male readers very kindly; indeed, one could argue that the Appeal is far more confrontational than the Vindication. Under the guise of Christian “gentleness” and forbearance, Hays upbraids the reader for a self-interested reliance upon custom and prejudice. In her own explicit employment of “philosophical” language, she implicitly insists that her male readers (supposedly imbued with an appropriately masculine and British love of truth and liberty) question their irrational assumptions about female “inferiority”, even as she continually

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asserts women’s rights to “Liberty, – rational liberty” (105). She exhorts her male readers to “submit to candid and cool examination some simple though unacknowledged truths, which if seriously taken into consideration, might have a tendency to promote the equality, and the consequent peace and happiness of the sexes” (v). Even as Hays represents England as the home of “liberty”, she invokes the specter of riot and unrest by alluding to the tribunals of Revolutionary France in her description of the woman writer’s relationship to her readers: “In Britain then, in the favourite abode of liberty, shall the daughter of the ‘sea-girt isle’ tremble to appear before the tribunal of her brethren?” (iii). Although Hays evokes an image of herself as arrayed in “the humble garb of a petitioner” and not that of an “Amazon”, her measured language inevitably reaches a crescendo with impassioned and pointed prose: “But shall the time never come – Ah! surely it must – when the mysterious veil formed by law, by prejudice, and by precedent, shall be rent asunder, – when Justice herself shall appear in all the beauty of simplicity, – when her fetters shall be unbound, – and when unawed by clamour she shall say to the listening world – Before all these were, I was” (100). And Hays, although sometimes deferential, rarely conciliates her readers, addressing them as “Ye abetters of hypocrisy! ye self-imposers! ye slaves to surface!” (123). She also repeatedly questions their own putative possession of a variety of masculine virtues, including reason and bravery. “[C]ome forth and look Reason boldly in the face”, she goads. “To be sure this requires some resolution, and most of you would rather face a cannon, or see a spectre; but take courage, for though she will speak some dreadful truths to your consciences, yet you must agree at last, if you bring not the fiend Prejudice in your train” (29–30). In conflating her own prose voice with that of “Reason” (both “speak dreadful truths”), Hays establishes a position of sublime rhetorical authority even as she occasionally assuages the egos of her male readers with Godwinian assurance, for once they do apply their “reason” they will invariably “agree at last”. Hays extends Wollstonecraft’s argument in the Vindication and The Wrongs of Woman in some significant ways. She insists that social reform must go beyond education and into the halls of political power and explicitly chastens men for creating unjust laws – like coverture – which act to consolidate masculine power rather than serve either an abstract principle of justice or the women whom the law ostensibly protects. She also calls for the reform of the legal system, insisting that women need to be “protected by explicit and indisputable laws, from


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insult and oppression” (121). Hays also recognizes that repressive “laws” are made in private homes as well as the courts. She mounts a simultaneous assault on the intertwined workings of public and private regulation and rejects informal social contracts predicated on the notion that chivalrous men will always act in the best interests of defenseless women. Hays points out that such “laws” are based upon the false premise that all women are young and beautiful: In forming the laws by which women are governed, and in the arbitrary opinions which have been taken up and encouraged with regard to them, and which have nailed the fetters of the law down, or supplied their place where they have been entirely silent; have not men in forming these and in continuing them, consulted more their own conveniency, comfort, and dignity, as far as their judgment and foresight served them, than that of women; though they are as nearly concerned, and much more likely to be sufferers, as having no hand in forming them? (158–9) Hays traces the economic and political self-interest which lies behind the ideological positions of men who dictate social rules to women as well as the ways in which supposedly objective social and legal relationships are inevitably sexualized by male desire for both beautiful young women and absolute power. In her analysis of male privilege, Hays continues Wollstonecraft’s project by embarking upon an extended critique of the emphasis placed upon chastity for women. Hays makes claims for an “innate” female modesty bestowed upon women by a maternal Nature: “Nature having for her own wise purposes, [. . .] placed this trust [the bearing of children] in [women’s] virtue; she, ever in unison with herself and with reason, forms them – though with exceptions – modest from the beginning. Or in other and more explicit words – modesty is innate in a greater degree in women than in men” (231). Hays envisions a utopian union between Nature and Reason – both gendered as female throughout the text – and human women endowed with the god-like ability to give birth. After constructing an evocative model of feminine power, the author adds a caveat to her representation of an inevitably victorious female modesty. She fears that in her idealistic elevation of chastity, she might “fuel” the sexual double standard. Since men manipulate strictures about female modesty for their own “licentious” purposes, they contaminate the “rational” rule of law with animalistic masculine desire. Hays critiques social mores that consign unchaste

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women to perennial exile; it is an exile that subsequently forces them into the further service of male desire. Breaking from her intended audience, “. . . the Men of Great Britain . . .”, she implores her (female) reader to attend to that body of their sex who have “fallen victims to vice – Or rather let me say to the arts of men; who, by an absurdity of conduct which no good system of morality can possibly countenance, talk indeed of female virtue, and seem even by their laws, to consider it as the chief bond of society; yet never scruple to break this bond, when instigated by a passion” (234). Virtuous women should reach out to the “penitent”; they are “much fitter for such a task, than men – feeble advocates, alas! and dangerous patrons, for returning virtue” (277–8). As the “patrons” of prostitutes, men make poor reformers, while women – once they recognize their affinity with their “unfortunate sisters” – are most suited to such work. Although only obliquely, Hays seems to suggest that, like Wollstonecraft, she believes that virtue resides in the soul rather than the body. And, like women social reformers working later in the century, she argues that women are the best candidates for rescue work. Hays’s text owes an enormous debt to Wollstonecraft’s earlier work. Indeed, at one point in the Appeal, she pays homage to the 1792 essay even as she extends its argument. In a discussion of “What Women Are”, Hays notes that “chained and blindfolded as [women] most certainly are, with respect to their own rights; – they know, – they feel conscious – of capability of greater degrees of perfection, than they are permitted to arrive at. Yet they see – there is not an individual among them, who does not at times see, – and feel too with keenest anguish, – that mind, as has been finely said, is of no sex” (104). Although Hays acknowledges Wollstonecraft’s critique of Rousseau in the above passage, she (unlike Wollstonecraft in the Vindication) insists that all women understand that they are capable of “perfection”.4 Indeed, she argues that they both “see” and “feel” a power that rises above even the most insistent attempts to gender their mind through education and socialization. Although Hays’s treatise represents itself as an “appeal” to men, it finally works rather subversively as a text addressed to women. Mary Robinson, however, explicitly dismisses male readers in her Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination. Like Wollstonecraft and Hays, Robinson grounds her argument upon an assertion that women have been deprived of their rightful place as the equals of men. Robinson’s rhetorical position is overtly inflammatory; she openly declares herself to be of the Wollstonecraft “school”. She


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goes on to specify her own approach to the “rights of woman” debate; she intends to address the ways in which both “universal knowledge” and “true happiness” are “benumbed and blighted” by the “cruelties of mental subordination” (2). Like Hays, Robinson assumes an intelligent female reader but she wastes no time in respectful obeisance to male superiority: “I shall remind my enlightened country-women that they are not the mere appendages of domestic life, but the partners, the equal associates of man: and, where they excel in intellectual powers, they are no less capable of all that prejudice and custom have united in attributing, exclusively, to the thinking faculties of man” (3). Robinson continually contests the assumption (propagated even by Wollstonecraft and Hays) that women are the “weaker sex”. Indeed, she suggests that social custom and conditioning conspire to deprive women of an awareness of the power that they already possess. In the body of the essay she focuses upon women’s inability to protect themselves in a society where they are insistently figured as the “defenseless sex” (4) and deprived of “the first of Nature’s rights, self preservation” (9). In response to the plight of the “insulted woman”, Robinson’s Letter initially seems to call for vengeance delivered by women themselves. While men are allowed to kill those who “defraud” them (5), women must suffer in silence, or else be labeled “maniacs” or “murderers” (25–6). In order to make her point most effectively, Robinson encourages her reader to imagine herself in the position of the “fallen woman”: custom says, you must be free from error; you must possess an unsullied fame: yet, if a slanderer, or a libertine, even by the most unpardonable falsehoods, deprive you of either reputation or repose, you have no remedy. He is received in the most fastidious societies, in the cabinets of nobles, at the toilettes of coquets and prudes, while you must bear your load of obloquy, and sink beneath the uniting efforts of calumny, ridicule, and malevolence. (5–6, my emphasis) Unlike Mary Hays or Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792, Mary Robinson actually writes from the position of the “sexualized” and suspect woman. Although a well-respected professional actress and writer, Robinson was most infamously known as one of the Prince Regent’s many mistresses; furthermore, her determined efforts to collect promised money from him subjected her to public scorn. Her personal

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history perhaps accounts for the Letter’s insistent focus on dismantling the machinery of the double standard.5 Robinson insistently places the responsibility of reforming social mores squarely upon women: “every good which cements the bonds of civilized society, originates wholly in the forbearance, and conscientiousness of women” (87). And finally, she turns from her desire for “vengeance” through violent action to reform through narrative: “O! my unenlightened country-women! read, and profit, by the admonition of Reason. Shake off the trifling, glittering shackles, which debase you” (93). To facilitate such reading she concludes her essay with a list of texts by British “women of genius” meant to “EXCITE EMULATION” in her readers. Robinson’s list includes novelists and poets, but also women writing “Physical and Metaphysical Disquisitions” as well as scholars of “Biology” and the “Greek and Hebrew Classics” (98–104). And, with a nod to Wollstonecraft’s Vindication, she calls upon mothers to educate their daughters properly: “Let your daughters be liberally, classically, philosophically, and usefully educated; let them speak and write their opinions freely; let them read and think like rational creatures” (94).6 Indeed, among Robinson’s “List of British Female Literary Characters” we find “Mrs. Wolstonecraft [sic]” noted as the author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Novels, Philosophical Disquisitions, Travels, &c.” as well as Miss Hayes [sic], the author of “Novels” and “Philosophical and Metaphysical Disquisitions”.7 Throughout the Letter Robinson constructs her own narrative of female power dependent upon reading women’s writing and learning women’s history: “WOMAN is a thinking and an enlightened being! We have seen a Wollstonecraft, a Macaulay, a Sévigné; and many others, now living, who embellish the sphere of literary splendour, with genius of the first order” (12). Unlike Wollstonecraft and Hays, Robinson contends that “woman” is “as she should be”; the ideal British woman already exists – although she might be unrecognized. Robinson supports her assertions about female strength through historical argument; she endlessly enumerates instances both quotidian and sublime – from Welsh peasant women to Elizabeth I – where women prove themselves capable of great mental, physical, and even political strength. And, in a thorough survey of women’s writing from antiquity, she stresses their dominance in the literary marketplace as well. Indeed, Robinson argues that while British women have been pushed out of some realms of public discourse (particularly in politics and religion) they responded by “taking up the pen”: “The


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embargo upon words, the enforcement of tacit submission, has been productive of consequences highly honorable to the women of the present age. Since the sex have been condemned for exercising the power of speech, they have successfully taken up the pen: and their writings exemplify both energy of mind, and capability of acquiring the most extensive knowledge” (90). Indeed, Robinson’s vision of women’s education is far loftier than that proposed by either Wollstonecraft or Hays and looks forward to late-century activism. “Had fortune enabled me, I would build an UNIVERSITY OF WOMEN” (92), she proclaims. In lieu of a formal education, Robinson’s Letter encourages her audience to re-educate themselves through the reading of women’s literature. In many ways, then, Robinson’s own “pedagogical” theory resembles that outlined by Wollstonecraft in her preface to The Wrongs of Woman. Throughout the Letter, Robinson points her readers to possible models of feminine power. The “fallen woman” looms particularly large throughout her text both because it is the figure with whom she is most dangerously conflated and because the sexually transgressive woman represents both the most degraded subject position as well as the most potentially emancipatory. Robinson’s Letter to the Women of England, like Wollstonecraft’s 1798 novel, Mary Hays’s Victim of Prejudice and the novels of Amelia Opie, which I discuss at length over the next two chapters, explicitly challenge their readers by positioning them as “fallen” heroines. All of their texts ask the woman reader to “imagine” the consequences of being “driven from society; deserted by her kindred; scoffed at by the world; exposed to poverty; assailed by malice; and consigned to scorn” (Letter to the Women of England 7), thus compelling her into the subject position of the necessary social critic: the sexualized heroine.

2 “To think, to decide, and to act”: Radical Fictions of Transgression and Vindication

Like Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman, Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice (1799) and Amelia Opie’s Father and Daughter (1801) are experimental fictions that require the reader’s identification with a sexualized heroine marked as transgressive and persecuted by society. Indeed, as I suggest in the first chapter, Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman models the rebellious and outspoken Romantic heroine I am delineating. In many ways, Maria Venables represents an extreme of the type; she leaves her husband, takes a lover, and presents her case for divorce to a court of law. Her suit fails, but it is a noble failure. Furthermore, as Tilottama Rajan has taught us to recognize, Wollstonecraft’s unfinished narrative invites its readers to “complete the text by unfolding a truth it does not yet contain” (“Wollstonecraft and Godwin” 223). As I note in the Coda to Chapter 1, The Wrongs of Woman was published with six different endings, all drawn from the author’s working notes, most of which end with the heroine’s death but one of which ends with her and Jemima co-mothering Maria’s long lost daughter. Rajan argues for the potent political power of the unfinished text; it invites its readers to move beyond the page and enact its revolutionary potential in the “real” world outside of the book. I would argue that in both its deliberate use of embedded tales and dialogic exchanges between characters, as well as in its accidental but radical incompleteness, Wollstonecraft’s novel stands as a model of disruptive discourse. It undoubtedly lies behind both The Victim of Prejudice and Father and Daughter. Certainly, all three novelists both allude to and reject conventional narratives of “the harlot’s progress”. It is in their double movement of recognition and revision that we find their most effective textual interruptions. In each novel the narrative begins with a moment of compromising 76

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crisis for an already “fallen” heroine – Maria’s story originates from a madhouse, The Victim of Prejudice’s Mary Raymond composes her memoirs in debtor’s prison, and Agnes Fitzhenry and her child wander through a stormy night in Father and Daughter – the novels then continue by disrupting the expected “order” of the “story” through analepse (flashback) and prolepse (flashforward), as well as by continually interrupting the heroine’s tale with ancillary embedded narratives which support the worldview of the main character. I would suggest, however, that the use of analepse is most significant here. In beginning their narratives after the heroine has “fallen” out of grace with society, Wollstonecraft, Hays, and Opie reject the most familiar emplotment of sexual transgression. As we have seen in the work of William Hogarth and Augustus Egg, the “harlot’s progress” typically moves in a linear manner, from innocence to experience to death. Such a narrative traces the “fallen woman’s” irrevocable descent into vice, even as it relies upon the reader’s nostalgic recollection of her lost virtue. In the novels of Wollstonecraft, Hays, and Opie, however, the reader’s sympathy for the heroine – appealed to in early scenes that invite the reader’s identification with her plight – must prevail in spite of sexual transgression in her past. The narrative that follows then exonerates her from blame by tracing the “wrongs” visited upon her, rather than detailing the “wrongs” she commits. This is true of even Opie’s Father and Daughter, which does employ a plot element common to more conventional narratives of the “harlot’s progress”. The novel opens with the narrator’s evocation of a familiar scene: “The night was dark – the wind blew keenly over the frozen and rugged heath, when Agnes, pressing her moaning child to her bosom, was travelling on foot to her father’s habitation. ‘Would to God I had never left it’ she exclaimed, as home and all its enjoyments rose in fancy to her view. And I think my readers will be ready to join in the exclamation, when they hear the poor wanderer’s history” (428). But even as Opie’s narrator evokes the image of the pathetic “wandering” woman familiar to readers from sundry novels, plays, and newspaper accounts, she simultaneously sets the stage for Agnes’s “return” to respectability, rather than a further “fall” into vice.1 As the first two paragraphs make clear, Agnes is returning to her “father’s habitation”. The sympathetic – if somewhat intrusive – narrator boldly states her narrative design: “It is not my intention to follow Agnes through the succession of mortifications, embarrassments, temptations, and struggles, which preceded her undoing” (431). And indeed, Opie’s narrator only briefly details Agnes’s past, instead

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focusing upon her return to respectability and reintegration into the community. The sexually transgressive protagonists of Wollstonecraft, Hays, and Opie are heroic and proactive, rather than fallen and passive. In the historic space between Hogarth and Egg, the putatively “fallen” woman boldly looks out of the narrative frame and tells her own story. In these radical fictions we find first-person point-of-view as well as instances of embedded first- person narration in the form of recounted memoirs and letters. The sexually transgressive Romantic heroine may be socially outcast but she is a powerful and persuasive storyteller, intent upon finding sympathetic auditors to listen to her tale. All three novels emphasize the transformative power of narrative itself; alternative storytelling reveals truths about male privilege and female subjection. In part, the richness of these narratives derives from their indebtedness to an array of literary texts that offer other outspoken and sexually transgressive heroines. As we have already seen, Wollstonecraft rejects Richardson’s formulation of feminine honor in Clarissa and thereby constructs a proactive “anti-Clarissa”. While Richardson’s Clarissa and the biblical Mary Magdalene number among the sexualized Romantic heroine’s literary predecessors, I would also suggest less obvious examples as well. Certainly George Lillo’s prostituted Millwood in The London Merchant influenced all of the radical women writers intent upon interrupting the “harlot’s progress”. Millwood pairs a defiant manipulation of the men who have seduced her with a proto-feminist critique of seduction and prostitution: “Women, by whom you are, the source of joy, / With cruel arts you labor to destroy. / A thousand ways our ruin you pursue, / Yet blame in us those arts first taught by you” (The London Merchant IV.ii). She ends the speech asserting: “To right their sex’s wrongs devote their mind, / And future Millwoods prove, to plague mankind!” In a letter to William Godwin, Wollstonecraft mentions the 1796 production of Lillo’s play, in which Sarah Siddons played the role of Millwood, while Mary Robinson explicitly invokes the figure in a description of the tragic fate of seduced women in her Letter to the Women of England: Man first degrades, and then deserts her. Yet, if driven by famine, insult, shame, and persecution, she rushes forth like the wolf for prey; if, like Milwood [sic], she finds it “necessary to be rich” in this sordid, selfish world, she is shunned, abhorred, condemned to the very lowest scenes of debasement; to exist in misery, or to perish


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unlamented. [. . .] she rushes into the arms of death, as her last, her only asylum from the monsters who have destroyed her. (81–2) There are further allusions to Millwood in both The Wrongs of Woman and The Victim of Prejudice.2 And while Lillo’s character tends to be directly linked to the more culpable of “fallen women” – to Jemima and Mary Raymond’s mother – Millwood’s experience is also generalized to the more “virtuous” of sexualized heroines. Other outspoken literary predecessors evoked by these authors include Charles-Louis Montesquieu’s Roxana and John Dryden’s Sigismunda. George Venables responds to Maria’s “declaration of independence” by mockingly referring to her as his “fair Roxana” (The Wrongs of Woman 116). It seems likely that the “Roxana” referred to here is the rebellious harem wife of Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes. But as Maximillian Novak points out in a discussion of Daniel Defoe’s Roxana, the “name Roxana or Roxolana suggested a type of woman [. . .] who engages in a defense of sexual liberty [. . .] Many of these elements appear in the Roxana of Knolles as well as in the Roxana of Lee’s Rival Queens, in Racine’s Bazajet, and even in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, where the slave girl Roxana revolts against the restraints of the harem in the name of liberty” (116). Maria is also linked to Dryden’s rebellious daughter in the fable “Sigismunda and Guiscardo”. Sigismunda, a widowed but youthful princess, defies her father in order to marry her squire lover. When her father discovers their secret marriage, he has Guiscardo killed. The princess then requests the same fate, but boldly and without shame. She self-consciously assumes the “Heroine’s” place: “. . . she not as Women use, / Her Fault by common Frailty would excuse; / But boldly justifi’d her Innocence, / And while the Fact was own’d, deny’d th’Offence” (384–7). Even as the sexually transgressive heroine “justifies her innocence”, however, all three of these novels manifest a marked awareness of the difficulty in narrating stories of sexual danger, seduction, rape, and persecution. All carefully re-plot the “harlot’s progress” by drawing upon mediating literary conventions and codes. For example, as I discussed in the first chapter, the opening scene of The Wrongs of Woman borrows liberally from Gothic and Sentimental novels. But Maria Venables survives her immersion in the sublime, at least in part, because she has been provided with an education that fortifies her in times of trial. She receives this education from an enlightened uncle, who provides her with reading material and elevated conversation; consequently Maria seeks out the joys of nature and believes in the

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worth of her own opinions. Wollstonecraft constructs Maria’s education at least partly upon the tenets she had outlined in her own prose works, including A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, but she also alludes to the precepts and writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Godwin. Hays and Opie also draw from the same body of texts, as well as from novels of education written by Elizabeth Inchbald, Charlotte Smith, and other late eighteenth-century authors. Indeed, all three radical fictions represent their heroines as ideal British women in spite of their sexual transgressions; they are well-educated and rational beings, possessing innate modesty, intellectual curiosity, and strength of purpose. In her Appeal to the Men of Great Britain, Mary Hays had attacked the pervasive double standard that punishes women for sexual transgression but allows men to continue their sexual activities unabated. Hays, like her close friend Mary Wollstonecraft, also employed the genre of the novel to chronicle the dangers of unregulated masculine “tyranny” and its consequences for the women of England. In The Victim of Prejudice, published just one year after her feminist treatise, Hays delineates the “mischiefs which arise from too-great stress laid on the reputation for chastity in woman” when men – arbiters of the social and legal systems which enforce such mores – simultaneously “indulge” their “voluptuousness” (2). Hays’s fictional treatment of this issue takes the form of an autobiography written from the heroine’s prison cell. Mary Raymond addresses her narrative to an unknown “fellow sufferer”: another “victim of despotism, oppression, or error” (3). The first-person narrative subsequently employs flashback to chronicle her persecution by an “unjust” society. The illegitimate daughter of a prostitute convicted and executed for murder, Mary loses a beloved guardian and is betrayed by her lover. Raped by an unscrupulous lord, marked as “fallen”, and hounded from respectable employment, she finds herself imprisoned for debt through the connivance of her rapist. Yet from her prison cell she continues to assert her “unconquerable spirit, bowed but not broken”. Like Maria and Jemima, Mary recounts a long battle with “the injustice and barbarity of society” (3). But unlike Wollstonecraft’s heroines, Hays’s protagonist remains isolated from other “sufferers”; she offers up the “sheets” which tell her story to an unknown reader. In spite of her physical isolation, her narrative nonetheless resonates with a polysyllabic chorus of voices, for within the pages of Mary’s narrative we find the embedded tales of both her mother and guardian.


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As in The Wrongs of Woman, The Victim of Prejudice opens with a scene of present outlawry only to move backward into the heroine’s idyllic childhood. The adopted prodigy of her “parent, protector, and tutelar deity”, Mr Raymond, Mary shares an education with her wise and benevolent guardian’s paying male students, William and Edmund Pelham. Mary’s educational program combines the best elements from both Rousseau and Locke, but without their prescriptions against educating girls. Mary proudly asserts, “If I found myself foiled by [William’s] superior strength and stature, yet, in courage, in spirit, in dexterity, and resource, he was compelled to acknowledge he had met with no contemptible rival” (9). Although physically adept and intellectually curious, Mary remains most remarkable in her “virtuous sensibility” (25). Mary’s story, then, is not about the acquisition of “true virtue”; indeed, she embodies the ideal British woman envisioned by not only Hays, but by Wollstonecraft and Robinson as well. Hays’s text instead chronicles the conflict between “virtuous simplicity” and the “manners and maxims of the world” (25). Although Mary has been “properly educated”, that education fails her in a world where “a sordid calculation of self-interest [and] a bigotted attachment to forms and semblance” have replaced “the wise government of our inordinate desires [and] a graceful regard to the propriety of our actions” (26). In part, Mary’s education immerses her too thoroughly in an ideal and protected realm; her guardian introduces Mary to the “tribunal” of social mores only after he notices her blossoming sexuality. Mr Raymond, mindful of prejudices against the illegitimate offspring of felons, warns his charge away from William, but initially conceals her parentage: “The beauty, the virtue, the talents, of my child, in the eye of philosophy, are an invaluable dowry; but philosophers are not yet the legislators of mankind. William is destined for the theatre of the world; he will imbibe the contagion of a distempered civilization. Mary must not be contemned by the man she loves” (32). Interestingly, it is not Mary’s sexual desire that is represented as dangerous, but rather her lover’s wavering commitment to their love and his susceptibility to social injunctions against it. In Hays’s text, the metaphors of “pollution” and “contagion”, omnipresent in conventional representations of transgressive female sexuality, particularly later in the nineteenth century, are consistently attached to masculine sexual desire and its perversion by a “distempered civilization”. Furthermore, such “contagion” spreads through conventionally appropriate love relations, as well as the overtly licentious.

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Indeed, the poison of hypocritical social mores first enters Mary’s pastoral childhood alongside her love for William. Mary and William seemingly represent a bucolic ideal of virtuous passion; they are “natural” lovers who are “animated but by one heart and one mind” (11). But as an early scene indicates, Mary’s wholly honorable love and sexual desire for William is necessarily implicated in the same set of false mores which allow Sir Peter Osborne’s licentious exploitation of his power. Passing by the palatial estate of the wealthy nobleman, William spies a bunch of grapes hanging in a greenhouse. William’s “romantic” love – as well as his desire for the “forbidden fruit” – compels Mary to her only deliberately transgressive act. He demands that she prove her love by stealing the “large and tempting cluster of grapes”. And when Mary reminds him that they have been warned against trespassing, William responds with gendered exhortations: “‘You,’ added he, leering slily in my face, ‘like the rest of your weak sex, are timid and spiritless.’” Although Mary recognizes that his taunts are “unkind and petulant”, she complies nonetheless (13). She excuses her transgression by employing the self-sacrificing language of feminine love, the appropriate linguistic mate to William’s emotional blackmail: “it was not for selfish gratification I had subjected myself to hazard and censure, but to serve and oblige my friend. The difficulties and possible mortifications attending the enterprise would but enhance its value; I should prove, at once, my spirit and my affection: the risk, too would be all mine” (13). From the advantage of her jail cell, the narrating Mary looks back upon her youthful error and recognizes its source in an unreasonable allegiance to the “respectable forms of generosity and tenderness” (13–14). Undeniably the “Adam” to Mary’s “Eve”, a serpent-like William exhorts Mary to transgression. Sir Peter catches the young Mary in the act of holding the grapes and demands payment. He, unlike the lovers, understands and exults in the biblical overtones of Mary’s action; he delights in the opportunity of introducing this “daughter of Eve” to the economics of sexuality. Indeed, he appropriates the role of Adam in his assertion of a sexual relationship with Mary: “I must and will have a kiss; and, d—n me! you shall be welcome to all the grapes in the green-house” (14). Although she escapes the forced caresses of Sir Peter during their first encounter, Mary returns to William and Mr Raymond disheveled and distraught nonetheless. In her haste to escape, she grievously injures herself. Hays’s description of the heroine’s physical condition at this point in the text – when she eludes Sir Peter – allows the author to provide the material details of sexual violence later


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elided when Mary is actually raped by him. She describes her condition as follows: “My clothes [were] torn, my hands and arms bruised, scratched, and streaming with blood.” William’s desire for sexual mastery over Mary – displaced onto the grapes – exacts too high a price. Even as she presents her prize, she acknowledges that it is “dearly purchased” (15). The “contagion” of sexual desire also enters the text on a literal level as both Mary and William contract scarlet fever in the aftermath of their encounter with Sir Peter. Throughout the novel, Mary’s battle against exploitative male desire takes place on two different levels: in her seemingly appropriate love for William and in her struggle against her rapist, Sir Peter. Thus, Hays carefully implicates both romantic love and sexual violence in the “contagion” which endangers the heroine. Although Mary initially follows her guardian’s cryptic advice to test William’s love, she eventually comes to see it as “tyranny”: “What tyranny is this? When reason, virtue, nature, sanctify its emotions, why should the heart be controlled? Who will dare control it?” (35). But at the very moment when Mary threatens to rebel against her guardian, Mr Raymond provides her with the necessary conclusion to her formerly ideal philosophical education. He gives Mary the “fatal narrative” of her mother’s life in order to teach her a “material justification” for “controlling” the “heart”. Woven within the sheets of Mary Raymond’s autobiography, the reader finds that of the heroine’s mother, whose own biography both conforms to and yet departs from that of both her daughter and that of the generic “harlot”. Told through another series of letters written from yet another prison cell, the first Mary’s narrative initially appears to convey a conventional warning about the dire consequences of poor education for women. The description of her privileged girlhood could come directly from Wollstonecraft’s Vindication. Mary Raymond’s mother is “educated in the lap of indolence, enervated by pernicious indulgence, fostered in artificial refinements, misled by specious, but false expectations, softened into imbecility, pampered in luxury” (63). Indeed, like Wollstonecraft and other proto-feminist theorists, the first Mary attributes her sexual fall to the failures of her upbringing. The very imagery here seems derived from a Vindication: “In a mind unfortified by principle, modesty is a blossom fragile as lovely” (66). Yet Hays’s representation of the “harlot’s progress” differs significantly from Wollstonecraft’s. Whereas in both a Vindication and The Wrongs of Woman, Wollstonecraft juxtaposes different types of “fallen women” (“frail” middle-class daughters, diseased and

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repentant prostitutes, unapologetic proponents of “free love”), Hays intently chronicles the transformation of a middle-class woman into a syphilitic prostitute. Like Lillo’s Millwood, Mary’s mother turns her own persecution outward. Abandoned by society, she chooses to wreak vengeance rather than succumb to her “despair” (67): I perceived myself the victim of the injustice, of the prejudice, of society, which, by opposing to my return to virtue almost insuperable barriers, had plunged me into irremediable ruin. I grew sullen, desperate, hardened. I felt a malignant joy in retaliating upon mankind a part of the evils which I sustained. [. . .] I became a monster, cruel, relentless, ferocious; and contaminated alike, with a deadly poison, the health and the principles of those unfortunate victims whom, with practised allurements, I entangled in my snares. (66–7) The “contagion” of society – transgressive sexuality, but also the hypocritical mores that prohibit a return to virtue – expresses itself through Mary’s venereal disease. Of course, Mary’s narrative proves the most persuasive argument against the double standard: if men are allowed to seduce women without consequence they will eventually carry the “poison” of venereal disease back into their homes. Or, as Hays figuratively states the case in her “Advertisement” to the novel: “Can the streams run pure while the fountain is polluted?” (2). Yet Hays finally suggests that such “pollution” is not irrevocable. Even Mary, a diseased “monster”, can return to virtue. Like the sexualized heroines of Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman, the process of recounting her “infamous tale” transforms her (62). The reader can chart her transformation because Mr Raymond includes not only her “autobiography”, but also a letter written prior to composing those memoirs. In Mary’s first letter to Mr Raymond, we find the conventional expressions of a guilt-stricken and repentant prostitute: “I am about to expiate my crimes: seek not to avert my fate. In surviving virtue and fame, I have already lived but too long” (61). In the much longer second letter, however, Mary chronicles not only her past but also the self-knowledge she has achieved through narrative: “At this period, I felt suddenly awakened, as it were to a new existence [. . .] I indulged in mournful retrospect; I committed it to paper; while, as my thoughts were methodized, my spirit became serene” (68). As Mary achieves “serenity”, she simultaneously assumes the voice of a social critic. Whereas she had once felt that her sentence of execution was


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just and death a welcome release, her second letter charts a renewed sense of personal worth: “[I] feel, in the moment that life is cut short, dispositions springing and powers expanding, that, permitted to unfold themselves, might yet make reparation to the society I have injured, and on which I have but too well retaliated my wrongs. But it is too late! Law completes the triumph of injustice” (68). Mary’s “reparation” finally consists of the program of education she bequeaths to her child. In the tradition of Wollstonecraft’s Maria, the first Mary composes her narrative with her daughter in mind as its future audience. Even as she asks, “Why should I stain the youthful purity of my unfortunate offspring, into whose hands these sheets may hereafter fall, with the delineation of scenes remembered with soul-sickening abhorrence?” (66), she composes her warning. She must, of course, recount her “infamous tale” in order to warn of the dangers of both an “uncontrolled” heart and a society which would “impose fetters of sex upon mind” (69) and, where necessary, punish transgression with the full extent of its social and legal machinery. Indeed, Mary survives the perusal of her mother’s narrative and benefits from it. Initially, she reads as her mother would have wished: “this first lesson of injustice swelled my heart with indignant agony”. In a world which privileges the “jargon of superstition, the frigid precautions of selfishness, the mask of hypocrisy, and the factitious distinctions of capricious folly: reason is perverted and fettered, and virtue polluted at its source” (71). Mary acknowledges the personal referent of her mother’s “cruel narrative”, and applies its lessons to her own behavior. She refuses William’s proposal of a secret marriage and insists on a long engagement. Unlike the youthful Mary who had “dearly purchased” Sir Peter’s grapes, the older Mary refuses to pay the price exacted against youthful lovers who defy parental prohibition. Her thoughtful refusal reflects the lessons learned from her mother and guardian: “Is passion an impartial judge of the propriety of violating moral sanctions? If, where interest assails us, we suffer our principles to yield, who can tell to what fearful lengths, on lesser occasions, a precedent thus pernicious may lead us!” But the still childish William unsuccessfully repeats the same gendered insults he had used to cajole Mary into stealing the grapes: “You love me not! you never loved me! Pride and fickleness have fortified your heart! It is vain to expect from woman a stability for which sex and nature have incapacitated her!” (78). Hays accompanies her fairly conventional lesson about the rewards of true “virtue” and filial obedience with a rather unexpected plot

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twist. Mary’s parental history is finally represented as unimportant to her virtuous subjectivity; she remains untainted by “contagion” even after reading her mother’s “infamous tale”. The embedded tale of the first Mary’s history does not test her daughter’s virtue, but rather William’s. Mr Raymond and Mary both fear that the “flexible youth” will eventually come to read Mary’s parentage as “a man of the world” (70). In linking William’s acceptance of the social mores which outcast illegitimate children to an immersion in the libertinism which leads to the “ruin” of young women, Hays critiques the intertwined sociopolitical machinery which fuels the double standard. Whereas Mary’s “virtuous sensibility” would seem to inoculate her from her mother’s fate, the dangerously malleable William risks becoming like Mary’s hypocritical and licentious father. Yet the heroine’s life does come to resemble that of her mother. In spite of its steadfast indictment of a “distempered civilization”, Hays’s novel deliberately and with chilling inevitability traces out its victory. In the corrupt world of this text, “education is a fallacious effort, morals an empty theory, and sentiment a delusive dream” (33). Regardless of Mary’s superior education, steadfast courage, and innate virtue, she will be marked as a sexual transgressor as surely as her more culpable mother. In a variation of Jemima’s story, Mary successfully resists the “blandishments” of William (Wrongs of Woman 59) only to suffer a “brutal violation” at the hands of Sir Peter (Victim of Prejudice 117). From her position as narrator, Mary looks back on her life and declares that virtuous conduct is not sufficient protection in a world controlled by unscrupulous and lustful men: “Every subsequent incident of an eventful life has but led the way to new persecutions and new sorrows, against which the purest intentions, the most unconquerable fortitude, the most spotless innocence, have availed me nothing.” In language which evokes her philosophical and physical virginity prior to its violation, she remembers her once optimistic belief in society’s ability to discern her true virtue: “A generous heroism nerved my mind, throbbed in my bosom, glowed on my cheek, a spirit congenial to artless youth, by whom the veil of society, behind which corruption and contradiction lurk, has not been rent” (41). After William’s departure for the continent and her guardian’s death, Mary leaves her rural retreat for London, where, according to Mr Raymond, “connections may be acquired, employment sought, observation avoided, and liberty preserved” (102). But her guardian’s advice does little to prepare Mary for the peculiar dangers encountered by young women. Indeed, the London of this novel evokes the urban


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landscapes of Hogarth, Richardson, and Wollstonecraft. Immediately upon her arrival, Mary falls for the oldest of seduction’s tricks; she places her trust in a “lightly stepping” young woman who offers the heroine a coach ride to one house, only to deliver her to Sir Peter’s London residence. Like Richardson’s Clarissa, Mary becomes the unwilling recipient of licentious wooing.3 In a deft representation of the fine line between romantic courtship and sexual violation, Hays’s portrayal of her “Lovelace”, Sir Peter Osborne, stresses the nobleman’s seemingly unconscious abuse of his superior social and physical power. Even as he imprisons Mary, Sir Peter represents himself as an appropriate suitor. His employment of conventional courtship language is particularly marked: “You are the sovereign of my heart: myself, my house, my fortune, are at your command; the study of my life shall be to invent new pleasures [for you]” (113). He also dismisses Mary’s very real fears of sexual violation as “fancied evils, the fiction of a romantic imagination”. In all of her previous encounters with Sir Peter, Mary had managed to match his linguistic strategies with those of her own. For example, Mary leaves him “abashed” and “hesitating” when he approaches her right after Mr Raymond’s death (106–7). But after eight days as Sir Peter’s prisoner, “anxiety, indignation, grief, and watching” overwhelm Mary’s command over language (114). The narrator conveys the horror of rape through fragmented sentences and dashes until finally language breaks off altogether, and she chooses to represent the unspeakable with a series of asterisks: Deaf to my remonstrances, to my supplications, – regardless of my tears, my rage, my despair, – his callous heart, his furious and uncontrollable vehemence, – Oh! that I could for ever blot from my remembrance, – oh! that I could conceal from myself, – what, rendered desperate, I no longer care to hide from the world! – I suffered a brutal violation. ******** Yet Mary survives her rape and eventually regains rhetorical dominance (116–17). Unlike Clarissa, Hays’s heroine steadfastly rejects Sir Peter’s attempts to displace blame onto his virtuous victim. In response to his exculpatory “messages and entreaties”, Mary finds new strength: “Indignation re-animated my desponding mind, and invigorated my frame, as he proceeded to attribute to my severity and scorn

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the desperate measures into which he had been betrayed” (117). Mary also refuses her rapist’s attempts at financial and social reparation and instead demands “liberty” and “justice” (117). She threatens him with the “tribunal of [her] country” but he counters her with a graphic description of her powerlessness: Who will credit the tale you mean to tell? What testimony or witnesses can you produce that will not make against you? Where are your resources to sustain the vexations and delay of a suit of law, which you wildly threaten? [. . .] Who would support you against my wealth and influence? How would your delicacy shrink from the idea of becoming, in open court, the sport of ribaldry, the theme of obscene jesters? (119) Sir Peter successfully rends not only Mary’s body but also her faith in England’s social and legal system and she never brings suit against her rapist.4 Nonetheless, Mary continually refutes his estimation of both her character and her fate: “[My honour’s] lustre, which you have sought to obscure, will break out, in your despight, from the temporary cloud which envelopes it, with undiminished brightness. My spirit, superior to personal injury, rises above the sense of its wrongs, and utterly contemns you!” (119). In a Vindication, Wollstonecraft had criticized Richardson for investing in Lovelace the power to “steal” Clarissa’s innocence; in The Victim of Prejudice, the raped heroine remains convinced of her “virtue”. “You have afflicted, but you cannot debase me”, she exults. Indeed, Mary overcomes the psychological damage of rape and even attempts to re-enter respectable society. Although Sir Peter’s affinity to Lovelace is scarcely surprising, William Pelham unexpectedly employs the same facile rhetorical devices. With novelistic serendipity, Mary encounters William in her headlong flight from Sir Peter’s house. Their reunion closely resembles Mr Raymond’s own memories of encountering Mary’s mother after many years of mutual “dissipations”. Mary, like her mother before her, “looks wan and haggard, [her] eyes unsettled and frenzied” (121).5 And initially, it appears as though William – unlike Mr Raymond – will manage to interrupt his lover’s solitary and outcast fate. He nurses Mary in the delirious days after the rape. The heroine later recalls her domestic happiness during those weeks in which she and William lived together: “I felt guarded as by a talisman, encompassed in a magic circle, through which neither danger could assail nor sorrow pierce me. Absorbed in the present, that past and the future were, for


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a period, alike forgotten” (122). But her sojourn from history is destroyed, not, as one might expect, by Mary’s narrative of rape and stolen virginity, but by William’s betrayal. Mary’s lover admits to a marriage of convenience and the text explicitly condemns his deliberate act, even as it exonerates the heroine from any “stain” Sir Peter’s rape may have placed upon her. Mary’s lost virginity is never an issue; instead, William begs for redemption. He asks her to become his mistress, because he believes that only she can return him to virtue. Significantly, William’s language throughout this scene echoes Sir Peter’s after the rape; he too had offered to make Mary the “mistress of his heart” (119). And also like Sir Peter, William attempts to bend Mary to his will by stressing her vulnerable outcast status. He too insists that Mary’s own account of her life will be discounted; she is, after all, the “ruined” and illegitimate daughter of an executed criminal (128). But Mary defies William just as she had Sir Peter: “Amidst the destruction of my hopes, the wreck of my fortunes, of my fame, my spirit still triumphs in conscious rectitude; nor would I, intolerable as is the sense of my wrongs and of my griefs, exchange them for all that guilty propriety could bestow” (129). In spite of the twin betrayals of rapists and lovers, Mary remains a steadfast proponent of her own virtue. Hays’s heroine survives her battles with both men and she emerges with the conviction of her own principles. It is her struggle with society that ultimately compromises her hitherto unflagging faith in her personal agency. The most “fatal” betrayal is finally – just as Sir Peter and William had predicted – society’s unwillingness to listen to her narrative of “wrongs” and exonerate her. The rest of the novel traces Mary’s unsuccessful attempts to re-enter respectable society. Like the mysterious Juliet in Frances Burney’s The Wanderer, Mary’s lack of references stand in the way of successful employment. Without fail her efforts are thwarted as she moves down through the available professions for women: governess, companion, clerk, and servant. The most significant factor in Mary’s unsuccessful quest for even “the bare means of subsistence” is her loss of narrative power (141). She reveals her past to one prospective female employer only to go unbelieved, while her silence in yet another case results in her losing a potentially redemptive friendship. Pursued by rumors spread by both Sir Peter and William’s father, men interested in ruining rather than reclaiming her define Mary’s social status. Both men have a vested interest in keeping her outside of respectable society, for she possesses

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knowledge which threatens each of them: she can declare the one a rapist and the other a hypocrite. The twin efforts of Sir Peter and Mr Pelham – one a libertine rapist and the latter an esteemed member of the middle class – further demonstrate Hays’s argument that corruption pervades even the seemingly “respectable” motives of Mr Pelham. Although William’s father justifies his tale telling by attributing it to “motives of justice”, his rumor-mongering ensures that his son and Mary will never resume their relationship and thus compromise his own social standing. Eleanor Ty argues that Hays’s characterization of the wicked Sir Peter “sets out to disprove and dispel the Burkean myth of the benevolent country squire as an adequate miniature head or ‘monarch’ of the residents of his estate” (Unsex’d Revolutionaries 60). I would further suggest that Hays’s critique extends itself to the middleclass “economic” man, embodied in both Pelhams, as well as the numerous businessmen who refuse Mary work. Mary’s only successful employment comes as a professional artist specializing in botanical representations. In a profession that draws upon her early interests in both science and art, Mary momentarily experiences the “dignity of INDEPENDENCE” (138). But Sir Peter’s henchmen regale Mary’s employer with an undoubtedly lurid version of her narrative and she suffers its effect: “My employer, from commending my taste and ingenuity in exaggerated expressions, suddenly seized my hand, and, pressing it gently, at the same time leering in my face and tapping my glowing cheek, made an abrupt transition from the merit of my performance to the charms of my person” (139). In the context of a slanderous sexualized narrative, Mary is the object displayed for admiration and sale, rather than a worker capable of producing merchandise. Once discredited as an “honest” woman, she cannot even claim respectably earned wages; they too are inevitably sexualized: “To demand my dues would be but to revive and propagate the tale of my shame” (141). For a short period of time, chronologically prior to the moment when Mary seizes the pen, Sir Peter and Mr Pelham successfully represent Mary’s story as a “tale” of her “shame”, rather than one of their “injustice” or “prejudice”. Although her enemies usurp her tale, Mary determines to endure in spite of their persecution: she is hounded into first debt and then prison, not once but twice. In each case, recipients of her former generosity save her. In the first instance, James, a former servant, pays her debts and returns with her to “the scenes of [her] childhood” (159). But Sir Peter’s influence extends from the city into the country,


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and with James’s death, Mary is once again arrested and her story discredited: “In vain I endeavoured to justify myself; my character blasted, no one believed the tale I told; every ear was shut, every heart was hardened, against me” (167). It is at this point, four months into her second imprisonment, that Mary recounts her story as the reader is given it. In writing her autobiography, Mary finishes her reenactment of her mother’s life: “Indulged with pen and paper, I have sought to beguile my woes by tracing their origin and their progress” (168).6 Unlike her mother, however, Mary survives the narration of her past. Although she initially concludes her history with a suicidal immersion in the “despair” barely staved off throughout her life, yet again, she endures. Her “last appeal” seemingly concludes the text only to be followed by yet another “Conclusion”. In the final entry, recorded two years later, Mary recounts time spent with the Nevilles, a happily married couple who had once saved Mary from the opportuning demands of Sir Peter but who subsequently suffered the loss of their property through his malice. Saved from destitution by Mary, they, in their turn, offer her refuge from a socially imposed “shame”. In language reminiscent of Mr Raymond’s (as well as Wollstonecraft’s), the Nevilles distinguish between Mary’s essentially pure “soul” and the public reputation imposed upon her by “a cruel, undistinguishing world” (170). Tragically, first Mr Neville and then his wife contract fatal fevers, and so Mary is once again left alone. Happiness, in The Victim of Prejudice, remains a “coy and fair fugitive” (47). In Anna Neville’s final speech, Hays extends her critique of the “fetters” imposed upon a “victim of prejudice” to those which manacle the ideal domestic woman, the “victim of tenderness” (173). Throughout the text, Mary has fantasized about an alternative existence characterized by domestic bliss. She yearns for inclusion within the “magic circle” of socially sanctified marriage. Yet Hays’s authorial vision precludes the possibility of even domestic happiness.7 Anna’s last words recount her soulless existence as the “slave” of love: “I modelled to his my temper, my character, my words, my actions, even the expression of my feelings. I had no individual existence; my very being was absorbed in that of my husband. All the worth, all the talent, all the powers of my mind, were the product of my affection” (173). Animated solely by “Love”, Anna lacks the will to survive her husband. Mary, however, lives on, driven by a quest for justice. Indeed, in spite of her assertions that she lives a “joyless existence” soon to end in a much welcome death, Mary’s cynical sorrow is interrupted by a final hope that ultimately validates

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her outcast status as superior to the “proper”, but spiritless, life led by Anna: The sensibilities of my heart have been turned to bitterness, the powers of my mind wasted, my projects rendered abortive, my virtues and suffering alike unrewarded. I have lived in vain! unless the story of my sorrows should kindle in the heart of man, in behalf of my oppressed sex, the sacred claims of humanity and justice. (174, second emphasis mine) Mary’s story ends with hope rather than despair; the possibility of renewed faith hinges upon the significant “unless” of the above passage. Her narrative concludes with defiance, rather than submission to the forces which have persecuted her: “Ignorance and despotism, combating frailty with cruelty, may go on to propose partial reform in one invariable, melancholy, round; reason derides the weak effort; while the fabric of superstition and crime, extending its broad base, mocks the toil of the visionary projector” (174–5). When Sir Peter, William, and Mr Pelham tell “tales” of Mary’s rape and persecution, they mark Mary as a “whore”. To paraphrase Mary Robinson, Hays’s heroine breaks their “embargo” of silence and “takes up the pen” in order to compose a very different story. Unique in its representation of a “fallen” heroine who does not die at the end of the text, Mary’s determined voice dominates the final pages of The Victim of Prejudice. She redefines herself as a forthright author, whose experience with injustice allows her the unique freedom to speak simultaneously as a virtuous woman and as an unrepentant social critic. In the fiction of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays persecuted heroines speak from outcast positions, from debtor prisons and madhouses. In Amelia Opie’s Father and Daughter, however, the sexually transgressive heroine successfully returns to the community where her former virtue is remembered. The novel’s heroine, Agnes Fitzhenry, aggressively returns home after she has run away with an officer in the guards and borne an illegitimate child, actions that have led to her father’s economic and psychological ruin. Opie’s avowed purpose is not to dissect Agnes’s fall from grace but to trace her reintegration into the community. By the end of the novel, Agnes – armed with the monetary and psychological support offered by a faithful cadre of women confidantes – has nearly regained her former position as a highly regarded friend to the poor and the rich. The heroine’s


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characteristic belief in her own virtue fuels her return to respectability. She, like Mary Raymond, refuses to remain with her seducer, insisting, “You have made me criminal, but you have not obliterated my horror for crime, and my veneration for virtue” (Father and Daughter 435). Like the other texts discussed in this chapter, Father and Daughter immediately identifies its protagonist as an outcast but sympathetic character. But in keeping with the author’s vexed relationship to British Jacobin politics, Opie’s tale, unlike the more radical texts of Wollstonecraft and Hays, deliberately marks the heroine as a suspect sexual transgressor. An enthusiastic member of the circle surrounding William Godwin, Thomas Holcroft, Elizabeth Inchbald, and later Mary Wollstonecraft, Opie (née Alderson) was firmly committed to “Jacobin” politics and philosophy during the early and mid-1790s.8 Her ties to the group were somewhat fractured by the death of Wollstonecraft in 1797 and her marriage to John Opie, a painter and member of the Royal Academy, the following year.9 A particularly apt example of Mary Poovey’s “proper lady” writer, Amelia Alderson Opie successfully presented an appropriately feminine demeanor throughout the nineteenth century after participating enthusiastically in the revolutionary excitement of the 1790s. The year in which she became a respectable wife is also the year in which William Godwin wrote and published his Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft. The life and work of Opie, discussed here and in the chapter that follows, provide an ideal opportunity to study the manifold subtleties implicit in the highly volatile discourse surrounding the British woman writer between 1798 and 1832. Because Opie forgoes overtly radical “philosophizing” after 1798 she has often been identified as a frightened reactionary, yet another Regency woman writer who abandoned revolutionary philosophy to protect her reputation.10 At the same time, however, Opie’s work particularly lends itself to the reading paradigms suggested by Mary Poovey and Claudia Johnson. The former critic argues that “the women who grew up [during the decades of the French Revolution and its aftermath], or who immediately inherited [its] ideological legacy” had to negotiate between a radical past and a conservative present and thus developed narrative strategies that allowed them to do so (30). Johnson has drawn on Poovey’s work to re-evaluate the “historical truths” which have named Jane Austen and her contemporaries “conservatives”. Johnson suggests that Opie “[does] not endorse the status quo without serious qualification. [She] dutifully denounces reformist zeal, only to tuck away parallel plots which vindicate liberty, private conscience, and the

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defiance of authority, and thus discretely defines broad areas where conservatives and progressives could agree, surely no part of the reactionary program” (Jane Austen xxi). Keeping Claudia Johnson’s revisionist argument about the impact of the conservative backlash in mind, it is certainly possible to position Opie among the “legion of Wollstonecrafts” attempting to define the “new” British woman, particularly in Father and Daughter and Adeline Mowbray, where the protagonists are explicitly identified as “fallen” heroines.11 As I discussed at the very beginning of this chapter, Father and Daughter opens with the familiar scene of a “wandering” and desperate woman.12 Yet the narrator is intent upon tracing the reclamation rather than the “fall” of Agnes. The novel’s “good” heroine, Caroline Seymour, provides the most explicit statement of the tale’s socio-political aims. Although instrumental in Agnes’s return to respectability, Caroline objects to tales of sexual transgression like those found in Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman and Hays’s Victim of Prejudice: It is the slang of the present day, if I may be allowed this vulgar but forcible expression, to inveigh bitterly against society for excluding from its circle, with unrelenting rigour, the woman who has once transgressed the salutary laws of chastity; and some brilliant and persuasive, but, in my opinion, mistaken writers, of both sexes, have endeavoured to prove that many an amiable woman has been for ever lost to virtue and the world, and become the victim of prostitution, merely because her first fault was treated with ill-judging and criminal severity. This assertion appears to me to be fraught with mischief; as it is calculated to deter the victim of seduction from penitence and amendment, by telling her that she would employ them in her favour in vain. (456) Caroline goes on to write that she, on the other hand, knows of women who have been “restored by perseverance in a life of expiatory amendment [. . .] while their fault has been forgotten in their exemplary conduct as wives and mothers” (456). The text invites us to associate the narrative voice with that of Caroline, for the narrator herself states: “It is not my intention to follow Agnes through the succession of mortifications, embarrassments, temptations, and struggles, which preceded her undoing [. . .] it is sufficient that I explain the circumstances which led to her being in a cold winter’s night houseless and unprotected, a melancholy wanderer towards the house of


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her father” (431). If, on the one hand, Opie’s text critiques Wollstonecraft’s insistence upon chronicling “wrongs”, it also generates an imaginative script that represents the “fallen” woman’s return to respectable society, thus fulfilling one of the subsidiary goals of the Vindication. The narrator precedes her parenthetical revelation – that Agnes becomes “prey to her seducer” – with a brief evocation of the heroine’s life before the entrance of Clifford, a handsome and treacherous officer of the guards. Unlike the other heroines I have discussed in this chapter, Agnes is held directly responsible for her outcast social position; she is a “victim of passion” rather than of prejudice (430). But like Maria and Mary, Agnes is an idealized figure: “[She] united to extreme beauty of face and person, every accomplishment that belongs to her own sex, and a great degree of that strength of mind and capacity for acquiring knowledge supposed to belong exclusively to the other” (428). Agnes’s “fatal flaw” is an arrogant confidence in her own virtues, particularly her “great power to read the characters of those with whom she associated” (428). Even as the narrator frames her “fall” as a distressing cautionary tale meant to frighten young girls into filial obedience, the “vanity and self-love” of both Agnes’s father and her seducer are duly noted. In all three characters we find a “Fatal perversion of uncommon abilities” (428). Clifford, who “might have taught a nation to look up to him as its best pride in prosperity”, instead uses his persuasive powers to manipulate the “pride” of Agnes and her father. For example, he tells Fitzhenry that a marriage would violate his own father’s wishes, hence invoking filial honor even as he insults the father of Agnes (429). Opie thus tempers Agnes’s acknowledged culpability by highlighting Fitzhenry’s vanity and Clifford’s treachery. They wage battle over Agnes’s “heart”, but it is motivated partly by masculine delight in ownership and class pride. Opie’s virtuous heroine errs in listening to her lover’s attacks upon her father. Unlike Mary Raymond, she ultimately privileges romantic love over filial loyalty. In language reminiscent of William Pelham, Clifford convinces Agnes that Fitzhenry’s words of warning are those of a “tyrant” and “a slave of unwarrantable selfishness” who doesn’t want his daughter to marry at all (430). And Fitzhenry, unlike Mr Raymond, has failed to prepare his daughter for the test such exhortations will make upon her virtue. Agnes elopes with her lover believing they will marry, but Clifford successfully delays a formal marriage ceremony; the heroine becomes pregnant and bears his child. The narrator acknowledges Agnes’s guilt, but never precludes the possibility of the

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heroine returning to virtuous respectability. She retains the “virtues” which characterized her before the elopement with Clifford, including “strength of mind” and a “capacity for acquiring knowledge” (428). Like the heroines of Wollstonecraft and Hays, Agnes uses her talents to battle the stereotyped social position in which she finds herself. She first responds to the most common cultural script of exile by redefining herself in relation to her child: “What am I? did I ask? I am a mother, and earth still holds me by a tie too sacred to be broken” (432). Unlike the first Mary in Hays’s Victim of Prejudice, who responds to her daughter’s birth with horror because “its innocence contrasted [her] guilt” (66), but akin to Maria and Jemima, as well as to the Victorian “fallen women” of Elizabeth Gaskell and Christina Rossetti, Agnes initially finds the means of “rising” in maternity. Upon the birth of her child, Agnes rids herself of a “deep gloom”. Indeed, her future efforts are presaged in her courageous response to single motherhood: “in proportion to her trials, seemed to be Agnes’s power of rising superior to them” (432). Like Godwin’s Wollstonecraft, as well as Hays’s Anna Neville, Agnes is a “worshipper of domestic life”; she remains with her lover even though their relationship remains unsanctioned by church and state. She leaves him only after she learns to “read” their story through other eyes. Her epiphany occurs at the theater, as she sits alone in her box, “veil down”. Even as she gazes with “admiring fondness” across the theater at Clifford, she comes to see the signs of betrayal formerly invisible to her. Two men in the box next to her are also observing Clifford and by sharing their critical gaze Agnes discovers the truth about her lover: “if his heart were not as bad as his head is good, he would be an honour to human nature; but, I dare say, that fellow has ruined more young men, and seduced more young women, than any man of his age” (433). Agnes subsequently learns that Clifford is on the verge of marrying an heiress. But, more significantly, she overhears the story of her own ruin. The men name “Agnes Fitzhenry” as the “victim of a villain” and reveal that her seduction has thrust her father into a fatal illness. Upon hearing her narrative recounted in the public arena of the theater, Agnes “loses all self-command” and screams in the “helplessness of frenzy” (434). But the audience misunderstands her cries of filial grief and they greet the spectacle of her “frenzy” with disdain and violence. Consequently, in an ironic twist familiar to readers of Wollstonecraft, audience members greet Agnes’s first movement toward redemption as a “drunken freak”; they mistake her for an “intoxicated and abandoned woman” and demand her expulsion:


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“Turn her out! turn her out! echoed through the house [. . .] and a man in the next box struck Agnes a blow on the shoulder, and calling her by a name too gross to repeat, desired her to leave the house” (434). The naming of the virtuous Agnes a “whore” sets her “brain on fire” and she rushes out of the theater to find Clifford. When confronted, her lover boldly acknowledges his deceit: “it was my design to keep you in ignorance of my marriage, and retain you as the greatest of my worldly treasures” (435). Agnes’s night at the theater provides her with three possible identities, all of which potentially disempower her as a sexually transgressive woman: sympathetic men pity her as the “victim of a villain”, the audience castigates her as a “whore”, and Clifford appeases her by naming her his “greatest” possession. But Agnes responds to her lover’s betrayal by inaugurating a new identity as a proud if prodigal “fallen woman”. She acts as neither “victim”, “whore”, nor broken-hearted and abandoned mistress. Instead, she makes practical plans to escape Clifford’s influence: “he left not Agnes, as he supposed, to vent her sense of injury in idle grief and inactive lamentation, but to think, to decide, and to act” (435). Agnes’s willingness “to think, to decide, and to act” radically transforms Opie’s conventional narrative of seduced innocence. Even as Agnes assumes the predictable role of repentant wanderer returning to the familial home – a return other narratives inevitably paint as doomed – Opie’s heroine deliberately scripts her tale to have the greatest possible effect upon her father and community. Agnes rids herself of any garments that might mark her as a rich man’s mistress; she dons the clothes of a “country-woman”, exchanging her pelisse and shawl for “a man’s great-coat, a red cloth cloak with a hood to it, a pair of thick shoes, and some yards of flannel, in which she wrapt up her little Edward” (436). Indeed, because painful experiences make for a pathetic story, Agnes revels in her trials as she toils toward her father’s home: Agnes was not sorry to have a tale of hardship to narrate on her arrival [. . .] His child, his penitent child, whom he had brought up with the utmost tenderness, and screened with unremitting care from the ills of life, returning to implore his pity and forgiveness, on foot, and unprotected, through all the dangers of lonely paths, and through the horrors of a winter’s night, must, she flattered herself, be a picture too affecting for Fitzhenry to think upon without some commiseration. (436)

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Agnes deliberately assumes the garb of the “wandering” woman from balladry; hence, she performs the sympathetic role of “victim” even as she hopes to play upon her father’s class pride. But Opie’s heroine must ultimately reject the subject position of play-acting middle-class penitent. Agnes’s sexual fall has led to her father’s own loss of economic, as well as psychological, stability. Thus, Opie rewrites a key scene of the “fallen woman’s” narrative: the repentant’s return. The Fitzhenrys’ reunion scene does not take place in their family home but in the woods outside of their village. Fitzhenry can neither reject nor reclaim Agnes because he fails to recognize her at all. And, in her turn, Agnes does not discern her father in the threatening madman who menaces her son. Whereas the Fitzhenrys had once been linked by their mutual possession of superior qualities, they are now united by their status as outcasts. Fitzhenry is in the wood because he has just escaped from the very Bedlam that he, as a “respectable merchant”, had built. Like Agnes, he is now a homeless “wanderer” (437). Indeed, Fitzhenry proves to be the weaker of the two. He responds to “ruin”, not with his daughter’s fortitude, but with madness. Opie further connects Agnes’s sexual transgression to the economic and psychological deterioration of her father by having Fitzhenry mouth yet another common narrative associated with “wandering” women. Disturbed by Edward’s cries, the yet unnamed “maniac” screams: “‘Strangle it! strangle it!’ [. . .] ‘do it this moment, or – .’ Agnes, almost frantic with terror, conjured the unconscious boy, if he valued his life, to cease his cries; and then, the next moment, she conjured the wretched man to spare her child; but, alas! she spoke to those incapable of understanding her – a child and a madman” (374). Fitzhenry, and not Agnes, rehearses the script of infanticide usually associated with desperate and deserted sexual transgressors.13 The rest of Father and Daughter charts Agnes’ attempts to return her father to sanity. She rejects the narrative of the victimized and helpless “fallen woman” – which she had briefly embraced for the sake of its powerful, if passive, imagery – and rewrites it as one of proactive filial loyalty. Agnes’s “duty” to both her father and her child allows her to actively seek a return to respectability. She subsequently rejects cultural scripts (infanticide, further sexual transgression, madness, or suicide) which would deprive her of the ability “to think, to decide, and to act” on her own. Opie employs the conventionally appropriate role of dedicated daughter to empower a conventionally disreputable heroine; Agnes can attempt anything when her efforts take place under “the name of the father”. Yet, significantly, it is not a return to “virtue” which is at


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issue here – the text implies that Agnes has not been corrupted by her love affair with Clifford – but rather the reclamation of her father from insanity. Opie thus redefines “reclamation”, not as an act of charity performed upon the passive and repentant “wanderer”, but rather as the heroine’s filial duty: Agnes must reclaim her own virtuous past by reminding both her community and her father of it. The narrative of reclamation thus outlined in Father and Daughter characteristically combines the contrary impulses so specific to Amelia Opie’s domestic, yet politicized, ideology. On the one hand, Opie appears to associate herself with conservative mores that insist upon severely disciplining sexual transgression: Agnes must work and suffer to reclaim her father’s sanity. Yet the author simultaneously undermines disciplinary mores by bestowing upon her heroine innate virtue and mental fortitude; and ultimately, Agnes proves herself to be smarter, stronger, and wiser than either her father or her seducer. Opie launches her subtle critique of masculine privilege by endowing most of her female characters with superior virtues. Fanny, the daughter of Agnes’s nursemaid, and Caroline Seymour, the heroine’s closest friend, both soften her “hard task” with their steadfast loyalty. Fanny provides Agnes with her first home and employment. Indeed, she takes the place of the welcoming father in the overlaid narrative of the Prodigal Son which Agnes herself evokes in her first conversation with Fanny: “The prodigal is returned, and you have killed the fatted calf” (443). Agnes accepts Fanny’s help because she recognizes its importance to her project of self-reclamation: “[I would not] throw myself on your generosity, were I not afraid that if I were to be unsoothed by the presence of a sympathising friend, I should sink beneath my sorrows, and want resolution to fulfill the hard task my duty enjoins me” (442). In Opie’s narrative, the sexually transgressive woman works with the “pure” women who offer her succor; more significantly, perhaps, she orchestrates their actions to best facilitate her own plan. Agnes approaches Mr Seymour first because he is the father of her best friend; she targets him as her most likely public advocate because “his daughter Caroline [. . .] will not suffer him to trample on the fallen” (443). Throughout Father and Daughter, Opie pairs Agnes’s rhetoric of conventional shame to her proactive efforts to regain a respectable place in society for both her father and herself. Agnes’s “scheme” to “save” her father depends upon securing a position at the madhouse that holds him and Mr Seymour numbers among the powerful men who sit on its board. Initially, however, less influential but more sympathetic members of the community facilitate

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Agnes’s access to social power. Throughout the first part of Father and Daughter, Agnes finds allies among women and the working classes, all of whom understand that “misfortune spares no one” (441). Indeed, Opie consistently acknowledges the class interests that link middleclass women to working-class men. Mr Seymour, assuming the role of the obdurate parent, rejects Agnes’ first attempt to plead her case: “going up to Agnes, he desired her to leave his house directly, as it should be no harbour for abandoned women and unnatural children” (443). He orders Caroline to stay away from her former friend and instructs the doorman to shut the door in Agnes’s face. But each thwarts his punitive desire. William, a former Fitzhenry servant, refuses to do Mr Seymour’s bidding, thus sparing Agnes some indignity, and Caroline runs after Agnes in order to give her a gift of twenty guineas. More importantly, she provides Agnes with the validation denied to her by both of their fathers. She includes a note with the money: “For my still dear Agnes – would I dare say more!” (444). Caroline rewrites her father’s dismissal of Agnes as “an abandoned woman and an unnatural daughter” by insisting upon Agnes’s worth; she is “still dear”. But most significantly, Caroline “re-forms” her powerful father’s attitude toward Agnes, and therefore smoothes the exile’s progressive return to the community. Indeed, Caroline voices not only the warning against radical cynicism, which I cited earlier, but also a critique of punitive conservative mores. Although Father and Daughter preaches the necessity of “duty”, it also carefully delineates the difference between what we might call “true” and “false” duty. In Mr Seymour’s behavior toward Agnes, Opie carefully charts how “true” duty threatens to become hypocritical slavishness to convention. The narrator notes that, “Mr Seymour was a very vain man, and never acted in any way without saying to himself, ‘what will the world say?’ Hence, though his first impulses were frequently good, the determinations of his judgment were often contemptible” (444). Mr Seymour is not unlike Mary Hays’s Mr Pelham, but in Opie’s text, Caroline rejects her father’s “lessons” about the world for a nearly Godwinian model of personal responsibility: “Suppose [the world] should think you too lenient a [judge], will not the approbation of your conscience, be an ample consolation for such a condemnation?” (447). And, through her influence, Mr Seymour comes to recognize that independent “duty” must prevail regardless of social mores. Thus, in the tradition of earlier English Jacobin texts, the “daughter” reeducates her “father”. In Mr Seymour’s first act of courage, he invites Agnes to the Bedlam


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board meeting, where she is greeted with sympathy rather than scorn: “They thought of their own daughters, and secretly prayed to Heaven to keep them from the voice of the seducer. Away went all their resolutions to receive Agnes with that open disdain and detestation which her crime deserved; the sight of her disarmed them” (445). Like an ambitious actress dressed to win a role, Agnes assumes the garb of a maidservant. She begins her story from “the time of her leaving Clifford to her recontre with her father in the forest”, thus replicating the narrative structure of Opie’s own tale. She also continues to demonstrate her power as a storyteller: “she gained courage, remembering it was her interest to affect her auditors, and make them enter warmly into her feelings and designs. [. . .] and when she was unable to go on, from the violence of her emotions, she had the satisfaction of seeing the tears of her auditors kept pace with her own” (445). Even as Agnes assumes the conventional Magdalen pose, she carefully monitors its influence upon her audience and successfully evokes tears from them as well. Although the board members do not allow her to act as a servant in Bedlam, they do give her leave to visit her father as his nurse. They also offer her financial succor, which Agnes rejects. She instead declares her intention to lead an “expiatory plan of life” dependent upon “industry” rather than charity (445). Opie’s imagined community, unlike those of Wollstonecraft and Hays, embraces its “fallen” daughter. Its social leaders allow her the opportunity to “work” out her perceived guilt through properly recompensed labor. Yet Agnes’s reintegration into the community is not unopposed. The aptly named Mrs Macfiendy, whose daughters had once been overshadowed by the beautiful and virtuous heroine, becomes Agnes’s worst enemy. In her characterization of the mean-spirited Mrs Macfiendy, Opie balances Caroline’s optimism about reclaiming the “fallen woman” with an acknowledgment that radical “cynicism” is somewhat justified. Opie’s utopian community must silence the voices of the “ferociously chaste” before it can actually reclaim its “fallen” daughter (450). Mrs Macfiendy’s account of Agnes maliciously reiterates the conventional “harlot’s progress” narrative: “I hear that good-for-nothing minx, Fitzhenry’s daughter, is come to town; I wonder for my part she dares show her face here – but the assurance of those creatures is amazing [. . .] But this girl must be a hardened wretch indeed [. . .] I suppose her fellow is tired of her and she will be on the town soon” (449). Mrs Macfiendy casts Agnes’s behavior and motivation in the worst possible light. She assumes that Clifford has abandoned Agnes, although the reader knows that she has left him.

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Furthermore, Mrs Macfiendy suggests that Agnes returns home – which the reader knows she has done to resume her filial duty – in order to begin a career as the town prostitute. Finally, she categorically denies Agnes’s individuality and respectable past by denying her a Christian name; she calls her a “minx”, a “creature”, and a “wretch”. She goes on to refer to her as a “– what I do not choose to name” (449). But Mrs Macfiendy’s attempts to deprive Agnes of her former fame and current penitence are combatted by Mr Seymour’s willingness to challenge what the “world says”. Acting on the advice of Caroline, he does public battle with Mrs Macfiendy over the narrative of Agnes’s return, often employing biblical injunctions to forgive sin. He also faithfully retells the heroine’s story from her own perspective: “he gave the account of Agnes, her present situation, and her intentions for the future which she gave the governors” (449). With the assistance of Mr Seymour’s public ventriloquization, Agnes’s version of her own narrative succeeds; it becomes “town talk” and all acknowledge that “fallen as she is, she is still Agnes Fitzhenry” (449). Nonetheless, even as the townspeople and Caroline recognize Opie’s heroine as “still” Agnes, her own father remains uncomprehending. The Bedlam visits so diligently acquired become tortuous trials. Fitzhenry constantly, albeit unknowingly, punishes her: “[Agnes] saw that [Fitzhenry] had drawn the shape of a coffin, and was then writing on the lid the name of Agnes” (445). The rest of Opie’s tale focuses on the heroine’s industrious return to respectability through the reclamation of her father’s sanity. Indeed, all depends upon his recognition of Agnes as a worthy penitent and “still” his child. He must forget the “fallen” daughter he lost along with his mind. After five years, Agnes convinces the governors of the madhouse board that she should care for her father in their own home. Again, Caroline intuits Agnes’s plan and helps her without being petitioned to do so. Agnes continues to allow the philanthropy of female friends even as she rejects other aid: “Yes – [Caroline] has indeed divined my secret [. . .] and she deserves to assist me in procuring means for my poor father’s recovery – an indulgence which I should be jealous of granting to any one else” (456). In Father and Daughter, Opie defines philanthropy as an “indulgence” allowed to the respectable only when they “deserve” it and the penitent desires it. Caroline instinctively helps her friend; she is neither sanctimonious nor arrogant about it and it is absolutely consistent with her behavior toward Agnes before her fall. Opie further articulates a complex – and necessary – system of social duty between women in her second novel,


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Adeline Mowbray; or, The Mother and Daughter, which I discuss in the next chapter. Caroline supplies her friend with the necessary funds to materially recreate the atmosphere of comfort once available to the Fitzhenrys. Indeed, Fitzhenry’s doctors actually prescribe the careful reconstruction of their past life together. Finally, then, both the formal institutional power of the medical establishment and the informal operations of domestic power range themselves behind Agnes and her father as they assume all of the accoutrements of their former happiness. Indeed, they are welcomed back into the community: “never, in their most prosperous hours, were they met with curtsies so low, or bows more respectful [. . .] She might, if she had chosen it, have been received at many houses where she had formerly been intimate (459). And six years after Agnes’s return home, her father absolves her at the very moment he returns to clarity: “Thou art restored to me, and God knows how heartily I forgive thee!” (460). Fitzhenry’s “madness”, then, comes to signify his former refusal to acknowledge his “still dear” daughter: the return of his reason is inextricably tied to reunion with Agnes. At the same time, however, it is also linked to his speedy death and Agnes’s subsequent demise. Finally, Opie, unlike either Wollstonecraft or Hays, unambiguously kills off her heroine. Indeed Agnes and her father are borne to a single grave. Agnes’s “sudden” death – six years after reintegration into her community – has been read as evidence of Opie’s ultimately conservative ideology.14 In addition to the chronological distance between her sexual transgression and her death, two plot elements undercut such a reading. First of all, Agnes dies a dutiful and heartbroken daughter, her past as an infamous “fallen” woman nearly forgotten. Secondly, Opie’s tale does not actually conclude with her death. Instead, the heroine’s history is narrated one final time to great effect. At the very end of the tale, Opie turns her attention back to the seducer. For the most part, the narrator does not focus on Clifford; indeed, she explicitly states her aversion to characterizing him fully. Initially, she describes him only to “excus[e], as much as possible, the strong attachment he excited in Agnes” (429). And when he is mentioned, the narrator employs a prose akin to that found in the proto-feminist treatises discussed in the last chapter: “This man, who might have taught a nation to look up to him as its best pride in prosperity, and its best hope in adversity, made no other use of his talents than to betray the unwary of both sexes, the one to shame, the other to pecuniary difficulties” (428). Aside from these early descriptions, however, Clifford is

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largely absent from the tale. Opie interrupts Agnes’s story at only two crucial moments to substantially return to his. In both instances, the narrator parallels the seducer’s experience to that of the seduced and in each case judges him more harshly and punishes him more severely. Just after Agnes begins her slow rise to respectability, the narration returns to the very beginning of the action to recount Clifford’s reaction to Agnes’s disappearance with their child. Whereas Agnes believes that her n’er-do-well lover never attempted to find her, the narrator details Clifford’s pursuit: “Without a great-coat and in a violent attack of fever, [he] was wandering on the road to London, in hopes of meeting Agnes, at the very time when his victim was on the road to her native place” (453). In this description, Clifford occupies the same metaphorical space as the wandering woman herself. Furthermore, unlike Agnes, his prior treachery leaves him without sympathetic companionship or the means of reform. Indeed, Clifford’s father leads him to believe that Agnes and Edward have frozen to death in order to ensure his son’s marriage to an heiress. Finally, Clifford’s familial inheritance of treachery and bribery amply repays his destruction of the Fitzhenrys. In two subsequent marriages, conjugal unhappiness and infertility further chasten him. The narrator promises even greater punishment in the afterlife since Clifford never fully acknowledges the horrendous moral wrongs he has committed. He feels only earthly unhappiness “without the consolations of repentance” (454). Opie again returns to Clifford’s “horrors” at the very end of the tale. With novelistic serendipity, Agnes’s seducer returns to the village only to witness her funeral. Clifford, now Lord Montcarrol, recognizes his son in the forefront of the procession and steals him away. Although Mr Seymour and Fanny eventually allow him to adopt Edward, they first “torture” him by “narrating” Agnes’s story: “She had thought him so vile, that she could not for a moment regret him!” (462). Unlike Agnes, who dies having fulfilled her filial and maternal duty, Clifford dies “selfish to the last moment of his existence [. . .] he grudged and envied Agnes the comfort of having been able to despise and forget him” (462). Significantly, Opie chooses to end her tale by elaborating upon the seducer’s death rather than upon the death of his “virtuous” victim. Opie’s tale – even as it disciplines its sexualized heroine – simultaneously addresses the sins of seducers, fathers, and even “respectable” men like Mr Seymour. Indeed, the final paragraph of Father and Daughter manages to condemn both men and women for sexual transgression even as it simultaneously promises redemption. It begins as a eulogy for Agnes


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and reinforces the stated reform goals of the narrator: “Peace to the memory of Agnes Fitzhenry! And may the woman who, like her, has been the victim of artifice, self-confidence, and temptation, like her endeavour to regain the esteem of the world by patient suffering and virtuous exertion, and look forward to the attainment of it with confidence!” (462). The narrator goes on, however, to warn her readers that the “victim of seduction”, even if she regains the respect of others “must always despair of recovering her own”. The “voice of the seducer” permeates this passage like a whisper, as the narrator returns to his culpability in the final line of the novel. Suddenly, the narrator replaces the feminine pronoun with the masculine: “where is the mortal who can venture to pronounce that his actions are of importance to no one, and that the consequences of his virtues or his vices will be confined to himself alone?” Opie’s final warning to future “fallen women” opens up to include the men who cause them to fall and fail to facilitate their reclamation. Opie’s Father and Daughter foreshadows representations of the “fallen woman” in the work of Elizabeth Gaskell and other midcentury authors. Agnes, like the Victorian heroines I discuss in later chapters, regains respectability only to die virtuously, celebrated as an ideal mother and virtuous nurse. Opie’s allegiance to the final detail of the “harlot’s progress” – her death – partially obscures her interruptions of the Hogarthian construct. But it is important to see the ways in which she consistently works against the expected narrative of the seduced and abandoned woman: Agnes lives for six years after her seduction and dies only after she has been thoroughly reintegrated into her community. Furthermore, even as Opie explicitly rejects radical “cynicism”, she incorporates many progressive tenets into her text. Like Wollstonecraft and Hays, Opie enumerates the culpability of the entire male community in female seduction and ruin, the importance of employment for single women, the hypocrisy of conventional social mores, and the redemptive nature of female friendship. Opie more thoroughly addresses such issues in her next novel, Adeline Mowbray; or, The Mother and Daughter, in which the author again takes up and revises narratives of female sexual transgression, specifically in light of Mary Wollstonecraft’s death in 1797 and the late eighteenthcentury conservative backlash against “philosophical” women.

3 Diverting the Libertine Gaze: Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray

Although Father and Daughter obliquely touches upon the concerns of “Jacobin” sympathizers in England, Opie’s use of the sentimental tale tends to preclude overt socio-political commentary. In 1805, four years after the publication of Father and Daughter and at a moment when Mary Wollstonecraft’s reputation would seem to be fully compromised, Opie explicitly addresses republican concerns such as free love, free speech, and abolition in Adeline Mowbray; or, The Mother and Daughter.1 Indeed, the novel was considered a roman à clef about Wollstonecraft and William Godwin throughout the nineteenth century. While there are important differences between Wollstonecraft and Opie’s eponymous heroine and between Godwin and the novel’s hero, Frederic Glenmurray, the text does examine the confusion that ensues when a woman’s philosophical beliefs conflict with society’s notions about female sexuality. Adeline Mowbray is about naming a woman a “whore” because she is both sexually and intellectually transgressive. As Wollstonecraft and Hays had already demonstrated, telling the story of the “sexual” woman provides an ideal opportunity to critique unjust systems of social and legal regulation. Opie’s text, however, considers the consequences of deliberately choosing sexual transgression based upon deeply held philosophical principle. The text draws upon elements of the philosophical novel, particularly Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Heloise, as well as the conventions of the domestic tale, without idealizing either form, thus Opie’s text moves beyond the parameters of the “seduction novel” to focus upon the political and philosophical conflicts of the early nineteenth century. By situating the debate between “radicals” and “conservatives” directly over the heroine’s desirable – and commodifiable – female form, Opie exposes the self-interest implicit 106

Diverting the Libertine Gaze

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in both radical and conservative prescriptions about female education and citizenship. Questions about Opie’s own political position have been at issue from the time of Adeline Mowbray’s publication. In the nineteenth century it was widely read as a critique of English Jacobin politics, particularly the life and work of Godwin, Holcroft, and Wollstonecraft. The same ideological backlash that leads to Wollstonecraft’s condemnation protects Opie; her reputation as a “respectable” woman ensures a largely positive reception of her work.2 Contemporary journals herald Adeline Mowbray as a worthy novel by a “lady whose uncommon talents do honour to her sex and country” (The Critical Review 219), while The Monthly Review reads the novel as an uncompromising condemnation of Wollstonecraft and Godwin: “It is the intention of this work to portray the lamentable consequences which would result from an adoption of some lax principles relative to a rejection of matrimonial forms which have been inculcated by certain modern writers” (320–1). Forty-eight years later, Adeline Mowbray was still being read as a repudiation of “Jacobin” morality. Although Cecilia Brightwell acknowledges Opie’s suspect political beliefs, she carefully disassociates the author from any connection with the radicals themselves, particularly that “philosophising serpent”, Mary Wollstonecraft.3 Brightwell fervently insists that “there was too much of the pure womanly character in [Opie], to suffer her ever to sympathize with the assertors of ‘woman’s rights,’ (so called)” (42). On the rare occasions when Opie’s work was examined during the 1970s and 1980s, biographers and critics continued to judge her based – not on her own “female speech” – but on her reputation as a “flirt” and the romantic triangle that she seems to have formed with Wollstonecraft and Godwin. It is often suggested that Godwin wooed Amelia Alderson even as he embarked on a relationship with Wollstonecraft.4 Leaping to her subject’s defense in her biographical study of Wollstonecraft, Claire Tomalin strongly condemns Opie’s motivation in writing Adeline Mowbray. She reads the novel as part of a “steady campaign of denigration” waged against Wollstonecraft throughout the nineteenth century: “it is hard to forgive Amelia Opie for the cool way in which she thus made use of the woman who had certainly done her no harm and who had left daughters, legitimate and illegitimate, who could have done with some kindness from their mother’s friends” (294). Both Brightwell and Tomalin fall into the trap of judging Opie based on their own “feminine ideologies”. Whereas Brightwell frames Opie as an ideal Victorian “angel”, the twentieth-

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century Tomalin condemns her for not taking the proper “feminist” actions upon Wollstonecraft’s death.5 Richard Holmes characterizes Opie and her contemporaries as timid and without political consistency. He condemns them for a conservatism which betrays their former idols: “The facts of Wollstonecraft’s sufferings, and the truths of her difficult personality, frightened them [. . .] The [Memoirs] made Mary Wollstonecraft too romantic and too dangerous a figure” (45–6). Gary Kelly’s portrait of Opie is more evenhanded: “She was always known for both her femininity and her independence, for her sense of propriety and her liberal humanitarianism; and her fictions exhibit the same somewhat contradictory qualities, preaching conformity to the conventional sexual and family roles, but fascinated by deviations from those roles, incorporating criticism of the oppressive and unjust nature of social institutions and social convention, but reaffirming the dominance of social institutions and obligations over individual rights” (Kelly, “Amelia Opie . . . Official and Unofficial Ideology” 5). Even as Kelly acknowledges the potentially subversive power of Opie’s writing, however, he ultimately reduces her to a type of literary dilettante. She “dwell[s] on the spectacle of freedom of a kind”, he writes, but finally approves of “social conventions and social institutions” (10). In part, Kelly’s insistence that women figures are the corrupting influence in Adeline Mowbray compromises his argument (8). He ignores Adeline’s enforced isolation from women throughout the novel, as well as Opie’s overt condemnation of male lust and uncontrolled authority. Although he points to the link between Adeline Mowbray and the publication of Godwin’s Memoirs, Kelly suggests that Godwin’s work only triggered Opie’s reconsideration of “Wollstonecraft’s feminism and Wollstonecraft’s loves” (8). He ignores Opie’s critique of Godwinian philosophy in particular and revolutionary philosophy in general. In his book-length study of the Jacobin novel, Kelly painstakingly constructs an ideal relationship between the women of Godwin’s circle and the philosopher: “For these women Godwin was more than a Mentor or a father-figure, more one might say, than a mere man. The letters and the novels of these women, if read with care and candour, witness their recognition of Godwin’s candid and catalyzing personality” (Jacobin Novel 266). In positing a gendered symbiosis between Godwin’s “sense” and feminine “sensibility”, which necessarily precludes reading Adeline Mowbray as a critique of Godwinian philosophy, Kelly also implies that the only true voices of dissent in early nineteenth-


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century England were those loyal to a very specific brand of “Jacobinism” current in the early 1790s. In that case, Opie’s work after 1798 appears to refute her earlier beliefs and she can be dismissed as a mere enthusiast, a woman who flirted with radicalism but abandoned it in the face of a conservative reaction. Such a reading does an injustice to Opie’s own changing political position over the course of her lengthy life. In a writing career spanning over two decades and marked by radical shifts in political, social, and religious affiliation, Opie consistently addresses questions which are directly related to individual rights and responsibilities, and she inevitably does so through the lens of gender and often race as well. Even Opie’s earliest readers note her subversive narrative techniques. In 1805 The Critical Review departs from its generally favorable review of the novel to criticize “the fascinating colours thrown over the erroneous virtues of Adeline and Glenmurray, ‘making’ [. . .] vice more dangerous by giving it an air of respectability” (219–20). Lucy Stebbins, writing in 1952, consistently reads Opie as a proponent of traditionally conservative mores, yet even she recognizes a suspect subtlety in Opie’s treatment of Wollstonecraft’s biography: “[Opie] knew that Mary Wollstonecraft’s ruin was not the consequence of sin, but the result of her opposition to the moral codes of her time. Through the bathos and flummery in which [Opie] veiled this simple fact peeped her private knowledge that her heroine had been wrong because she did what she believed was right” (76). In pointing to the underlying tensions that “peep” through Opie’s text, Stebbins anticipates the work of feminist critics including Poovey, Johnson, and Eleanor Ty, all of whom insist upon layered readings of Opie’s work. It is my contention that in Adeline Mowbray, safely nestled under the cloak of her own married respectability, Opie addresses the still dangerous topic of Wollstonecraft’s sexuality seven years after the publication of Godwin’s Memoirs, while criticizing attitudes harbored by both the political left and the political right. Opie had both personal and professional motivation in reacting negatively to the Memoirs and the ensuing assault on Wollstonecraft’s character. Her admiration for Mary Wollstonecraft can be seen in an early letter exchanged between the two women: “Will you help me to account for the strong desire I always feel when with you, to say affectionate things to you?” (quoted in Wardle 274). In the same letter, Opie’s expressions of affection transcend the domestic to include the sublime: “you are one of the few objects of my curiosity who in gratifying have not disappointed it also – You & the Lakes of

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Cumberland have exceeded my expectations”. Wollstonecraft appears to have reciprocated Amelia Alderson’s friendship. Epistolary evidence indicates that Alderson was among the first of Wollstonecraft’s friends to learn of her marriage to Godwin. Wollstonecraft’s letter also suggests that the unmarried Alderson remained close to the married philosophers in spite of possible damage to her own reputation (Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft 389). In her missive to Alderson, Wollstonecraft explicitly discusses the desertion of other members of their circle, including Elizabeth Inchbald, due to revelations about her illicit relationship with Gilbert Imlay. It is likely, based on the affectionate correspondence between the two women, that Opie would have been horrified at Godwin’s sometimes naive and often distorted portrait of his wife. As I argue in the Coda to Chapter 1, the publication of Godwin’s Memoirs made clear the untenable position of the intellectual woman amongst radicals and conservatives. Wollstonecraft had earlier been considered a fairly respectable literary personage but her reputation was severely damaged by Godwin’s uncompromising code of honesty as well as a simultaneous tendency to romanticize his subject. A conservative audience intent on reading “radicalism” as “licentiousness” gleefully received his complete account of Wollstonecraft’s life. Opie’s reaction to the Memoirs is somewhat akin to that of Robert Southey, who accused Godwin of “a want of all feeling in stripping his dead wife naked” (quoted in Holmes 43). Opie addresses the gender implications of such a “stripping” for publication and purchase in Adeline Mowbray, even as she remains a proponent of some of Godwin’s philosophical principles. For she also critiques the reactionary forces which gleefully attacked the vulnerable reputation of this most prominent Jacobin woman writer as well as her idealistic widower. On the one hand, the criticism of Godwin and his principles seems to be rooted in Opie’s intimate knowledge of his personal faults. She was particularly amused by William Godwin’s clumsy attempts at romance: “It would have entertained you highly to have seen [Godwin] bid me farewell. He wished to salute me, but his courage failed him” (Letter to Susannah Taylor, 1794, Brightwell, 59). Opie explicitly mocks Godwin’s willingness to compromise his theories for the sake of flirtation. In the following letter she recounts a meeting with Godwin during which he turns the conversation from a discussion of her studies to the following:


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But was I to acknowledge any other dominion than that of reason? – “but are you sure that my affections in this case are not the result of reason?” He shrugged disbelief, and after debating some time, he told me I was more of the woman than when he saw me last. Rarely did we agree, and little did he gain on me by his mode of attack, [. . .] In short, he convinced me that his theory has not yet gotten entire ascendancy over his practice. (Letter to Susannah Taylor, 1794, Brightwell, 43) Opie seems to have taken up the rationalist Godwin on his reluctance to recognize “womanly” affection and learning based upon “reason”. As a witness to Godwin’s innumerable flirtations throughout the 1790s, Opie certainly had reason to question his famous objections to marriage. By 1805, she had definitive proof that the twice-married Godwin was more than willing to sacrifice theory for both romance and pragmatism. But although Adeline Mowbray may have been fueled by the author’s knowledge of the private lives of Godwin and Wollstonecraft, it is not a biographical treatment of their love affair. Written in the aftermath of Godwin’s ill-considered revelations about his wife, Opie aims her satire directly at the gendered assumptions that mar radical political theory in general and Godwin’s Political Justice in particular. Opie’s critique – perhaps modeled upon Wollstonecraft’s own readings of Rousseau and Milton in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman – is predicated in part upon her own healthy pragmatism: “Heigho! What charming things would sublime theories be, if one could make one’s practice keep up with them; but I am convinced it is impossible and am resolved to make the best of every-day nature” (Letter to Susannah Taylor, 1797, Brightwell, 63). To identify Opie solely as a pragmatist, however, is to do her an injustice as a critic of gender roles. Adeline Mowbray quite deliberately considers what the consequences of Godwinian philosophy could be for a female proponent. Frederic Glenmurray, the novel’s “hero”, first seduces the eponymous heroine through language; indeed, he is more dangerous on paper than he is in the flesh. Once the heroine subscribes to his progressive ideas that heterosexual relationships can and should exist outside of marriage, she is attacked by a conservative society that finds it impossible to separate virtuous motives from seemingly licentious actions. Hence, Opie’s novel explicitly foregrounds Wollstonecraft’s own interest in distinguishing “true” virtue from the mere performance of conventional morality, even as it implicitly ponders the fate

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of “female philosophers” intent upon challenging such hypocrisy. Like the heroines of Wollstonecraft and Hays, Adeline’s countenance shines with the “graceful awfulness of virtue” (Adeline Mowbray 75). Nonetheless, “the world” insists upon naming her a “fallen woman”. In Opie’s novel the reader is presented with a philosophical heroine led astray by the temptations of male language and then cut off from the healing language of virtuous women. Adeline Mowbray does not condemn Wollstonecraft but rather calls for more texts like A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and The Wrongs of Woman. Adeline is vulnerable to seduction and stigmatization because she is besieged by male voices; she can only be “redeemed” by reintegration into a community of articulate women willing to offer her compassion and protection. Opie finally rejects both the model of Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Heloise and its idealization of the male teacher/female student relationship, as well as the domestic tale’s ultimate faith in the redemptive powers of marriage. The world of Opie’s text is particularly determined – for better or worse – by the actions of its women. The Mowbray family fortune passes through the maternal line. Adeline’s mother’s great-grandmother, “the sole surviving daughter of an opulent merchant in London”, wills the family home to the heroine’s grandfather who, in turn, leaves it to his daughter’s management (Adeline Mowbray 3). The novel does not indicate the state of Adeline’s father’s fortune; indeed, he dies before the action begins. Women pass along knowledge as well as financial freedom in the Mowbray family. Editha Woodville Mowbray, Adeline’s mother, “imbibe[s] a love of free inquiry” from an aunt and then assumes the task of educating her own daughter. Editha is not, however, a Wollstonecraft. She pursues her philosophical studies in isolation while class pride precludes her from entering the marketplace as a writer. She also neglects the “positive duties” of home and family in order to immerse herself in theoretical treatises. Her readiness to experiment with Adeline’s mind and body determines the course of her daughter’s education: “Now it was judged right that she should learn nothing, and now that she should learn every thing. Now, her graceful form and well-turned limbs were to be free from any bandage, and any clothing save what decency required, – and now they were to be tortured by stiff stays, and fettered by the stocks and the back-board” (5). Editha is punished for her abstruse reasoning at the end of the first chapter. Unable to decide exactly which “clothes philosophy” to subscribe to, she fails to provide Adeline with any shoes at all. Adeline’s body rebels:


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“Mamma, mamma!” cried she, “you forget to send for a pair of new shoes for me; and see, how the stones in the gravel have cut me!” This sight, this appeal, decided the question in dispute. The feet of Adeline bleeding on a new Turkey carpet proved that some clothing for the feet was necessary; and even Mrs Mowbray for a moment began to suspect that a little experience is better than a great deal of theory. (7) Unfortunately, Mrs Mowbray continues to expose her daughter to “a great deal of theory” gleaned exclusively from the work of male authors. Indeed, Adeline’s body remains the proving ground of “experimental philosophy” throughout the novel. As Adeline matures, the danger increases, for Editha introduces her to the tenets of Frederic Glenmurray, who bewitches her daughter with “the fatal fascination of his style” and Godwinian schemes of a world rid of false rites such as marriage (14). While the narrator condemns Editha Mowbray for dabbling in “experimental philosophy”, Opie does not reject all manner of female education or philosophy. Indeed, it appears as though she is responding to Wollstonecraft’s own trenchant observations on contemporary education for women: “One cause of this barren blossoming I attribute to a false system of education, gathered from the books written on this subject by men who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than affectionate wives and mothers” (Vindication 7). While Wollstonecraft points her finger at Dr Gregory, Milton, and Rousseau among others, Opie adds Godwin to that list, for his theory – when enacted in society – literally results in making his female converts “alluring mistresses”. As an adult, Adeline’s bleeding feet are no longer the issue, but rather her sexuality and consequently her reputation as a “pure” woman. The Christ-like imagery of Adeline’s wounded feet in early childhood foreshadows the images of the Magdalen that dominate her adulthood. Yet Adeline’s paradoxical characterization also contradicts traditional Christian iconography of innocence and experience. Although consistently shown to be a self-sacrificing woman, Opie’s heroine is nonetheless driven by intellectual independence, as well as filial obedience. She accepts Glenmurray’s doctrines because her mother teaches them to her but she puts them into practice because, unlike her mother, she believes in practical philosophy. She marries her mother’s radical tenets to her grandmother’s lessons in the

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requisite “feminine” virtues: “In a short time Adeline, stimulated by the ambition of being useful, (for she had often heard her mother assert that utility was the foundation of all virtue), became as expert in household affairs as Mrs Woodville herself” (9). Never entirely subsumed into either her mother’s or her grandmother’s ideology, Adeline ultimately proves most loyal to her own uncompromising system of consistent thought and action. Furthermore, she rigorously holds both Glenmurray and her mother to that standard. For example, she does not want Glenmurray to abandon his principled rejection of marriage unless directed to do so by her mother, even as she maintains her own objections to marriage: “I should think [. . .] my mother must have had too much of marriage to wish me to marry; but if she should insist on my marrying, I will comply, and on no other account” (89). In Adeline’s philosophical system, filial love always commands greater obedience than either romantic love or abstract theory. Like Godwin, Frederic Glenmurray draws “a picture of the superior purity, as well as happiness, of a union cemented by no ties but those of love and honour” (Adeline Mowbray 15). Adeline echoes Godwin’s rhetoric when she too declares marriage to be an institution “unworthy of regard from a rational being” (89). In Political Justice, Godwin rejects “cohabitation” because he believes it to be detrimental to the pursuit of personal liberty and the perfecting of “reasonable men”. He does not dismiss sexual relations between the sexes but assumes that “rational” justice will prevail: “Reasonable men then will propagate their species, not because a certain sensible pleasure is annexed to this action, but because it is right the species should be propagated; and the manner in which they exercise this function will be regulated by the dictates of reason and duty” (Political Justice III: 220). Opie’s novel questions whether or not men can “regulate” their sexual desire through “reason and duty”. Individuals heedlessly pursue their own desires in the social system of Adeline Mowbray and Frederic Glenmurray. Once her reputation is compromised she is fair game for all men, including her stepfather. Glenmurray’s theory – when adopted by Adeline – puts her in very real sexual danger. The landscape Opie uncovers in Adeline Mowbray seethes with male desire, not rational and unprejudiced judgment. Opie bases her representation of the conflict between destructive masculine desire and ideal philosophy upon a careful reading of Godwin. In Political Justice, Godwin does not abandon the vocabulary that positions the woman as a sexual object in a power relationship between two (or more) men. Even as he sets out his program of


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“rational” sexual relations, he sexualizes the woman’s function. On the one hand, he objects to marriage because it treats the woman as “property”, yet his underlying rationale does nothing to displace women from that role: “So long as I seek to engross one woman to myself, and to prohibit my neighbour from proving his superior desert and reaping the fruits of it, I am guilty of the most odious of monopolies” (III: 220). Godwin idealizes a sort of sharing of the wealth, with femininity as the middle term: “We may all enjoy her conversation; and, her choice being declared, we shall all be wise enough to consider the sexual commerce as unessential to our regard” (II: 511). The “we” who decides on these interactions is most decidedly male and perhaps not as uninfluenced by society’s judgments as he would like. Even as Godwin postulates a utopian society in which individual worth is dependent upon the deployment of reason and women are valued for their intellectual and rational “accomplishments”, he retains prejudices that bias the case against women. In an early chapter on justice in the first edition of Political Justice, Godwin pragmatically asserts that, regardless of democratic maxims, it is true that one man is of more worth than another. His argument goes on to suggest that just as a man is more deserving than a beast, an archbishop is more valuable than a chambermaid. Of course, Godwin strengthens his case by making his archbishop the Abbé Fénelon, a moralist, philosopher, and poet, whose “worth” in terms of “justice, pure unadulterated justice” would prejudice the case against a working-class female servant. Godwin goes on to further sexualize his argument even as he insists upon a domestic and even personal referent. He argues that he would acknowledge the superiority of Fénelon even if the chambermaid were his wife, mother or benefactor: “What magic is there in the pronoun ‘my’ to overturn the decisions of everlasting truth? My wife or my mother may be a fool or a prostitute, malicious, lying or dishonest” (III: 146, my emphasis). The above statement contains an explicit judgment based upon received notions of feminine sexuality, as well as an insistent – if hypothetical – refusal to acknowledge the claims of the domestic passions. Opie contests Godwin’s unquestioning choice of the “prostitute” as the absolute nadir of feminine worth in her novel: Adeline, both “virtuous” and “fallen”, challenges society’s ability to make a clear-cut decision as to moral desirability.6 And, in representing the Godwinian philosopher as repeatedly torn between his love of a woman and his love of a theory, she also contests Godwin’s idealistic vision of impartial “justice”.

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Glenmurray, like Godwin, rejects the rites of society which name women “wives”, but he continues to use society’s vocabulary to name them “whores”: “He was firmly resolved never to marry; and it was very unlikely that Adeline, though she had often expressed to him her approbation of his writings and opinions, should be willing to sacrifice everything to love, and become his mistress” (26, my emphasis). Adeline’s declamation “against marriage, as an institution at once absurd, unjust and immoral” (28) convinces Glenmurray of both her romantic passion for him and her devout commitment to his philosophical theory. Her “extraordinary speech” wins Glenmurray’s respect but also exposes her to the insults of Sir Patrick O’Carrol. Her mother’s acknowledged lover and future husband can only understand the philosophy of “free love” in terms of his own worldly knowledge of women. He immediately fixes her with a “libertine gaze” (27) and applauds her “honesty”: “I always was sure that what you just now said was the opinion of all your sex, though they were so confounded coy they would not own it” (29). In the first of several exchanges between Adeline and Sir Patrick, each presents to the other a definition of the phrase: “the life of honour”. Sir Patrick employs it as a euphemism for sexual promiscuity while Adeline takes it literally. She innocently accepts it as “a very excellent name for the pure and honourable union which it is [her] wish to form” (29). But Glenmurray understands both ends of the conversation and is given a graphic example of the failure of his theory when put into practice. Unable to reconcile Sir Patrick’s “licentiousness” with Adeline’s “innocence”, Glenmurray re-reads his own theory with a “libertine gaze”. For Sir Patrick, Godwinian theory is far from radical; it merely provides male readers with yet another self-serving euphemism for transgressive sexual relations. Whereas Godwin – and Glenmurray – posit a society in which human reason reigns supreme, Wollstonecraft – and Opie – acknowledge that reason often serves nefarious aims: “Men, in general, seem to employ their reason to justify prejudices which they have imbibed, they can scarcely trace how, rather than root them out” (Wollstonecraft, Vindication 12). Yet even Glenmurray’s philosophical belief in “reason” is somewhat vindicated in the context of conservative masculine desire. The introduction of Sir Patrick O’Carrol into the text inaugurates an important shift in the representation of Adeline’s lover. While Opie does not hesitate to suggest that Glenmurray’s reluctance to marry contributes to Adeline’s social “fall”, she critiques traditional marriage as well. Whereas the radical philosopher chooses


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not to marry because of his theory – a theory he would abandon if Adeline would allow it – Sir Patrick O’Carrol eagerly marries again and again in order to benefit financially and to compel women to serve his sexual appetites. Editha’s bigamist husband plots to steal her money and seduce her daughter. Once he marries Mrs Mowbray and blocks Adeline’s proposed marriage to Glenmurray he employs the language of fatherhood to further intimidate his stepdaughter: You are the most extraordinary motherly young creature [. . .] Instead of your mother giving the nuptial benediction to you, the order of nature is reversed, and you are giving it to her. Upon my word I begin to think, seeing you in that posture, that you are my bride begging a blessing of mamma of our union, and that I ought to be on my knees too. (52) Once on his knees, Sir Patrick grasps a “weeping” Adeline and “presses her to his bosom”. While Adeline lives in his house, he subjects her to both disturbing sexual innuendo and physical assault.7 His final seduction attempt forces the heroine into the arms of Glenmurray. Adeline responds to a “vehement declaration of the ardour of his passion” by thrusting her stepfather away from her; he falls and is knocked unconscious. Fearing that she has killed him and reluctant to expose his predatory sexuality to Editha, she flees (60). Adeline finds herself “on a turf seat by the road side” because “[her] mother’s roof is no longer protection to [her]” (60). Indeed, Editha’s passion for Sir Patrick blinds her to his incestuous desire for her daughter and forces Adeline into the marginal position of the “wandering woman”. Eventually, Editha’s jealousy causes her to withdraw economic, as well as sexual, protection from her daughter; she epitomizes Wollstonecraft’s image of the mother “lost in the coquette” (Vindication 49). Adeline learns of her mother’s marriage from a faithful maid whose awareness of the economics of wedlock surpasses that of the educated Editha: “Only think, miss! they say, and I doubt it is too true, that there have been no writings, or settlements, I think they call them, drawn up; and so sir Pat have got all” (49). Adeline’s response to the news of her mother’s marriage foreshadows their inevitable rupture: “Then has my mother given me up, indeed! [. . .] and the once darling child may soon be a friendless outcast”. This moment of legal vulnerability is the first of a series that unsuccessfully pit Adeline against the laws of England, administered by and for advocates of masculine sexual and economic desire. Editha’s “roof” fails to

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protect Adeline precisely because it no longer belongs to her. Adeline, in a scene that echoes similar moments in Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman and Hays’s Victim of Prejudice, fortuitously encounters Glenmurray after leaving her mother, and embraces the principle of “free love”. She insists upon a “rational” union forged without the connivance of the church or state. At this point in the narrative, Glenmurray once more offers to compromise his principles and marry Adeline. But again she holds him to his published tenets: “if you are still convinced your theory is good, why let your practice be bad? It is incumbent on you to act up to the principles that you profess” (66). While Adeline’s lover is finally a sympathetic character, and far more developed than either Wollstonecraft’s Darnford or Hays’s William Pelham, he is also fatally flawed, if in somewhat contradictory ways. Although he is most assuredly the seducer in his relationship with Adeline, he remains innocent of any direct assaults upon her honor. It is the written word that compels the heroine to love “That author whose works [she] had long delighted to meditate, and who had completely led [her] imagination captive, before the fascination of his countenance and manners had come in aid of his eloquence” (20). His more compelling fault lies in his readiness to sacrifice Adeline in the name of theory and in spite of his superior knowledge of the world: “For he knew, though [she] did not, the extent of the degradation into which the step which her conscience approved would necessarily precipitate her; and experience alone could convince him that her sensibility to shame, when she was for the first time exposed to it, would not overcome her supposed fortitude and boasted contempt of the world’s opinion” (37). Glenmurray repeatedly tests Adeline’s intellectual mettle and she emerges victorious. It is precisely her rejection of society’s attempts to treat her as a “whore” which makes the novel of interest. In spite of overwhelming condemnation by those around her, and her lover’s willingness to compromise the theory that converted her, Adeline persists in seeing her actions as just and honorable. She refuses to compromise principle by marrying Glenmurray and the novel implicitly values her constancy over his vacillation or her mother’s hypocrisy. Furthermore, the narrator explicitly condemns Glenmurray’s eager betrayal of his principles: Glenmurray thought that he was willing to marry Adeline merely for her sake; but I suspect it was chiefly for his. The true and delicate lover is always a monopolizer, always desirous of calling the woman


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of his affections his own: it is not only because he considers marriage as a holy institution that the lover leads his mistress to the altar; but because it gives him a right to appropriate the fair treasure to himself, – because it sanctions and perpetuates the dearest of all monopolies, and erects a sacred barrier to guard his rights, – around which, all that is respectable in society, all that is powerful and effectual in its organization, is proud and eager to rally. (38) The above quotation – with its echo of Godwinian rhetoric – is representative of the narrator’s double discourse on the subject of Adeline and Glenmurray’s “left-handed marriage”. The narrator asserts that the groom-to-be is a “slave of selfishness” who marries from an egotistical desire to own the woman he loves, rather than solely out of respect for the “holy institution” of marriage. Yet, the passage ends with a seemingly positive paean to marriage. Note, however, that what is lauded is not an intrinsically sacred ceremony but the “power” commanded by the institution. Adeline’s “fall” from grace is not a fall out of grace with God but rather from the good graces of a judgmental and often hypocritical society. Glenmurray “knows” of the “degradation” heaped on those whom society labels a “whore”, but Adeline knows of the dangers of being a “good woman” when definitions of virtue depend upon conjugal connections. Although her “rational” desire to join Glenmurray in a “union founded on rational grounds and cemented by rational ties” is compromised by her obvious need for “protection”, she deliberately seeks that protection outside of England’s legal and ecclesiastical system (40). Such institutions have been discredited by her mother’s betrayal and her stepfather’s “criminal passion” (43). And while Adeline’s reluctance to sign a marriage contract does indicate her loyalty to Glenmurray’s philosophical position, this should not obscure her own investment in remaining a “free” woman. She benefits from her refusal to marry: to paraphrase Locke, she retains the “Property” which she holds within her “own Person”. The marriage contract in nineteenth-century England required the woman to forfeit all rights over property – both her financial holdings and dominion over her own sexuality – in exchange for the economic and social protection afforded by marriage. Adeline continually asserts her right of self-ownership and demands respect based upon her own intrinsic worth. When approached by a former admirer seeking to displace Glenmurray as her “protector”, Adeline attempts to define her position as a respectable “sexual” woman who is not a “wife”: “And

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suppose I am not his wife [. . .] is it then given to a wife only to be secure from being insulted by offers horrible to the delicacy, and wounding to the sensibility, like those which I have heard from you?” (115). Carole Pateman points out that the two most significant “sexual contracts” in patriarchal contract theory are the marriage contract and the prostitution contract; both are examples of men “contracting for use of a woman’s body” (The Sexual Contract 199). Throughout Opie’s novel, Adeline must negotiate between these two systems of heterosexual contract even as she searches for a third option. In Political Justice, Godwin rejects Locke’s social contract theory as coercive: “Acquiescence is frequently nothing more, than a choice on the part of the individual, of what he deems the least evil” (I: 188). According to Pateman, social contract theory replaces a paternal patriarchy with that of a “fraternal brotherhood” committed to upholding contractual society. Its ties are bound by evidence of sexual triumphs in which ascendancy over women – the “subjects” of patriarchy – also signifies superiority over other men: The sons overturn paternal rule not merely to gain their liberty but to secure women for themselves. Their success in this endeavor is chronicled in the story of the sexual contract. The original pact is a sexual as well as a social contract: it is sexual in the sense of patriarchal – that is, the contract establishes men’s political right over women – and also sexual in the sense of establishing orderly access by men to women’s bodies. (Pateman 2) In Opie’s text, both Adeline and Glenmurray must contend against a community of men whose fortunes are inextricably linked together and to whom they represent a threat. Their relationship defies conventional description of sexually transgressive relations. In a sentence that reverses earlier formulations like those found in Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman, Glenmurray writes that “Adeline was the victim neither of her own weakness nor of my seductions” (75). Adeline’s consistent purity of motive and virtuous countenance continually challenge the parade of men who first admire her as an honorable woman, but who can only desire her sexually after she is identified to them as Glenmurray’s “mistress”. Opie’s narrative cleverly plays with conventional attempts to categorize feminine sexuality based on reputation and appearance; Adeline’s situation remains profoundly ambivalent. Because of her virtuous appearance and nature, the men who meet her assume that she is married to


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Glenmurray. The first man Adeline encounters after she begins living with her lover is Mr Maynard, an old friend unaware of Glenmurray’s philosophical repudiation of marriage. Ironically, Maynard and Adeline engage in a conversation concerning the habits of streetwalkers. When later recounting this exchange to his sisters, Maynard makes the following comparison: “[Adeline’s] own dress, manners, and expression, were such an admirable comment on her words, and she shone so brightly, if I may use the expression, in the graceful awfulness of virtue, that I gazed with delight, and somewhat of apprehension lest this fair perfection should suddenly take flight to her native skies, toward which her fine eyes were occasionally turned” (72). Once Maynard discovers that Adeline and Glenmurray are “merely” lovers, however, he discards all evidence of Adeline’s virtue and exposes the male desire that lies on the other side of sentimental hyperbole. In spite of Glenmurray’s assertion that “no wife was ever more pure than Adeline”, Maynard assumes that the couple’s hasty departure was motivated by sexual jealousy on the part of Glenmurray even as he turns from deifying Adeline as an angel to denigrating her as “fallen” (79). Like Sir Patrick, Maynard cannot resist over-reading Glenmurray and Adeline’s words through the lens of his own libertine worldview. In the context of a society which privileges surface appearance and a “reputation” for chastity, the problematic relationship between Glenmurray and Adeline – neither a marriage contract nor a prostitution contract – is somewhat redeemed. Even as Opie condemns the consequences of radical theory, she satirizes the hypocritical society that shuns the lovers. It is a world incapable of understanding the true nature of intellectual thought and radical practice. In an early exchange between Adeline and a respectable acquaintance, the friend warns her against associating with Glenmurray for “they say one should not notice him” because of “what he is”. When Adeline asks if he is more than “a celebrated writer, and a man of genius”, her friend continues, “I do not exactly know what; but I believe it is a French spy, or a Jesuit” (24–5). Opie pokes fun at the ignorance required of the conventionally naive young woman; Adeline’s acquaintance is not quite sure as to why Glenmurray is a dangerous man to know. Perhaps more significantly, however, Opie explicitly acknowledges society’s tendency to turn intellectual and sexual transgression into political and/or religious bogeys. The critique continues in an account of the rumors which surround Glenmurray’s duel with Sir Patrick: “It was soon told all over the city that Sir Patrick O’Carrol and Mr Glenmurray had fought a duel, and that the latter was dangerously wounded; the

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quarrel having originated in Mr Glenmurray’s scoffing at religion, king, and constitution, before the pious and loyal baronet” (35). Just as Adeline’s words can only be understood as licentious, Glenmurray’s actions can only be perceived as treasonous. Opie points to the ways in which society ignores or misreads even the conventionally appropriate actions of the radical philosopher. The icons of British society, “religion, king, and constitution”, are invoked to disguise sexual violence toward unprotected daughters. The unspoken crime here is Sir Patrick’s sexual assault on Adeline, an action that is not only violent but also incestuous in the eyes of the church (Wolfram 29). Throughout the novel, bigamy, deceit, and explicitly unequal power relations characterize traditional marriages, while Glenmurray’s and Adeline’s unorthodox union is almost entirely celebrated. The following passage from the novel, in which Opie describes the relationship between Adeline and Glenmurray after their “elopement”, led The Critical Review to reluctantly accuse her of idealizing “vice”: “Hours, days, weeks, and months spent in a manner most dear to the heart and most salutary to the mind of Adeline! – Her taste for books, which had hitherto been cultivated in a partial manner, and had led her to one range of study only, was now directed by Glenmurray to the perusal of general literature; and the historian, the biographer, the poet and the novelist, obtained alternately her attention and her praises” (Adeline Mowbray 66). While living with Glenmurray, Adeline also learns French and Italian even as traditionally feminine lessons are not neglected. She nurses her lover through a series of debilitating illnesses and struggles to manage their finances. Their illicit “marriage” remains superior to any other heterosexual relationship in the novel, “cemented by one of the strongest of all ties – the consciousness of mutual benefit and assistance” (66). Even in the midst of one of Adeline’s worst trials, the illness of her estranged mother, the lovers are shown to be at peace with one another and with nature: “The sun was below the horizon, but the reflection of his beams still shone beautifully on the surrounding objects. Adeline, reclining her cheek on Glenmurray’s arm, gazed in silence on the scene before her” (87). Those familiar with Godwin’s Memoirs might also hear an echo of the philosopher’s description of his own relationship with Wollstonecraft: “Mary rested her head upon the shoulder of her lover, hoping to find a heart with which she might safely treasure her world of affection; fearing to commit a mistake, yet, in spite of her melancholy experience, fraught with that generous confidence, which, in a great soul, is never extinguished” (Memoirs 258).


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Opie further redeems Adeline in the eyes of the reader by contrasting her true virtue to the assumed “purity” of socially respectable women. Maynard’s sisters, who laugh with glee upon learning that Adeline is a “mistress” and not a wife, reveal all the faults of the conventionally pure. They embody the kind of women Mary Wollstonecraft felt her society produced; they relish Adeline’s sexual and social “fall” from grace because they mistakenly “confound virtue with reputation” (Vindication 132). Glenmurray’s female cousins also shun Adeline, gazing upon her with “the bold unfeeling stare of imagined superiority” (Adeline Mowbray 127). The narrator, however, reveals to the reader what the innocent (and socially exiled) Adeline does not know, that one woman pursues an affair with a “gallant” under her husband’s “accommodating protection” and the other “coquetted with many men, but intrigued with only one at a time” (127). Throughout the novel, those who condemn Adeline’s supposed vices are inevitably revealed to be in want of virtue themselves. Nevertheless, Adeline eventually does internalize the prejudices of society. In the second and most tragic seduction in the novel, Adeline accepts society’s condemnation of her actions. She eventually regrets her commitment to a philosophy of free love that the world can only understand as libertinism. Mrs Mowbray’s denunciation of her as a daughter, as well as Adeline’s own fear of failing as a mother, initiates her change of heart. In the first case, Opie minimizes Mrs Mowbray’s condemnation by acknowledging its roots in sexual disappointment. At one point in the novel, Mrs Mowbray rationalizes her abandonment of Adeline to Dr Norberry by insisting that Adeline’s “coquettish arts” had “seduced the affections of the man [she] loved” (98). Even when reminded of her maternal duty to Adeline, Mrs Mowbray cannot overcome personal vanity; she vows to forgive her daughter only when Adeline is on her deathbed. During a foiled attempt at reconciliation, she rejects Adeline after her daughter’s pregnant body betrays the sexual nature of her relationship with Glenmurray: “[Her] eyes glanced from her face to her shape. In an instance the fierceness of her look returned: ‘Shame to thy race, disgrace to thy family!’” (105). Opie places Mrs Mowbray’s conventional response to sexual transgression in the context of her irrational jealousy over Sir Patrick’s perverse desire for Adeline. Again, as in the beginning of the novel, Mrs Mowbray sees her daughter’s body only in the context of her own. Adeline’s pregnancy provides undeniable proof of the youthful sexuality that attracts her husband’s “libertine gaze”. Unable to either accept or acknowledge

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Sir Patrick’s rejection of her own aging body, Mrs Mowbray names Adeline a “seductress” and hence, not her daughter. The good Dr Norberry, who represents the voice of the conservative but compassionate community which rejects Adeline and Glenmurray’s philosophical position but not the young lovers themselves, judges Mrs Mowbray much more harshly than he does Adeline. He vows to “renounce” Mrs Mowbray, in spite of the heroine’s objections: “Why, how could I have the heart to do otherwise, when she whitewashed herself and blackened you?” (110). The pregnant Adeline’s feelings of guilt are further increased by a conversation she has with a child tormented by his playmates. Adeline, meaning to do well, suggests that the child return to his mother but he replies, “No, I won’t go to her; I don’t love her: they say she is a bad woman, and my papa a bad man, because they are not married” (131). Adeline’s encounter with a “victim” of society’s prejudices against illegitimacy convinces her that she must marry for the sake of her unborn child. But, before Adeline and Glenmurray can marry, she loses their child: “Anxiety and agitation had had a fatal effect on the health of Adeline; and the day after her encounter on the terrace she brought forth a dead child” (135). This stillbirth leads to her subsequent self-condemnation. If, in the eyes of society, Adeline’s pregnant body serves as a marker for an illicit sexual relationship with Glenmurray, than the death of the child acts as an indictment of their relationship for the heroine herself. Although even here, the narration undermines the heroine’s self-castigation by suggesting that her mother’s cruelty contributes to Adeline’s illness. Glenmurray’s health and philosophical beliefs also fail in the course of the same chapter; while on his deathbed, he attempts to atone for his “seduction” of Adeline by planning her marriage to his cousin. Charles Berrendale is a gentleman, similar to the philosopher in appearance, but different in his principles. Glenmurray, although aware of his cousin’s faults – Berrendale had been married to the daughter of a slave owner from the West Indies and on his wife’s death had “sold” his son to his father-in-law for an annual income – entrusts Adeline to him. Indeed, Glenmurray encourages his cousin’s suspect admiration of Adeline. At one point, Adeline’s lover perceives that Berrendale “feeds his passion” for “the unconscious Adeline” by pretending to read even as he observes her every action (148). The two men proceed to negotiate for her as Glenmurray panders to his cousin’s desire:


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“It is a book, Charles,” continued Glenmurray, “which the more you study the more you will admire; and I wish to give you a clue to understand some passages in it better than you can now do.” This speech deceived Adeline, and made her suppose that Glenmurray really alluded to the book which lay before Berrendale: but it convinced him that Glenmurray spoke metaphorically. (146) Whereas Glenmurray had once been determined to protect Adeline from the “licentious gaze” of desiring men, he now encourages it by “selling” Adeline as a good nurse and housekeeper. He deliberately (and even playfully) engages in a masculine rhetoric of sexuality completely inaccessible to a “reader” like Adeline. Finally, and in spite of his own reservations, he encourages Adeline to marry his cousin as he lays dying; thus, he employs the psychologically coercive force of a deathbed request to pressure Adeline into abandoning her philosophical and moral principles by embarking on a legal union with a man she does not love. Before marrying Berrendale, however, Adeline struggles to secure a social position independent of the marriage contract. Although Glenmurray wills Adeline what remains of his fortune, she cannot claim it because of the legally unsanctioned nature of their relationship. She embarks on a teaching career only to see it destroyed when Mary Warner, a former maid, reveals her past. Adeline eventually succeeds in writing moral tales for children, a profession that she continues to pursue throughout her marriage to Berrendale and even after its end. Significantly, the text never suggests that imparting morality to young minds is an inappropriate task for the heroine. Indeed, the novel represents Adeline’s writing as empowering: “Glenmurray’s bookseller accepted [her work]; and the sum which he gave, though trifling, imparted a balsam to the wounded mind of Adeline: it seemed to open to her the path of independence; and to give her, in spite of her past errors, the means of serving her fellow-creatures” (175). The independent Adeline does not marry Berrendale until her position as a compromised and unprotected woman becomes untenable; she eventually learns that her reputation as a “fallen woman” restricts her ability to function within the public sphere, even if she comes equipped with money and wit. In an encounter with a lustful lawyer, Mr Langley’s fee is taken out in sexual violence: “Charming fine woman upon my soul!” cried he, speaking through his shut teeth, and forcibly squeezing her fingers as he spoke; “and

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if you ever want advice I should be proud to see you here, at present I am particularly engaged,” (with a significant smile;) “but – .” Here Adeline, too angry to speak, put the fee in his hand, which he insisted on returning, and, in the struggle, he forcibly kissed the ungloved hand which was held out, praising its beauty at the same time, and endeavoring to close her fingers on the money. (178) Finally, Adeline throws the money onto the floor and runs into the street, only to be accosted immediately by two men who recognize her as Glenmurray’s former “mistress” and assume that she is in the market for a new protector. The 1805 edition of the novel makes quite clear the sexual nature of their interest in Adeline: “How do you do, my fleet and swift girl?” said one of the gentlemen, patting her on the back as he spoke: – and Adeline, roused at the insult, looked at him proudly and angrily, and walked on. “What! angry! If I may be so bold,” (with a sneering smile), “fair creature, may I ask where you live?” “No, sir,” replied Adeline; “you are wholly unknown to me.” “But were you to tell me where you live, we might cease to be strangers [. . .] Pray who is your friend?” “Oh! I have but few friends,” cried Adeline mournfully. “Few! the devil!” replied the young templar; “and how many would you have?” Here he put his arm round her waist: and here his companion gave way to a loud fit of laughter.” (178–9) In this second instance of roadside wandering and now without the alternative of radical philosophy, Adeline chooses the “safety” of the marriage contract in order to escape the stigma of prostitution. 8 In a moment of panic, she names Berrendale her protector and then, in compliance with her own theory of absolute honesty, she marries him: “I have used the sacred name of wife to shield me from insult; and I am therefore pledged to assume it directly” (179). All of Adeline’s encounters with men after Glenmurray’s death, from Langley to Berrendale, share a common theme: women are restricted to sexual “intercourse” with male society. Mr Langley refuses Adeline’s repeated attempts to enter into an economic relationship with him. Although she wants to hire his services, she soon learns that her role is delimited by her own position as a beautiful body that men expect to purchase themselves. Just as Langley takes a kiss rather than a coin – indeed, he tries to pay her for the kiss – Charles Berrendale gives Adeline his name in exchange for her body.


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Opie’s negative characterization of Adeline’s legal marriage is perhaps her most overt subversion of conventional morality. Her heroine, however, persists in seeing her marriage as due punishment for past “errors”: “She fancied that all the sufferings she underwent were trials which she was doomed to undergo, as punishments for the crime she had committed in leaving her mother and living with Glenmurray; and as expiations also. She therefore welcomed her afflictions, and lifted up her meek eyes to heaven [. . .] with the look of tearful but grateful resignation” (185). It is as a wife, rather than as a “mistress”, that Adeline sheds Magdalen tears. Indeed, in her representation of the Berrendale marriage, Opie provides her readers with a textbook illustration of the abuses of “legalized prostitution” as they were outlined in the numerous political tracts of her contemporaries, particularly the Vindication. An example of Wollstonecraft’s “voluptuous tyrant” (Vindication 30), Berrendale selfishly “monopolizes” the financial, sexual, and culinary resources of the household. His mammoth appetites require Adeline’s self-denial, which the heroine unconvincingly attempts to frame as a “blessing” rather than a curse: “she ate her simple meal in silence: and while her pampered husband sought to lose the fumes of indigestion in sleep, she blessed God that temperance, industry and health went hand in hand; and, retiring to her own room, sat down to write” (184). In her portrayal of Berrendale’s food-induced stupor, Opie indirectly alludes to his sexual demands upon Adeline and the brutality of a marriage of convenience even as she continues to stress the heroine’s determined recourse to writing as the only possible “path to independence”. Adeline soon becomes pregnant and after the birth of a daughter Berrendale’s behavior worsens. He tells the world that Adeline is his mistress and not his wife, engages in affairs in their home, and then finally abandons her altogether. He returns to Jamaica and illegally marries again; significantly, the wealthy woman he marries is a slave owner known for her own prodigious sexual appetites. The marriage contract which Adeline had signed in order to avoid the prostitution contract only exposes her to further insult; in order to marry again, Berrendale denies its existence and Adeline is once again named a “whore” by men who seek to possess her. Berrendale evades the rule of law by turning Adeline’s vexed reputation against her. Like the heroines of The Wrongs of Woman and The Victim of Prejudice, Adeline learns that the words of “fallen women” have little “currency” in a social marketplace controlled by men invested in silencing them. Throughout her final trials, Adeline maintains a meek and demure

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demeanor, as well as an intense belief in her own guilt. Her selfcondemnation allowed Opie’s contemporaries to read her novel as a conventional indictment of radical philosophy. Yet, the narrative continually contradicts Adeline’s self-portrait by introducing into the text alternative readings of her life. One of the determining factors in Adeline’s self-denunciation is her interaction with Mary Warner. The housemaid convinces Adeline that it was the “illicit” relationship between Adeline and Glenmurray which led to her own subsequent fall into vice: “You taught me that marriage was all nonsense, you know; and so thought I, miss Mowbray is a learned lady, and she must know best, and so I followed your example” (204). Adeline reacts to this statement with a “phrensy” of “anguish” and, later in the novel, the tortures of her languishing death are compounded by the “remorse and horror” she feels “for having led by her example and precepts an innocent girl into a life of infamy” (221). Adeline’s belief in her own guilt, however, is undercut by the narrator’s careful revelation that Mary Warner had “fallen” long before she was employed by Adeline. Although too late to save Adeline, first a repentant Mr Langley and then Mrs Pemberton indicate that Mary’s sexual transgression took place prior to meeting the heroine (204, 266). Furthermore, as in Father and Daughter, Opie goes to some lengths to indicate that Adeline’s example leads to a respectable engagement. Colonel Mordaunt, Adeline’s first and most persistent suitor, falls in love with Emma Douglas because she publicly states her admiration for Adeline: “I shall ever regret, not that I saw and conversed with miss Mowbray, but that I did not see and converse with her again and again” (230). Emma’s spirited defense of Adeline leads Colonel Mordaunt to see a resemblance between the two women, even though Emma’s plainness and Adeline’s beauty are commented upon. It becomes clear that their similarity rests not on mere physical attractions, but on the innate purity of spirit that characterizes both women. They share “a countenance never distorted by those feelings of envy, and expressions of spite, which so often disfigure some women, – converting even a beauty into a fiend” (234). Opie rewards the freethinking and generous Emma by marrying her off to Colonel Mordaunt, thereby ending her novel with one conventionally “happy” marriage. Significantly, again revealing Opie’s reinscription of Wollstonecraft’s precepts, theirs is a companionate marriage based upon mutual respect and shared principle rather than mere sexual passion. The most compelling disruption in the novel is the presence of


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Adeline’s black servant, Savanna. The revolutionary nature of Savanna’s characterization is somewhat undercut, however, by the romantic racism that pervades Opie’s descriptions of her. Although an articulate and insistent critic of the status quo, as well as an ideal selfsacrificing Christian heroine, Savanna’s colonial present almost entirely subsumes her Afro-Caribbean past. Homi Bhaba’s critique of post-Enlightenment representations of the colonial subject as a form of mimicry that is “a complex strategy of reform, regulation, and discipline, which ‘appropriates’ the Other as it visualizes power” has limited but significant application to Opie’s text (126). In order to accompany her white “other”, Adeline, Savanna gives up her son to the care of another presumably English benefactress and sees her husband only once after entering Adeline’s employ. Furthermore, Savanna defies Berrendale not because he once held slaves but because he is cruel to her “angel lady”. Although Savanna’s actions are those of a strong and independent heroine, Opie’s clumsy attempts to replicate Caribbean dialect in Adeline Mowbray further diminish Savanna’s forthright statements of defiance in the novel. As Moira Ferguson points out in Subject to Others, some representations of black speech in the early nineteenth century can mark “the introduction of linguistic difference – the alleged and erroneously perceived contrast between speech in ‘formal’ English and slaves’ ‘scant’ English – [and] emphasizes the ‘stupidity’ of slaves. This in turn reinforces the need for British intervention” (103).9 Savanna, an escaped black slave, enters the narrative just prior to Berrendale, a character who benefits from the plantation system. Adeline encounters Savanna in a moment of mutual trial. On the way to spend two of their last three guineas on a pineapple to tempt Glenmurray’s failing appetite, Adeline comes upon a public drama that seems to foreshadow her own future. Savanna, her fainting husband, and their crying child are about to be arrested for debt: “Adeline thought on Glenmurray’s danger, and shuddered as she beheld the scene; she felt it but a too probable anticipation of the one in which she might soon be an actor” (138). While others in the crowd dismiss Savanna as an “ugly black b—h”, Adeline sees a reflection of her own experience and gives the family her small cache of money. Indeed Adeline’s identification with Savanna is so intense that she seemingly fails to note that Savanna is Afro-Caribbean until the crowd’s deprecating remarks draw her attention to it. Opie’s intent in introducing Savanna into her text appears to be twofold. Firstly, such a characterization contributes to abolitionist

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discourse intent upon representing black men and women as thinking subjects. Opie also overturns notions of female sexuality that stigmatize all black women – stereotyped as naturally promiscuous – by associating them with white prostitutes (Gilman 225). In Adeline Mowbray, Savanna and the heroine are linked because they challenge conventional prescriptions of how a proper British woman should look and behave; an ignorant populace that does not recognize true virtue persecutes both of them. Secondly, Opie refigures radical constructions of slavery. Her text revises Wollstonecraft’s metaphor for the eighteenth-century British woman: “They may be convenient slaves, but slavery will have its constant effect, degrading the master and the abject dependent” (Vindication 5). Opie suggests instead that the escaped black slave can serve as an empowering model for the psychologically shackled white British woman. Just when Adeline abandons her quest for self-ownership, Savanna enters the novel as an individual who has literally reclaimed herself from an economic and legal system that had considered her “chattel”. Savanna continually counters Adeline’s meekness with expressions of anger. Whereas Adeline endures Berrendale’s tyrannies, Savanna protests them: “though she did not vow eternal hatred to her master, she felt herself very capable of indulging it, and from that moment it was her resolution to thwart him” (182). At one point, Savanna buys Adeline a delicacy with her own money, indicating that as a paid servant she has more freedom than a British wife. When she sees Berrendale’s disapproval, Savanna “snap[ed] her fingers in his face, and looking at him with an expression of indignant contempt, exclaimed, ‘I buy dem, and pay for dem wid mine nown money; and my angel lady sall no be oblige to you!’” (183). Savanna continually subverts the power structure which indebts women to men and makes them “property”. She breaks Adeline’s habit of tolerance in her relations with Berrendale by revealing the true extent of his perfidy. When Savanna returns from a visit to her husband in Jamaica, she makes known not only Berrendale’s bigamy, but also his attempt to silence her by returning her to slavery.10 In counterpoint to Savanna’s defiance, Adeline continues to accept her role as a “fallen woman”. Even when widowed by Berrendale, her looks marred from smallpox, she refuses to engage herself to Colonel Mordaunt, who loves her with “a real and lasting passion” (215). In her rejection of Colonel Mordaunt Adeline betrays her past beliefs and personal experience: I look on all suffering and mortifications which I meet with as


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latent blessings, as expiations inflicted on me in mercy by the Being whom I adore, for the sins of which I have been guilty; and, in the second place, because it gives me an opportunity of proving, incontrovertibly, my full conviction of the fallacy of my past opinions, and that I became a wife, after my idle declamations against marriage, from change of principle, on assurance of error, and not from interest or necessity. (216) In the above passage, Adeline represents herself as a “good” woman who desired marriage for its own sake. Yet the reader most certainly remembers that, in fact, Adeline marries Berrendale solely out of “interest” and “necessity” and not “from change of principle” at all. She accepts his protection only in the face of encroaching male violence. Nonetheless, Adeline comes to articulate a conviction of her sinfulness and past error. She internalizes the contemporary attitude that women who transgress sexual mores are necessarily evil. In spite of Opie’s attempts to redeem Adeline in the eyes of the reader, the heroine herself is forever just outside redemptive influences in the novel itself. The most pernicious result of succumbing to the seductions of male language is that, once fallen, Adeline remains cut off from the society of “pure” women. While Adeline perceives her unconventional actions as just, she seeks out the companionship of respectable women. Once she believes herself to be “fallen”, however, she hides from them. In the final chapters of the novel, Adeline’s reluctance to emerge from her self-imposed solitude leads directly to her death; she isolates herself from the powerfully redemptive triad formed by the Quaker minister Mrs Pemberton, her atoning mother, and the outspoken Savanna. Throughout the novel Editha Mowbray’s narrative of self-improvement runs parallel to her daughter’s movement into abjection. Just as Savanna counters Adeline’s self-denunciation, the Quaker minister Rachel Pemberton teaches Editha Mowbray the virtues of generosity and loyalty. The friendship between Mrs Pemberton and Mrs Mowbray is also based upon interdependence and shared experience, as their first encounter demonstrates. Editha saves the Quaker from an attacking bullock while Rachel, in her turn, provides Adeline’s mother with the information she needs to actively search for her daughter. With novelistic serendipity, Rachel Pemberton has met Adeline and approved of the woman while regretting her actions. Interestingly, it is in the Quaker minister’s history that we find the novel’s most overt allusion to Wollstonecraft’s biography. In an episode early in the

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novel, she travels to Portugal in order to care for a friend, just as Mary Wollstonecraft had once traveled to Lisbon in a vain attempt to nurse Fanny Blood. And just as Godwin had stressed Wollstonecraft’s deep regard for Blood in his Memoirs, Rachel Pemberton tells Adeline that she feels for her friend “as solicitous as thou about thy Glenmurray” (123). Her calling as a female minister is also more unorthodox than would first appear. According to Jennifer Carter Gadt, women were welcomed into the Quaker ministry in the early part of the eighteenth century, but due to increasing strictures against women ministers their numbers were declining in the 1780s and 1790s. Opie, an intimate acquaintance of the prominent Quakers Elizabeth Fry and John Joseph Gurney, would have been aware of the status of female ministers at this time. I find Opie’s linkage of the novel’s moral center, an outspoken but disenfranchised Quaker minister, to Wollstonecraft particularly thought provoking in light of the “female philosopher’s” increasingly vexed reputation in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Throughout the novel Rachel Pemberton preaches about both religion and women’s education. If Adeline represents one half of Wollstonecraft’s history – the half Opie would like to “vindicate” – then Rachel represents the aspects of Wollstonecraft’s life and work which require no defense at all and deserve to be incorporated into “reputable” discourse. Although Rachel Pemberton remains critical of Adeline’s choice to become Glenmurray’s mistress, she acknowledges her intrinsic virtue and actively works with Mrs Mowbray to bring her home to Rosevalley. But just as Adeline was prepared to succumb to societal pressure and marry Glenmurray for the sake of their child, she determines to die for her daughter Editha, thereby freeing her from the “dangerous example” of a redeemed “fallen woman” (238). She does, however, will two legacies to her daughter. The first is a “written record” which teaches that “the woman who feels justly, yet had been led even into the practice of vice, however she may be forgiven by others, can never forgive herself” (239). The conventional moral of Adeline’s memoirs, however, is undercut by two elements that further link her narrative to those of Wollstonecraft’s Maria and Hays’s Mary. In her autobiography, Adeline foregrounds her own innate – albeit misunderstood – goodness: “I did not act in defiance of the world’s opinion, from any depraved feeling, or vicious inclinations” (239). And like Mary Raymond’s mother, she insists that her daughter know the whole truth about her life; Editha’s innocence will not depend upon a naive acceptance of society’s rules. Adeline employs


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her rhetorical power as “Mother” to break the silence between the “fallen woman” and the virgin. The second gift Adeline leaves to her daughter is the protection of Mrs Mowbray, Mrs Pemberton, and Savanna. This triad finally forms itself around the dying body of Adeline; although it is too late for Adeline herself, her daughter Editha will benefit from a powerful and multi-faceted community of women.11 To a certain extent, Adeline’s daughter functions as a final “proof” of the heroine’s intrinsic purity. Editha Berrendale possesses her father’s name but her mother’s appearance.12 In a letter to Mrs Mowbray, Adeline writes: “O! look on her, my mother, nor shrink from her with disgust, although you see in her my features; but rather rejoice in the resemblance, and fancy that I am restored to you pure, happy, and beloved as I once was” (257). Throughout most of the novel Adeline defies categorization because her appearance belies her reputation and she reproduces that “pure, happy, and beloved” visage in her child; Editha Berrendale innocently reminds both Mrs Mowbray and Adeline of her mother’s virtuous past. Indeed, at one point, the sight of her daughter prompts the dying heroine to wish for life rather than death (240). If the “written record” composed by Adeline functions at least partially as a vehicle for her self-proclaimed shame, the manifest purity of her daughter tempers that message. In the logic of the text, Editha survives as living testimony to Adeline’s enduring virtue. And whereas the “libertine gaze” of Sir Patrick and others had assaulted Adeline, her daughter is entrusted to the protective looks of loving and powerful women. Opie’s ideal community possesses the traditional strengths of Mrs Pemberton’s piety and Mrs Mowbray’s philanthropy – conventional feminine virtues undercut by Rachel Pemberton’s unorthodox role as a female minister and Editha Mowbray’s administration of her own wealth – as well as the defiant figure of the self-emancipated Savanna. And if Editha Berrendale serves as a testimony of Adeline’s purity, Savanna remains as an emblem of Adeline’s earlier philosophical radicalism. Opie’s final response to the twin dangers of male philosophers and bigamist husbands is a retreat into the woman-centered fortress of Rosevalley, structured by traditional religious piety and female virtues, but safe because women hold economic and moral power in trust for one another. Adeline’s “memoirs” – unlike Godwin’s Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft – are circulated between women who read the twinned narratives of sexual and intellectual transgression with compassion and understanding. If Adeline Mowbray; or, The Mother and Daughter

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documents the woman writer’s retreat – on the part of both Opie and her writer heroine – from public politics at the end of the eighteenth century, it simultaneously positions a realm of influence outside of patriarchal power structures. Opie’s vision at the end of Adeline Mowbray evokes the “feminist counter public sphere” theorized by Rita Felski in Beyond Feminist Aesthetics. Felski identifies the “feminist counter public sphere” as an “oppositional community”: Like the original bourgeois public sphere, the feminist public sphere constitutes a discursive space which defines itself in terms of a common identity; here it is the shared experience of gender-based oppression which provides the mediating factor intended to unite all participants beyond their specific differences. [. . .] The consciousness of membership in an oppressed group engenders a solidarity rooted in collective identity and in theory grants all participants equal status. (166) At the end of Opie’s text women from diverse backgrounds and of varying sexual reputations are linked by a commitment to one another that encompasses economic as well as emotional support. Adeline entrusts not only her daughter but also Savanna to Editha and Rachel. In a letter to her mother she writes: “I owe [Savanna], my mother, a world of obligation! She will make my last moments easy, and you must reward her. From her you will receive this letter when I am no more, and to your care and protection I bequeath her” (259). Although marred by implications of ownership, Adeline’s letter elaborates a complex system of duty and debt that will ensure Savanna’s freedom. Other women will protect her because they have great economic power and some social authority. As Savanna pragmatically notes, without money, compassion and care are thwarted. After observing Editha’s efforts for Adeline, she says: “This it be to have money [. . .] poor Savanna mean as well – her heart make all these, but her hand want power” (265). The “world of obligation” which brings together women of different races also extends itself to the “fallen”. By the end of the novel, Mrs Mowbray has learned how to use the “hand of power” to help women less powerful than herself. Instead of punishing Miss Woodville, the young woman who kept Adeline’s letters from her, she gives her enough money to save her from “ruin”. She also promises Adeline that she will give Mary Warner a living if she gives up her “vicious habits” (266). Unlike Wollstonecraft’s Vindication,


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which ends with an appeal to the powerful male reader, Opie’s text concludes with a vision of interdependent female unity: “as [Adeline] lay half-slumbering with her head on Savanna’s arm, and Mrs Mowbray, lulling Editha to sleep on her lap, was watching beside her [. . .] a smile illumined [the heroine’s] sunk countenance” (268). While I am tempted to conclude this chapter with a compelling vision of feminine unity – female bodies entwined in “obligation” to one another and no longer vulnerable to purchase in the marketplace of masculine desire – I instead end with a question. Is this exclusively feminine “world of obligation” an entirely positive alternative to an inherently flawed heterosexual union? While Opie posits an empowering space of female freedom, it is a world entirely cut off from the masculine “public sphere”. Whereas Editha Woodville had once unabashedly propounded her philosophical opinions, Adeline had challenged notions of female sexuality openly, and Rachel Pemberton had preached in public, their words now circulate only in the contained space of Rosevalley. Opie’s novel embeds within it both the positive and negative virtues of feminine utopias. Such visions of female power become increasingly problematic as the century progresses. The intimacy of Rosevalley threatens to become the claustrophobic space of the “domestic sphere” or the carceral site of the Magdalen Asylum later in the century. As I will show in the following chapters, women involved in social reform during the Victorian period – but largely bereft of the philosophical radicalism of the 1790s – must resist increasing injunctions against venturing outside of the private sphere and its narrowly defined moral duties. The exclusivity of a domestic refuge makes connections between “public” and “private” women increasingly difficult to negotiate.

4 Victorian Reclamations: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Protective Fictions in Mary Barton and Ruth

In the first half of Chastity and Transgression in Women’s Writing I have suggested that a small group of women writers participate in the construction of a “new” sexualized and politicized heroine; they then employ that figure in a critique of the hypocritical social and sexual mores which frustrate female “independence”. While the Victorian women writers I discuss in the next two chapters, Elizabeth Gaskell and Christina Rossetti, also employ the figure of the sexually transgressive woman in their writing, they do so in a very different social and political climate. The categories of “author” and “social reformer” are themselves vexed during the period. Many Victorian authors were committed to social “missions” which they pursued outside – as well as inside – the text. Charles Dickens proselytized against the Poor Law in Oliver Twist and the Ragged Schools in Hard Times, even as he actively worked to reform such legal and social institutions. John Ruskin not only wrote of the need to educate the poor but also lectured at the Working Men’s College. Elizabeth Gaskell’s own philanthropy manifested itself in many ways. As the wife of a Unitarian minister she regularly visited the poor of her husband’s parish, actively interceding to make their lives better; she also wrote “social problem” novels, including North and South, meant to mediate the divisive class boundaries that plagued post-agrarian England. For Gaskell, as well as for Dickens, Ruskin, and others, “social work” was enacted within the literary work, but also in conjunction with actual philanthropic activity. In Mary Barton (1848) and Ruth (1853), Elizabeth Gaskell calls attention to the ways in which the author – adept at narrative construction – can intercede when social mores lead to cultural scripts of poverty, prostitution, and death.1 Her “fallen women” are victims of oppressive 136

Victorian Reclamations

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discursive structures that propel them toward ruin rather than reform. In the mid-Victorian period, medico-moral narratives of sexually transgressive women reified the eighteenth-century Hogarthian narrative of the “harlot’s progress”: seduced, pregnant, abandoned, prostituted, and dead. Indeed, when Ruth’s lover, Bellingham, encounters her living in respectability years after he deserts her, he denies the initial evidence of his eyes because the Bradshaws’ respectable governess could not possibly be “his” seduced Ruth. He muses: “Poor Ruth! [. . .] he wondered what had become of her; though, of course, there was but one thing that could have happened” (Ruth 275). In response to a seemingly irrevocable script, Gaskell generates texts which make narrative itself the crucible of the “harlot’s progress” toward either vice or reclaimed virtue. In both Mary Barton and Ruth, the fate of Gaskell’s “fallen” heroines depends on their power over the “telling” of sexual transgression: what is told, who relates it, and who hears it. In the first novel, Esther, the eponymous heroine’s aunt and a repentant streetwalker, endlessly repeats her narrative of seduction and ruin in an attempt to redeem herself and to save her niece: “She must speak; to that she was soul-compelled; but to whom?” (Mary Barton 207). Esther’s storytelling, however, finally does not facilitate reintegration into her working-class community. Five years later, in Ruth, Gaskell employs another narrative construct: Ruth is saved from the full horrors of Esther’s fate because she tells her story only to sympathetic listeners willing to “rewrite” that narrative. In Ruth Gaskell links the social redemption of the “fallen woman” to the generation of what I shall call protective fictions; these are embedded narratives that disguise the details of Ruth’s sexual knowledge and shield her from the culturally accepted script of female sexual transgression and its requisite punishments. Gaskell’s novel evades the predestined scenarios of the tragic “fallen woman”, interrupting the conventional “harlot’s progress” by substituting other stories to explain the heroine’s sexual status as an unmarried mother. The primary “authors” of such tales within the text are the compassionate Bensons; they enter the novel after Ruth’s seduction and abandonment but before any recourse to suicide or prostitution. Indeed, Thurstan Benson literally “stays” Ruth’s steps, as she “rushes to the awful death of the suicide” (96). Gaskell’s heroine never resorts to the prostitution of her body because she receives an economic and religious education that allows her to re-enter a “respectable” community. By assuming “characters” suitable to the protective fictions generated around her, including the bereaved widow, the Magdalen, and the

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“Mother”, Ruth staves off the judgments of a moralistic society until her illegitimate child is nearly grown. In moving from early century to mid-century texts, it is important to note that the very discourse surrounding sexual transgression undergoes a marked change in emphasis. Romantic writers and theorists usually invoke the “fallen woman” as a figural and literal example of the failure of traditional education for women, as well as a measure of the limitations of British law and social policy. The Victorian period ushers in an emphasis upon the medico-moral causes and consequences of transgressive female sexuality for the respectable middle classes. As Judith Walkowitz notes: “The intellectual impoverishment observable in the literature on prostitution was a general feature of mid-century social research. The discussion of prostitution was denatured of the political content it had possessed in earlier decades [. . .] prostitution constituted a distressing street disorder that threatened to infect ‘healthy’ neighborhoods, but it no longer represented a social inequity that could spark a revolution” (41). The heroines of Wollstonecraft, Hays, and Opie steadfastly narrated their tales of wronged virtue to respectable auditors, but they also employed their ability “to think, to decide, and to act” for themselves (Opie, Father and Daughter 435). Victorian “fallen women”, whose stories are narrated in a variety of mediums, including moral tracts, medical treatises, novels, and poetry, tend to be acted upon; they are invariably the passive recipients of disciplinary policies. And indeed, even as Victorian social reformers painstakingly record narratives of sexual transgression, they simultaneously silence the women who provide them with the “data” they crave. Although I will later suggest that the “fallen women” represented by Gaskell and Rossetti share some key qualities with the sexualized heroines of radical Romantic women writers, it is also important to note that the passive sexual transgressor of the Victorian period also emerges during the mid-eighteenth century but linked to a very different tradition than the one I’ve outlined in the first chapters of this study. According to Linda Mahood, the first female penitentiary, London’s Magdalene Hospital, was established in 1758. The next refuge wasn’t built until 1787, but by 1900 there were over seventy such establishments throughout the United Kingdom (75). And although revolutionary proto-feminists, including Mary Wollstonecraft, tended to decry the establishment of these asylums and refuges, the conservative political climate of the early nineteenth century facilitated the growth of a “carceral network” around sexually


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transgressive women (Dobash et al. 72). Magdalen houses were the literal manifestations of a growing cultural desire to police female sexuality through law, medicine, and other institutional mechanisms. These “Refuges”, which usually required inmates to narrate their history upon admission, also stressed absolute silence on the subject of one’s past once allowed in. Fascination with the details of sexual transgression did not preclude the suppression of such stories; social reform was predicated upon replacing an “unacceptable” history with a reform narrative of repentance and the adoption of middle-class behavior and mores. Ann Jessie Van Sant discusses late eighteenth-century social reform in Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: These women, who had very real stories of their own to tell, were forbidden to speak of these actual experiences, even among themselves. It would have retarded their development as daughters of woe. Although concealing their stories, as well as burying their names in that of Magdalen, protected the women’s privacy, this separation from their past was part of the strategy for rewriting their future. As they played the pathetic role of repentant prostitute before a public audience, they became more thoroughly what they played. (36) Van Sant convincingly argues that even as Magdalens were displayed in order to evoke sympathy, as well as philanthropic donations from middle-class observers, their “real” stories of poverty, seduction, and prostitution – with their potential to shock and critique – were suppressed. Here then is the crucial difference between the sexualized heroine’s narrative and that of the repentant Magdalen. Although in both instances the power of narrative is privileged, in the first case, the transgression of social mores – whether deliberate, as in the case of Adeline Mowbray, or inadvertent, as in the case of Mary Raymond – offers an opportunity to critique repressive socio-political mores and legal systems. But in Victorian texts, middle-class mores, and the larger institutional systems that support them, are eventually exonerated from blame, while sexual transgression is figured as a personal aberration to be written over. Indeed, during the period in which we find the rise of the sexualized heroine, we also find narratives that relegate “fallen women” to the margins of the text. Institutional controls and narrative constructs increasingly insist upon differences between “virtuous” and “fallen”

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women. In the first case, Magdalen houses shut “contaminated” female bodies up – both literally and figuratively – while fiction develops a complex system of narrative markers to designate differences between “good” and “bad” women. Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story (1791) and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), among other texts, raise the specter of adultery and sexual transgression only to harshly punish it. For example, Inchbald’s adulteress heroine, the sprightly Miss Milner, whose story dominates the first part of A Simple Story, dies before the opening of the second volume. More significantly, however, her sexual transgression is never actually narrated; it takes place in the narrative gap between the two volumes. The second volume of the novel, much like Frances Burney’s Evelina, focuses on Miss Milner’s daughter’s admittedly vexed but ultimately conventional movement toward a respectable marriage. In Mansfield Park, Austen’s “fallen woman” – Maria Rushworth – serves as an antithetical foil to the virtuous and self-sacrificing heroine, Fanny Price. Fanny is rewarded with marriage to the man she loves but Maria is relegated to social exile. Indeed, we find an increasingly rigid narrative division between “virtuous” and “fallen” women as the unified sexualized heroine I have hitherto described disappears in the first decades of the nineteenth century.2 Instead two figures appear, both enmeshed within a medicomoral landscape obsessed with identifying and categorizing female sexuality: the “fallen woman” and her virtuous twin, the often sympathetic but always morally superior middle-class heroine. Middle-class women reformers contributed to the reclamation of “fallen women” and, in turn, were empowered by their entrance into the public sphere via the culturally approved medium of “good works”. In Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England, F. K. Prochaska identifies how Victorian social and religious education for women not only equipped them for philanthropic endeavors but also provided them with the justification to enter the public sphere as active subjects. Prochaska’s chapter on “women’s mission to women” places women at the very center of rescue work: Female agents worked the railway stations to warn newcomers of the dangers from procurers; and better late than never, they watched the police courts “to win the erring back to virtue”. Others preached in the streets, amidst the gambling and dogfighting; the more timid addressed passers-by from the church or schoolhouse doorstep in the hope of persuading them to come in for tea and sympathy. Some women braved the nation’s lodging-houses, where


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they passed out tracts and pleaded with the residents to attend public worship. (183) In Family, Love, and Work in the Lives of Victorian Gentlewomen, M. Jeanne Peterson also seeks to dispel stereotypical notions about Victorian women and their vaunted ignorance: “Victorian ladies knew about sex, sexual vice, prostitution, and pornography” (67). Both Prochaska and Peterson convincingly suggest that philanthropic work provided middle-class women with a rich field of employment and self-discovery. But many historians of Victorian social reform have come to see feminized philanthropy as a vexed issue. As Lynda Nead succinctly puts it: “one woman’s emancipation can be another woman’s subordination” (197). It is certainly true that female social reformers brought to their task a discourse of reclamation dependent upon middle-class social mores that privileged domesticity and their own status as “virtuous” women.3 Furthermore, most Victorian social reformers do not show the same readiness to critique the status quo evidenced by Wollstonecraft and other Romantic era proto-feminists. Nonetheless, their entrance into the dialogue surrounding prostitution was clearly feared by male social reformers intent upon demarcating absolute difference between transgressive and virtuous female sexuality. Moreover, some Victorian-era social reformers clearly saw their work with the “fallen” as a political gesture. Marion Reid, writing in 1847, forthrightly objected to an article in The Edinburgh Review that justified the exclusion of women from parliamentary debates: We suppose that [the article] alludes to those terrible disorders and desperate vices of society, a fearful and shuddering glimpse of which is all that her own ideas of propriety allow to a modest woman; and, if such be the case, we cannot help thinking that a better acquaintance with those dreadful evils, and even great efforts to amend them, are perfectly consistent with female delicacy: to the pure all things are pure. The possession of a truer and more complete knowledge on this painful subject, by women in general, would do more to lessen the numbers of the most unfortunate outcasts of society – many of them more sinned against than sinning – than all the secret discussions of the House of Commons. (92) In a rhetorical move common to that of earlier and more explicitly

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proto-feminist political treatises, Reid links “secret” political discussions between men to the perpetuation of naive and, therefore, seducible young women. Like Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays before her, Reid claims that the province of rescue work is particularly the realm of women. Most significantly, however, in rhetoric more reminiscent of Hays than Sarah Stickney Ellis, and foreshadowing that of Josephine Butler at the end of the century, Reid rejects the discourse of female domestic “influence” altogether, insisting “this so-muchtalked-of influence has utterly failed in obtaining even the faintest semblance of justice” (42). In rejecting the socially acceptable script of “woman’s mission to woman” Reid sets herself against most of the prominent male reformers, who, when they do allow for female philanthropy, grudgingly do so on the grounds of “female influence”. In Lectures on Female Prostitution: its nature, extent, effects, guilt, causes, and remedy (1842), an evangelical call to rational men, the Reverend Ralph Wardlaw suggests that there is a limited role for Christian women in the reformation of “fallen women”. When they encounter prostitutes, it should be with “tender sympathies” and “beneficent exertions”, but Wardlaw assumes that women philanthropists will approach their “fallen sisters” with an admirable aversion: “If [aversion] cannot, and perhaps ought not to be entirely canceled, – [it] should yet be controlled and regulated by correct principle” (145–6). When good women are unable to control their disgust, failure “leans to virtue’s side” (146). In other words, if a truly virtuous woman cannot overcome her “normal” repugnance toward a “fallen woman”, it only provides further evidence of her goodness. If one follows Wardlaw’s logic to its natural conclusion, any woman who enters too eagerly into reform work leaves herself open to charges of an enthusiasm which “leans to vice’s side”. For Wardlaw, the real work is to be carried out from the “pulpit” and by his “fellowmen” (161). Employing chivalric rhetoric, he calls upon his “men, to stand forward on [the feeble sex’s] behalf; to come with the shield of your protection, between them and danger; to prevent their degradation, and vindicate their honor; to screen their purity, from the putrid breath of pollution; [and] to maintain and elevate their virtue” (161). Wardlaw’s reluctance to enlist the “feeble sex” in his crusade is no doubt predicated upon his deep distrust of female sexuality. When discussing the causes of prostitution, he absolutely dismisses economic imperative and stresses instead the “positively vicious inclination” of the “fallen woman” (102). William Greg’s “Prostitution”, an article published in the Westminster


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Review in 1850, contradicts Wardlaw’s strictures against women philanthropists. Greg’s position, however, is ultimately as restrictive. In a text that draws much more heavily upon mid-Victorian medical and political theory, Greg’s analysis of the causes of prostitution directly acknowledges the economic needs that force women to prostitute their bodies. If “fallen women” are guilty only of poverty, then they should pose no threat to their respectable, but equally naive, “sisters”. Greg develops a model of female sexuality which completely denies the presence of desire in either the “fallen” or the “pure”: [Most women] fancy the original occasion of their lapse from virtue to have been either lust, [or] immodest and unruly desires, [. . .] it is the first never, or so rarely, that in treating of the subject we may be entitled to ignore the exceptions; [. . .] Women’s desires scarcely ever lead to their fall; for [. . .] the desire scarcely exists in a definite and conscious form, till they have fallen. In this point there is a radical and essential difference between the sexes. (456) Greg lauds the “radical and essential difference” between men and women, simultaneously revealing a deep anxiety about the potential power of an “unleashed” female sexuality. Echoing Victor Frankenstein’s fears when confronted by his own female “monster”, Greg insists that if women’s sexual desires were “ready, strong, and spontaneous [. . .] there can be little doubt that sexual irregularities would reach a height, of which, at present, we have happily no conception” (457). With a paradoxical logic, he argues that the absence of rampant sexual transgression proves that women have no innate sexual desire. According to Greg, when women do fall, “sexuality and self have no share”; women allow men to seduce them because “There is in the warm fond heart of woman a strange and sublime unselfishness, which men too commonly discover only to profit by – , a positive love of self-sacrifice, – an active, so to speak, an aggressive desire to show their affection” (459). Although Greg suggests that the respectable woman can facilitate the re-entry of the “fallen woman” into society, her role is necessarily bound by Greg’s own script of female asexuality. The underlying fear is that, unless the virtuous accept their own sexlessness, the story of the prostitute can “excite” and stir those necessarily “dormant” desires (457). Wardlaw and Greg, for very different reasons, promote a discourse of femininity that precludes cooperation between women of different sexual reputations. Yet their prose also reveals a reluctant fascination

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with the possibilities inherent in a meeting between the “pure” and the “fallen”. The male author to perhaps best envision the potentially transformative power of such a friendship is Charles Dickens. Dickens was intrigued by the possibilities of unified womanhood to right social wrongs, particularly in the arena of reclamation work. Indeed, in Oliver Twist and Dombey and Son, Dickens narrates meetings between pure and “fallen” female characters. But for the purposes of this chapter, I am more interested in his shadowy representation of the meeting between Emily and Agnes in David Copperfield. As both Amanda Anderson and Lynda Nead note, the reclamation of the “fallen” in David Copperfield is a distinctly masculine endeavor. David and Mr Peggotty successfully “reclaim” the seduced and betrayed Emily and in the process reform the prostituted Martha Endell. Yet just as Mr Peggotty, Emily, Martha, and the Micawbers are about to start a new life in Australia, David witnesses the following scene, which suggests a very different program of reclamation in which he has played no part at all: “As my eye glanced round this place, I thought I saw sitting, by an open port, with one of the Micawber children near her, a figure like Emily’s; it first attracted my attention, by another figure parting from it with a kiss; and as it glided calmly away through the disorder, reminding me of – Agnes! But in the rapid motion and confusion, and in the unsettlement of my own thoughts, I lost it again” (883–4). The meeting between the two poles of David’s masculine desire, the deliciously “fallen” Emily and the tantalizingly pure Agnes, “unsettles” the young hero; he can scarcely imagine it, let alone acknowledge it. Dickens cleverly points to a female solidarity that lies beyond the ken of male observers; not insignificantly, in this realm the newly reclaimed Emily has been integrated into a conventional family unit that includes small children and respectable women. In the above passage, Dickens pays tribute to a barely glimpsed and sovereign arena of feminized social reform with its own distinct politics of reclamation. In both Mary Barton and Ruth Elizabeth Gaskell explores the ways in which dialogue between the “pure” and the “fallen” can radically transform the fate of the outcast sexual transgressor. Esther’s story in Mary Barton, unlike Ruth’s, follows the generic progress of the doomed sexual transgressor; she never does escape the toils of prostitution and alcoholism. Mary Barton envisions the rescue of Esther, but fails to enact it. For the most part, Gaskell attempts to garner sympathy for Esther – as well as “real” British prostitutes – by highlighting the


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pathos and power of the conventional plot line. Whereas Ruth derives its narrative power by interrupting the “harlot’s progress”, Mary Barton details its presumably inexorable path. Esther’s story is one of missed opportunity. At different points in the novel John Barton, Jem Wilson, and Mary Barton all consider how they might reclaim her. Later in this chapter I argue that elements of their unfulfilled schemes for reformation reappear in Ruth. In Ruth, Gaskell cloaks her seduced and abandoned heroine in the assumed persona of the pregnant “Mrs Denbigh”, widowed cousin to the Reverend Benson and his sister, Faith. But Gaskell first explores the possibility of cloaking the “fallen woman” in a respectable persona in Mary Barton. Esther has only one encounter with her “pure” niece, the novel’s eponymous heroine; the “fallen” aunt brings Mary the evidence that proves her father’s guilt even as it exonerates her lover. Prior to that visit, Esther exchanges the clothes of a streetwalker for those of the poor but “decent” working class. The disguise allows her to imagine herself as a respectable woman: “She looked at herself in the little glass which hung against the wall, and sadly shaking her head, thought how easy were the duties of that Eden of innocence from which she was shut out; how she would work, and toil, and starve, and die, if necessary, for a husband, a home, – for children” (292). But believing herself unworthy of redemption and thus determined not to reveal her true history, Esther assumes her role too thoroughly. She pretends an indifference to Mary that she is far from feeling: “she had wished to impose upon her with her tale of married respectability, and yet she had yearned and craved for sympathy in her real lot” (297). With the assumption of “respectable” silence, Esther successfully repels too close an interest in her story on the part of Mary and thereby rejects the potentially redemptive love offered in her niece’s innocent kiss and intuitive concern (298). In reuniting Mary and Esther, Gaskell challenges a cultural script dependent upon strict lines of demarcation between “pure” and “fallen” characters. In Mary Barton, as in Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman, the fate of the dual heroines – bound together by multiple likenesses – depends upon a recognition of that sameness. Esther and Mary not only resemble each other physically, but Mary’s story nearly replicates her aunt’s all too exactly; indeed, only Esther recognizes her niece’s vulnerability to Harry Carson’s charm: “As she is loving now, so did I love once; one above me far” (209). More importantly, perhaps, the two women share familial links forged through death. While Mary immediately acknowledges their affinity, Esther cannot.

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In the following passage, Gaskell’s proliferating pronouns make it difficult to determine each woman’s actions: [Esther] had felt as if some holy spell would prevent her (even as the unholy Lady Geraldine was prevented, in the abode of Christabel) from crossing the threshold of that home of her early innocence; and she had meant to wait for an invitation. But Mary’s helpless action did away with all reluctant feeling, and she bore or dragged her to a seat, and looked on her bewildered eyes, as, puzzled with the likeness, which was not identity, she gazed on her aunt’s features. (293) Esther hovers on the doorstep as if she were Coleridge’s Lady Geraldine of Christabel, a false “mother”, while Mary collapses upon seeing a double of her dead mother.4 Confronted with the fainting form of her niece, Esther must take action. It is she, and not Mary, then, who, in ushering a “helpless” woman over the “threshold”, assumes the subject position of the innocent Geraldine. The confusion of identity persists for, if Mary and Esther resemble one another in their sexually transgressive desire, Esther is like her respectable sister in appearance. Furthermore, Esther’s desire to protect her niece arises not only out of love for her sister’s daughter, but also from the memory of her own child, Anne, who resembled Mary and whom Esther was unable to save from starvation. Hence, the Gordian knot of female relation – the confounding of mother, daughter, and sister – makes the boundaries of virtue and vice nearly impossible to demarcate. Yet this “puzzling” complexity simultaneously allows women to reclaim each other by articulating a “likeness” which is yet not “identity”.5 Of course, Esther does hide her past from Mary and accepts the social conventions that mark her as irrevocably different from her virgin niece. Outcast from the domestic realm of good women, Esther only tells her true story to suspicious men she encounters in the streets. Both John Barton and Jem initially ignore Esther’s entreaties to “listen” because they assume that “public women” use language promiscuously; they hear a sexual proposition rather than a plea. Esther first confronts John Barton, but in his grief over his wife’s death he flings her away from him. She staggers into the street and a passing policeman arrests her for public drunkenness. Once in the lock-up, an “abode of vice and misery”, Esther’s “anxious mutterings” are presumed to be the murmurings of an intoxicated prostitute and as such are ignored by the superintendent who watches over her:


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If he [the superintendent] had listened, he would have heard these words, repeated in various forms, but always in the same anxious, muttering way. “He [John Barton] would not listen to me; what can I do? He would not listen to me, and I wanted to warn him! Oh, what shall I do to save Mary’s child? [. . .] How can I keep her from being such a one as I am.” (170) In obscuring the authoritative “he” who listens to Esther, thus linking John Barton, a chartist, to a prison superintendent, Gaskell makes a sweeping indictment of society’s failure on the part of both conservative and progressive forces to “listen” to the prostitute. John Barton, a protective father, does not tell his daughter the truth about her aunt; this indirectly contributes to Mary’s involvement with Harry Carson. The superintendent identifies and isolates deviant elements of society – presumably drunken and discredited prostitutes – and keeps them off respectable streets. The confinement of the prostitute’s story of seduction and ruin puts innocent girls at risk because it maintains the premise that they are immune from repeating her narrative. Bereft of a home, the moral center of the working-class community, Esther must trace her family’s history through the evidence she finds in the streets: “I put this and that together, and followed one, and listened to the other; many’s the time I’ve watched the policeman off his beat, and peeped through the chink of the window-shutter to see the old room, and sometimes Mary or her father” (211). Esther becomes a storyteller out of necessity – she puts “this and that together” – because she is an outsider. Yet her narrative skills are significant; she possesses the compelling if terrifying power of the outcast exemplar. Like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, with whom she is associated, she cannot refrain from reciting her history (208, 464). She holds Jem in her thrall with her tale of woe: “You must hear it, and I must tell it; and then see after Mary, and take care she does not become like me” (209). But Esther’s narrative demonstrates agency as well as victimization. Her prohibited acquisition of carnal knowledge allows her to trespass the conventions of what a good woman can see, hear, and relate to others; indeed, she seeks out information. Esther proves herself to be a particularly canny reader of the streets: “She stood still for a minute, imagining to herself the position of the parties, guided by the only circumstance which afforded any evidence, the trailing mark on the dust in the road” (289). Her ability as a detective links the domestic to the political plot; the valentine which leads

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her to believe in Jem’s guilt provides Mary with evidence to indict John Barton of a political crime.6 Interestingly enough, the figure of the “fallen woman” reappears in the poem Mary had copied for her father on the other side of Jem’s valentine: “God help her, outcast lamb; she trembling stands” (154). Gaskell, however, counters this conventional image of the prostitute as victim by empowering Esther with the key to the novel’s plot. And Esther evokes similar strategies of survival in Mary. After their meeting, Mary rejects the role of the patient and silent “good” woman as modeled to her by the blind Margaret; she actively establishes Jem’s alibi and testifies upon his behalf. Esther is not allowed the comfort of knowing she has done well; indeed, she castigates herself for having failed: “How could she, the abandoned and polluted outcast, ever have dared to hope for a blessing, even on her efforts to do good?” (290). Far worse than the condemnations of others is her acceptance of the role of polluted outcast. Not only does Gaskell’s narrative refute Esther’s logic – she does “do good” – but the narrative voice explicitly rejects Esther’s selfcondemnation: “Poor diseased mind! and there were none to minister to thee!” (291). Here, then, we find a narrative convention also deployed in Opie’s Adeline Mowbray; although the “fallen” heroine expresses a strong conviction of error, the third-person narration counters it. Esther errs by telling her true story to the wrong people; she hides it from the one person, Mary, who can possibly redeem her and so dies convinced of her sinfulness: “‘Has it been a dream then?’ asked [Esther] wildly. Then with a habit, which came like instinct even in that awful dying hour, her hand sought for a locket which hung concealed in her bosom, and, finding that, she knew all was true which had befallen her, since last she lay an innocent girl on that bed” (465). While Mary Barton finally fails to reclaim the “fallen woman”, Gaskell’s portrait of Esther does inaugurate the author’s increasingly critical approach to contemporary strategies of reform and regulation: As evidenced by the work of Wardlaw, Greg, and Reid, Victorian social investigators were obsessed with the details of the prostitute’s story; they endlessly draw upon first-person accounts in their quest to classify, regulate, and thus eradicate transgressive female sexuality. In Mary Barton, Gaskell invests Esther with powers of narrative worthy of such microscopic interest. In many ways her portrayal fits the tradition of prostitution narratives favored by the social reform movement and her story serves as an exemplary warning to the novel’s pure but


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vulnerable heroine. Even the details of Esther’s life conform to the most popular stereotypes of Victorian prostitution. In the tradition of Wardlaw’s dangerous sexual transgressors, she acknowledges that it was her love of dress and her love of a man “above [her] far” which led to her initial seduction (209)7 and, like the prostitutes interviewed by such noted nineteenth-century social scientists as Henry Mayhew and A. J. B. Parent-Duchâtelet, Esther begins to sell her body only because she has no other means of providing for her illegitimate child. Yet, as I have shown, Gaskell’s representation of Esther’s trustworthy narrative powers also diverges from the conventions of Victorian medico-moral discourse.8 Gaskell’s narratives of sexual transgression were written during a period of transition in the field of social reform. In the 1840s, medicomoral discourse preached the transcendent virtues of Christianity as the antidote to vice, but as the century progressed, reformers increasingly turned toward institutional remedies such as Magdalen houses and Lock hospitals; later reform tended to rely on cooperation between the courts, the police, and the medical establishment to enforce compliance. The strongest influence on British treatments of prostitution was undoubtedly A. J. B. Parent-Duchâtelet’s De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris (1836). Based on years of interviewing prostitutes and observing their behavior, Parent-Duchâtelet’s work outlined the socio-economic causes of prostitution in great detail and ultimately concluded that only legal regulation could stem the tide of immorality and its most regrettable consequence, the spread of syphilis.9 Although most English writers were careful to distinguish their specifically “British” approach to the subject from that of the “immoral” French, they, like Parent-Duchâtelet, ultimately directed their energies toward ridding their country of the threat of sexually transmitted disease rather than remaining focused on the situation of the prostitute herself: “[Syphilis] attacks more especially that part of the population which [. . .] forms at once the strength and the wealth of nations [. . .] where it does not occasion sterility, [it] gives birth to an unfortunate and degenerate race” (Wardlaw 41). But Lectures on Female Prostitution also diverges from nineteenthcentury scientific methodology. Indeed, Wardlaw’s reform program superficially resembles Gaskell’s in its reliance on the power of Christianity: “The Bible way of getting at the heart, of reaching the very root of the evil, of effecting a change in the dispositions and springs of action, – is, to urge ‘repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ;’ – to tell the tale of the cross [is] the

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refuge from despair” (Wardlaw 128). In Mary Barton, even John Barton, vengeful over his wife’s death, believes that “religion” might “save” Esther (171) and “the tale of the cross” determines much of Thurstan Benson’s actions in Ruth. Throughout both novels, however, Gaskell counters the more punitive aspects of Christian reform. Wardlaw, for example, pairs the “Bible way of getting at the heart” with a moralistic condemnation of the “fallen woman”. Unlike proponents of legalized prostitution, who usually portray the prostitute as a victim in need of protection by the state, Wardlaw portrays her as a dangerous “seductress” who lures men into sexual and economic commerce. Prostitutes “throw their toils around [men], in such artful ways, that to escape from their meshes would be a kind of moral miracle” (64). In his condemnation of the “harlot” as the “moral pest of the community”, Wardlaw does not hesitate to employ the Bible as a weapon of condemnation, at one point quoting Solomon’s judgment of the prostitute: “[She] lieth in wait as for a prey and increaseth the transgressors among men” (62). I would suggest that Gaskell’s portrayal of Esther in Mary Barton refutes such stereotypical representations of “public women”. Wardlaw’s prostitute victimizes innocent men, but Esther “lies in wait” for John Barton and Jem in order to save Mary from seduction. Although Wardlaw preaches pity and compassion for the penitent, his model of “deviant” female sexuality tends to pose the figure of the prostitute as both dangerous and finally irredeemable. While frequently alluding to Christ’s mercy to the repentant Mary Magdalene, he also insists upon the “sexual propensity” of the prostitute. He rejects ParentDuchâtelet’s contention that poverty is the first cause of prostitution because, in order to accept that hypothesis, one must believe women’s stories. Instead, he characterizes the “fallen woman” as an unreliable witness to her own experience; she might be “tempted” to utter “misstatement and prevarication” rather than “truth” (100): “It may be far from easy to determine the proportions of guilt belonging, respectively, to the two parties, – the seducer and the seduced” (109). In spite of allusions to the redemptive story of the Magdalen, Wardlaw believes that the loss of virtue is final. His unpitying representation of female sexual transgression reinscribes the narrative of irrevocable moral deterioration: “Rising is a thing unknown. It cannot be. It is all descent” (52). Although written as a work of “reform”, Wardlaw’s remains most interested in stopping “depraved women” from seducing otherwise good men who then might bring sexual disease into the domestic sphere.


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Wardlaw’s portrayal of the prostitute as a whispering woman who tempts men from streetlamp shadows is opposed by the “weeping” victimized Magdalen found in the work of William R. Greg, a journalist and social reformer. Greg’s “Prostitution”, published in the Westminster Review (1850), and more closely modeled upon ParentDuchâtelet’s work, ventriloquizes the words of women themselves and initially positions itself as a text written for their benefit. He repeatedly quotes Mayhew’s interviews of prostitutes as they were published in the Morning Chronicle in 1849.10 From those narratives Greg draws a portrait of the typical prostitute as well meaning, desperate, and deeply penitent. He condemns society’s reluctance to forgive the “fallen woman” as the foremost cause of her falling further: “we turn contemptuously aside from the kneeling and weeping Magdalen, coldly bid her to despair, and leave her alone with the irreparable” (471). Greg then conducts a thorough critique of the lack of employment and inadequate pay of “unprotected” women as well as the willingness of the criminal underworld to exploit that vulnerability. While acknowledging that the best deterrent of prostitution would be better wages and better living conditions for poor women, Greg nonetheless determines that widespread social reform is impossible. Instead, sweeping changes to the governing and policing bodies of Britain will regulate what he deems impossible to eradicate. The language of redemption inexorably deteriorates into the economic: “All experience has shown that you cannot, by enactment, prevent any demand from being met by an adequate supply” (489). Even as Greg acknowledges that male desire requires a “supply” of prostitutes, he, like Wardlaw, eventually concludes that the burden of reform falls upon “sensible and right-minded men” (Greg, 502). The latter reformer turns to a French model that regulates prostitution through the institutions of government and medicine. Although Greg begins his discussion with the words of working-class women who occasionally prostitute themselves to feed their children, he transforms them into pathetic and penitent Magdalens who eventually metamorphose into the bogey of syphilitic whores; they are diseased women who threaten an otherwise efficient economic system of male desire and female availability. Men are not asked to control their sexual desire but to set up better systems to police the consequences of that desire. Finally, Greg’s recourse to the Lock hospital and the registered brothel as the ideal instruments of re-education is particularly problematic given his former critique of the inadequate employment available to British women. He applauds Parent-Duchâtelet’s system

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because French statistics indicate that after regulation “reformed” women abandoned prostitution. Given that the large majority of the French women re-entered society working as milliners, seamstresses, washerwomen, shopkeepers, and domestic servants – the same professions that Greg recognized as actually contributing to British prostitution – his acceptance of Parent-Duchâtelet’s institutional solution is strikingly unconvincing. Even as Greg recognizes that poverty often forces a woman into prostitution, while social condemnation keeps her there, the remedy he suggests reinforces that same economic position and marks her even more explicitly as a sexual transgressor.11 As a strong proponent of reform it is likely that Elizabeth Gaskell would have been cognizant of the contradictory nature of medicomoral discourse surrounding the figure of the sexually transgressive woman.12 Indeed, Gaskell’s personal relationship with William Greg would seem to ensure her knowledge of his writings in particular.13 Her novels certainly reveal a familiarity with the medico-moral vogue for cataloging and analyzing “the extent, causes and consequences” of prostitution, but Gaskell’s novels also revise contemporary portraits of the “fallen woman”. She rejects not only Wardlaw’s traditional image of the immoral and worthless prostitute, but also Greg’s panacea of institutionalized regulation. Gaskell’s “fallen women” are neither seductively whispering “Eves” nor sexless and weeping “Magdalens”. Indeed, one way to measure the differences between Gaskell’s representations of prostitution in Mary Barton and Ruth is to examine the reception of those narratives by Greg himself. The reformer found Esther to be a very convincing prostitute; indeed, in “Prostitution” he quotes Esther to exemplify the distress of the diseased and dying prostitute: “I could not lead a virtuous life if I would” (quoted from Greg 454; Mary Barton 213). But in a discussion of Ruth published in 1873, Greg rejects the portrayal of Ruth as extraordinary because of the sexually experienced heroine’s persistent “innocence” (Literary and Social Judgments 114). As many scholars have pointed out, Elizabeth Gaskell’s portrayals of “fallen women” were influenced by her social work among prostitutes in the forties and the fifties.14 Her opinion of the type of pocket-book philanthropy most practiced by the rich was scornful: “The numbers of people who steadily refuse Mr Gaskell’s entreaties that they will give their time to anything, but will give him or me tens & hundreds, that don’t do half the good that individual intercourse, & earnest conscientious thought for others would do!” (The Letters of Elizabeth Gaskell 193). Gaskell goes on to say that her disgust is aroused by the donor’s


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belief that in giving money he can dictate how that money is used: “If you knew and saw as I do how freedom of opinion & action are bought & sold, you would feel sorry that men can not find a better way of evincing their good feeling than by giving money.” Her own philanthropic activity was in fact threefold. She not only worked within Manchester neighborhoods but she also donated money to charity garnered from authoring texts which were themselves aimed at ameliorating social wrongs. Some of the profits from “Lizzie Leigh” (1850), her tale about a mother’s search for her “fallen” daughter, were donated to a “Refuge”, presumably for “fallen women” (The Letters of Elizabeth Gaskell 113). Perhaps the most perfect conflation between Gaskell the social worker and Gaskell the writer are her efforts in 1849 on behalf of a young woman named Pasley. Gaskell wrote to Charles Dickens, an expert because of his administration of Urania Cottage, a “home for homeless woman” supported by Angela Burdett Coutts, on two separate occasions asking for advice in arranging Pasley’s emigration out of England. Gaskell’s first letter to Dickens outlines Pasley’s history with great attention to its narrative detail, yet she also recognizes that Pasley’s redemption might depend on suppressing that story: “I want her to go out with as free and unbranded a character as she can” (The Letters of Elizabeth Gaskell 99). Although Gaskell suggests that Pasley accompany one of the Urania Cottage groups, Dickens refuses, either from fear that Pasley, who was not reformed under his aegis, might corrupt his “people”, or out of fear that they would harm Pasley. Dickens does, however, offer advice. He agrees that Pasley’s reformation depends on repressing her “past history”: “Let me caution you about the Cape. She must be profoundly silent there, as to her past history, and so must those who take her out [. . .] she will either be miserable [if she tells the truth] or flung back into the gulf from whence you have raised her” (The Letters of Charles Dickens 6: 29).15 As Amanda Anderson points out, Dickens was fascinated by tales of prostitution and yet repelled by them. Urania Cottage required its residents to remain silent as to their pasts, although only after Dickens had “ritually” recorded their narratives (71–2). Certainly Gaskell’s frustrating experiences with Pasley, as well as with Dickens, determined the social reform method proposed in Ruth. Gaskell’s initial commitment to a policy of emigration can be traced back to Mary Barton. Canada offers Mary and Jem the opportunity to start anew; no one will know their tainted narratives there. In later correspondence with Dickens, however, Gaskell begins to express

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some skepticism about the virtues of emigration. She writes that “the account of common emigrant ships is so bad one would not like to expose [Pasley] to such chances of corruption [. . .] Pray don’t say you can’t help me for I don’t know any one else to ask, and you see the message you sent about emigration some years ago has been the mother of all this mischief” (The Letters of Elizabeth Gaskell 99). Gaskell may have even picked up her distrust of emigrant ships from the pages of Dickens’s own journal, Household Words, a noted proponent of emigration but also a chronicler of its hardships in such articles as “Off to the Diggings” (17 July 1852) and “Safety for Female Emigrants” (31 May 1851). Gaskell eventually arranges Pasley’s departure, but only after providing her with a surrogate family: “a man and his wife going to the Cape, who will take loving charge of her” (Letter to Eliza Fox, The Letters of Elizabeth Gaskell 101). Just prior to writing Ruth, then, Gaskell’s efforts to “reclaim” Pasley alert her to the drawbacks of both emigration and institutional reform. Her desire to send Pasley to Australia arises from the moral dangers of the girl’s continued residence at an undiscriminating “Refuge”: “a literal refuge, for any destitute female without enquiry as to her past life being made, – all are received, and not classified. So it is a bad place, but what can we do?” (Letter to Charles Dickens, The Letters of Elizabeth Gaskell 100). In Ruth, Gaskell explores the option of reforming the repentant sexual transgressor within the English home. It is never suggested in Ruth that the heroine emigrate and the only character who advises Ruth to enter a Magdalen house is the mean-spirited Mrs Bellingham, who, like Opie’s Mrs Macfiendy, never refers to the heroine by name: “I wish to exhort you to repentance, and to remind you that you will not have your own guilt alone upon your head, but that of any young man whom you may succeed in entrapping into vice. I shall pray that you may turn to an honest life, and I strongly recommend you, if indeed you are not ‘dead in trespasses and sins,’ to enter some penitentiary” (Ruth 91). And just like Esther’s lover in Mary Barton, Mrs Bellingham sets Ruth upon her descent downward with fifty pounds for her “cooperation” (Mary Barton 210; Ruth 124). The site of reform in Ruth bears some similarity to Mary Barton’s unfulfilled plan to reclaim her aunt Esther: “Hope yourself, and trust to the good that must be in her. Speak to that, – she has it in her yet, – oh, bring her home, and we will love her so, we’ll make her good” (Mary Barton 463). In her 1853 novel, Gaskell rearticulates Esther’s vision of cloaking the sexually transgressive woman in the persona and dress of a “proper” Victorian wife. Faith Benson provides Ruth


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with the story of “Mrs Denbigh” and thereby makes it possible for her to re-enter respectable society. Although Thurstan Benson later repents of the lies he tells for Ruth’s sake, his sister refuses to accept it as immoral: “Ruth has had some years of peace, in which to grow stronger and wiser, so that she can bear her shame now in a way she never could have done at first [. . .] And I don’t think it wrong. I’m certain it was quite right, and I would do just the same again” (358). Gaskell echoes this sentiment of Faith’s in a letter she wrote defending her own fictional representation of Ruth: “‘An unfit subject for fiction’ is the thing to say about it; I knew all this before; but I was determined notwithstanding to speak my mind out about it [. . .] I wd do every jot of it over again to-morrow” (The Letters of Elizabeth Gaskell 220) The creators of fictions like “Mrs Denbigh” and “Ruth” face the same prejudices as the “fallen woman” herself. The “reputations” of Faith and Gaskell suffer because of their insistent challenges to received notions of feminine virtue; their narratives dare to suggest that a “fallen woman” is not without moral and social merit. Gaskell’s reactions to the negative criticism of Ruth are well documented in her letters, as well as in biographical treatments by Winifred Gérin and Jennifer Uglow. The novel, although well received in some circles, was burned and banned in others. At one point Gaskell writes: “I think I must be an improper woman without knowing it, I do so manage to shock people” (The Letters of Elizabeth Gaskell 223). In the novel both Faith and Thurstan suffer the consequences of their lies but only she receives rebuke in contemporary reviews. One reviewer implies that the “masculine” Faith leads her “amiable” but “weak” brother astray: “Certainly his ‘Faith’ was not faithful” (Sharpe’s London Magazine 126). Faith creates the fiction of Mrs Denbigh for Ruth’s sake; she embellishes it because she enjoys the process of designing a narrative: “I do think I’ve a talent for fiction, it is so pleasant to invent, and make the incidents dovetail together; and after all, if we are to tell a lie, we may as well do it thoroughly, or else it’s of no use” (149). Faith volunteers her “narrative theory” after Mr Benson chides her for telling Mrs Bradshaw that Ruth’s “husband” was a doctor. In an interesting way, then, Gaskell’s own fiction “dovetails” with Faith’s. At the end of the novel, Gaskell provides Leonard with a foster father in the figure of Mr Davis, the town physician. Although she accepts Mr Benson’s critique, Faith regrets being asked to abandon her “pretty, probable story” (149). Indeed, it is her loving attention to detail that effectively integrates Ruth into a maternal family history; the heroine takes the maiden name of Faith’s mother and wears her grandmother’s wedding

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ring. Furthermore, in a successful re-enactment of the meeting between Mary and Esther, Faith offers her mother’s name because she acknowledges an affinity to Ruth: “We are both of us great sinners in the eyes of the Most Holy; let us pray for one another” (129). Indeed, both Bensons welcome Ruth into their lives because they acknowledge “likeness” to her. The physically misshapen dissenting minister and the beautiful seamstress first encounter each other right after Bellingham’s desertion. Benson discovers her “crouched up like some hunted creature” under “an old hawthorn tree” and approaches. When she darts away from him, he attempts to follow her but, handicapped by his hunchback, he stumbles and takes an “unfortunate fall” (96). It is precisely his “fall” which entices the “fallen” Ruth back to his side: “she had a consciousness that some one looked for her kind offices, that she was wanted in the world, and must not rush hastily out of it” (97). The distracting and healing nature of both storytelling and gossip significantly contribute to Ruth’s reclamation. Immersed in the voluble effusions of Faith and Sally, the Benson family servant, Ruth is reborn into the Benson family. Initially, illness and pregnancy make her utterly dependent upon them, but she becomes their adopted “daughter” after taking an active role in both their home and the community. Mr Benson explicitly states their intent to the heroine: “Never fear leading an idle life, Ruth. We’ll treat you as a daughter, and set you all the household tasks” (171). Unlike Esther, who garners information through windows and doors, the social world of Eccleston embraces Ruth. In the “homely, pretty, old-fashioned” parlor, with its “open” windows and garden view, Faith gossips of “things and people which as yet [Ruth] did not understand”. Faith narrates Ruth’s new world in order to still “the long-drawn quivering sighs which came from the poor heavy heart, when it was left to silence, and had leisure to review the past” (142). Sally also contributes comforting narratives, offering Ruth either a “love story or a fairy story” (163). At one point in the novel, she entertains Ruth with a tale of her own comically disastrous courtship until Ruth falls asleep: “‘I thought I’d lost some of my gifts if I could not talk a body to sleep,’ said Sally, in a satisfied and self-complacent tone” (169). Narratives of reintegration and reform are generated within the Benson household and successfully interrupt the expected course of Ruth’s life. Faith, in particular, shows a keen awareness of the temptations offered to a poor and beautiful young mother. She acknowledges that reclamation depends upon an economic security impossible for


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most Victorian single mothers. She stops Ruth from becoming a seamstress because she understands its attendant poverty: “Her utmost earnings would not be more than seven or eight shillings a week, I’m afraid; and then she is so young and pretty” (123). Although Faith leaves her sentence unfinished, both Thurstan and the sympathetic reader perceive the potential narrative of a “fall” into prostitution that remains unsaid, but understood. Ruth avoids prostitution by retraining herself under the protective aegis of the Benson household. The Bensons’ model of economic selfsufficiency, based on self-sacrifice and denial, provides Ruth with a model that allows her to withdraw her body from purchase by male figures. Her first step in this direction is to reject the fifty pounds that the Bellinghams send to her: “While he [. . .] loved me, he gave me many things [. . .] and I thought of them as signs of love. But this money pains my heart. He has left off loving me, and gone away. This money seems – oh, Miss Benson – it seems as if he could comfort me, for being forsaken, by money” (126). Ruth carefully demarcates the boundary between where her “pure” relationship with Bellingham ends and the purchase of her body begins. She bases her economic model on the exchange of love, not mere labor or duty, and rejects even Mr Bradshaw’s charitable gifts because they make her uncomfortable: “There are people to whom I love to feel that I owe gratitude – gratitude which I cannot express, and had better not talk about – but I cannot see why a person whom I do not know should lay me under an obligation” (155). The text bears out Ruth’s immediate distrust of Bradshaw’s philanthropy for it becomes evident that he gives in order to exonerate his own sins. Furthermore, Bradshaw’s philanthropy is explicitly linked to Bellingham’s seduction of Ruth: both men attempt to dress her in fine white muslin. Gaskell’s text moves into overt cultural criticism in her treatment of the parliamentary elections. The elections unite Bradshaw, pillar of his community, and Bellingham, dilettante seducer, in a joint project aimed at achieving widespread influence. Bradshaw and Bellingham cloak their illicit desires in conventionally respectable personas, most notably in their pursuit of political authority. Mr Bradshaw wants the town to respect him as a moral and pragmatic leader of men; he visualizes himself as the power behind “his” member of parliament. And, in a narrative echo to Opie’s Father and Daughter, Mr Bellingham (like Agnes’s seducer) sells his own name to become Mr Donne, a “gentleman” of good birth and political aspirations. Bradshaw and Bellingham willingly purchase power; they buy the necessary votes to

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place Bellingham in Parliament. Gaskell’s text implicitly condemns their “vice” as greater than that of the innocent but reviled Ruth. Throughout her novel Gaskell carefully juxtaposes the Bensons’ willingness to interrupt the expected narrative of the “fallen woman” with conventional expressions about Ruth’s predetermined end. Even Ruth acknowledges what could have happened to her. After Leonard’s birth, she dreams that her son corrupts a young girl “strangely like herself, only more utterly sad and desolate even than she” who is left to “a worse fate than that of suicide [. . .] and then she saw her son in high places, prosperous – but with more than blood on his soul” (162). A milliner who knew “Mrs Denbigh” when she was “Ruth Hilton” gleefully regales Jemima Bradshaw with a Hogarthian – and entirely fictive – version of Ruth’s story: “Why ma’am, what could become of her? Not that I know exactly – only one knows they can but go from bad to worse, poor creatures! God forgive me, if I am speaking too transiently of such degraded women, who, after all, are a disgrace to our sex” (317–18). In the final quote, Gaskell captures the “ferociously chaste’s” disturbing tone of pseudo-religiosity, as well as the self-satisfaction and hypocrisy which also characterize the texts of both Wardlaw and Greg. Ruth may be a “poor creature” deserving of pity, but she is ultimately a “degraded woman”. As in the earlier narratives of Hays and Opie, Gaskell critiques the hypocrisy of middle-class society by placing its favorite narratives of sexual transgression within the mouths of the most mean-spirited of its members. Like Wardlaw and Greg, as well as Christina Rossetti, whose work I discuss in the next chapter, Gaskell sees in Christ’s forgiveness of Mary Magdalene a possible societal model that contradicts the accepted wisdom voiced by the milliner: “not every woman who has fallen is depraved; that many – how many the Great Judgment Day will reveal to those who have shaken off the poor, sore, penitent hearts on earth – many, many crave and hunger after a chance of virtue – the help which no man gives to them – help – that gentle, tender help which Jesus gave once to Mary Magdalen” (Ruth 347). The story of the Magdalen, however, is more significant as a model of behavior for those who encounter Ruth, rather than for the heroine herself. The image of the biblical Mary Magdalene is essentially static as it reappears in Victorian social reform literature.16 Greg represents her as the “kneeling and weeping Magdalen” who must wait for forgiveness; she does nothing to win her own redemption. In terms of Ruth’s own narrative, the story of the Magdalen is replaced by a secular and peculiarly Victorian version of Mariolatry. Faith and Sally are both


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disturbed by Ruth’s constant weeping. The “hot tears” she sheds while sewing or nursing her child irritates Faith and provokes Sally to comment: “My bonny boy! are they letting the salt tears drop on thy sweet face before thou’rt weaned! Little somebody knows how to be a mother” (172). In order to be a “Mother”, Ruth has to abandon the role of the Magdalen. Sally gives Ruth a strong lecture on the virtues of serving God with a contented heart: “Just try for a day to think of all the odd jobs as to be done well and truly as in God’s sight, not just slurred over anyhow, and you’ll go through them twice as cheerfully, and have no thought to spare for sighing or crying” (175). Thurstan Benson also provides Ruth with a socially active and yet spiritually correct narrative of motherhood. He explicitly conceives of Ruth’s pregnancy as a pathway to God: “Why, it draws her out of herself! [. . .] here is the very instrument to make her forget herself, and be thoughtful of another. Teach her (and God will teach her, if man does not come between) to reverence her child; and this reverence will shut out sin, – will be purification” (118). To a certain degree, Ruth embraces the role of the “virgin” mother. She fervently seeks to forget Leonard’s real father; instead, she “prays” to present a “pure and noble being” to “Our Father in Heaven” (162). Yet, Ruth can never really repress her love of Bellingham; indeed, Gaskell’s representation of the heroine’s hidden desires – which survive her “reformation” – may be her most interesting subversion of the “harlot’s progress”: I have already discussed the ways in which Gaskell’s experience with Pasley influenced the method of Ruth’s reformation, but I am also interested in Gaskell’s transformation of Pasley’s story into Ruth’s. Gaskell’s revisions of Pasley’s biography reveal which taboos the author is unable or unwilling to break in her social criticism. At the same time, they indicate her willingness to deploy the conventions of the domestic tale in order to represent the disturbing possibility of female sexual desire. Gaskell outlines Pasley’s “true” history to Dickens: [Pasley] is the daughter of an Irish clergyman who died when she was two years old; [. . .] when she was about 14, she was apprenticed to an Irish dressmaker here, of very great reputation for fashion. Last September but one this dress-maker failed, and had to dismiss all her apprentices; she placed this girl with a woman who occasionally worked for her, and who has since succeeded to her business; this woman was very profligate and connived at the girl’s

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seduction by a surgeon in the neighbourhood who was called in when the poor creature was ill. Then she was in despair, & wrote to her mother, (who had never corresponded with her all the time she was at school and an apprentice). (The Letters of Elizabeth Gaskell 98) Whereas Ruth is an orphan with a positive memory of a loving mother, Pasley’s mother is neglectful and therefore partly responsible for her daughter’s fate. Ruth falls in love with Bellingham because Mrs Mason fails to supervise her apprentices properly, while a man directly assisted by her employer rapes Pasley. Gaskell’s narrative portrays the plight of an individual whose naiveté leads to a sexual fall while Pasley’s sexual violation was a direct result of being at the mercy of respectable people who manipulated social rules for their own benefit. Clearly, Gaskell was reluctant to represent the ugly commingling of socio-economic power and sexual abuse evident in Pasley’s “true” story, she thus compromises her ability to represent the social wrongs done to “real” women. Gaskell’s text indicates the degree to which representation rather than reality lies at the core of reformist interruptive discourse, particularly when deployed by mid-century authors. Ruth has usually been read as a text that desexualizes sexual transgression; it certainly transforms the violence of Pasley’s rape into a more ambivalent representation of seduction. In seeking sympathy for her fictional heroine, Gaskell cloaks Ruth’s sexuality in the mantle of Romantic natural sensuality, as surely as she encouraged Pasley to remain silent as to her “true history”.17 Indeed, the novel is often judged an aesthetic failure because the portrayal of an innately innocent sexual woman is considered to be impossible.18 Yet Gaskell’s decision to imbue Ruth with both a preternatural goodness and a “natural” sensuality radically challenges conventional portrayals of culturally transgressive female desire and harkens back to the “radical fictions” of the Romantic period. In part, Gaskell was attempting to negotiate the difficulties attendant in writing a novel as an act of “social work”. In order to reform middle-class attitudes toward the “fallen woman”, the tragic circumstances of her “past history” must be revealed, yet the author then risks “branding” her as morally unredeemable. Gaskell responded to this challenge by investing Ruth with both “snow-pure” innocence and a tainted sexual past. When Gaskell’s novel first appeared it was simultaneously faulted for both an unrealistic portrayal of the heroine and its unseemly subject matter. A reviewer from Sharpe’s London Magazine refused to believe that a milliner’s assistant would not be wiser to the ways of the


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world: “although some little time apprenticed to a milliner, [Ruth] is more innocent of the world, and its ways and means and objects, than any girl we ever had the fortune to hear of before” (126). Even as the reviewer denies the possibility of such innocence in Ruth, he upholds it in young readers of the novel. He suggests that the subject matter of Gaskell’s novel makes it inappropriate for “fireside” reading, where “the young should not be aroused to feel an interest in vice, however garnished” (126). Even Richard Cobden, a Liberal Member of Parliament, who considered Ruth to be a work of “courage and humanity”, believed Gaskell’s novel should not be read by young girls: “‘Ruth’ will be considered dangerous company for unmarried females even in a book” (Waller 118). Yet, Gaskell intended to create a “fallen woman” who was appropriate company for the Victorian reading public; in the novel itself, Ruth attends afternoon tea with respectable people, governesses young children, and nurses the sick. In confounding the conventional narrative of transgressive sexuality – Ruth is not a sexually voracious seducer and even her seducer is not unkind, but merely careless – Gaskell broadens her critique of Victorian “vice”. Ruth and Bellingham sit very comfortably around Victorian firesides and yet their story together is one of passion and betrayal. Ruth is a beautiful and modest heroine, a “proper” woman in all things but her sexual history. Bellingham is not a villainous rapist but instead a typical well-to-do Victorian son. But both are left vulnerable to sexual transgression because they have not been properly instructed in their familial parlors. Ruth, beloved and protected at her mother’s knee, never learned about either female desire or male seduction. Bellingham, the spoiled darling of his widowed mother, has had all his desires indulged. Furthermore, Ruth is seduced, not by promises of riches or status, but by domestic narrative; she confuses the pleasures of story with sexual desire. Left an orphan, Ruth wants to be reintegrated into a social world; the desire to re-form her lost family makes her vulnerable to Bellingham’s narrative charms.19 Gaskell suggests that the most dangerous aspect of life at Mrs Mason’s is the solitude and unnatural silence that dominate Ruth’s life there; she dreads the “terrible nights! in that close room! and in that oppressive stillness! which lets every sound of the thread be heard as it goes eternally backwards and forwards” (8). Once her friend Jenny leaves, Ruth is cut off from her only source of narrative. The other girls are “too weary to make her in any way a partaker of their pleasure by entering into details of the manner in which they had spent their day” (34–5). Storytellers figure prominently in Ruth’s world because they

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remind her of the pleasures of listening at her mother’s knee. Like Wollstonecraft’s Darnford, Bellingham first pleasures Ruth with narrative: “there was some one who listened with tender interest to all her little revelations; who questioned her about her early days of happiness, and, in return, spoke of his own childhood” (38). He also offers her a new family: “Don’t you remember your promise to consider me as a brother? Go on telling me everything that happens to you, pray; you cannot think how much interest I take in all your interests” (41–2). Not insignificantly, Bellingham and Ruth consummate their relationship after a forbidden and ill-fated trip to visit the heroine’s family home. Ruth is susceptible to Bellingham’s “stories” – those of his childhood and those he uses to lure her into further interaction with him – because of her mother’s reticence in teaching Ruth about that “brooding spirit” of feminine desire which “cannot be put into words” (8). It is only after her fall that Ruth begins to distinguish between “good” and “bad” narratives; she learns to name feminine desire only after she has been seduced by Bellingham. Ruth falls in love with Bellingham because he invites her into the narrative details of his life; he represents himself as a “brother” before he becomes her “lover”. And, after she bears his child, Bellingham accrues other familial markers as well, including “Father”. While Ruth’s ascension to “Motherhood” facilitates her full reintegration into respectability, maternity also necessarily reintroduces the memory of female sexual desire into the text. She, unlike Thurstan Benson, cannot completely separate her “sin” – loving Bellingham – from the “consequence”, bearing their child. As Leonard’s father, Bellingham remains an imagined presence in her life even before he actually reappears in Eccleston, traveling under the name of “Mr Donne”. Ruth’s continuing desire for her son’s father remains a secret she tells no one else: “He did me cruel harm. I can never again lift up my face in innocence. They think I have forgotten all, because I do not speak. Oh, darling love! am I talking against you? [. . .] You, who are the father of my child!” (270). Ruth constantly shifts between her unspoken love for Bellingham and her socially acceptable role as a “Mother” because she has not decided upon Bellingham’s place in her story: Is he her seducer or her “darling love”? On the one hand, Bellingham should be reverenced as “the father of [her] child” (270). Yet in confronting her in Eccleston, he leaves her open to actual physical temptation and makes her aware that he is a seducer, a “bad man” who would also make a “bad” father (271). Prior to Bellingham’s return, Ruth displaces her love for him onto


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their child. In Wales, Bellingham had decorated Ruth’s hair with water lilies: “When he came back he took off her bonnet, without speaking, and began to place his flowers in her hair. She was quite still while he arranged her coronet, looking up in his face with loving eyes, with a peaceful composure” (73). Patsy Stoneman suggests that in this scene, Gaskell moves toward representation of explicit sexual passion. However, Stoneman goes on to argue that motherhood allows Ruth to escape the memory of such feeling, as well as its corresponding betrayal, by retreating into “the coherent world of her own childhood” (107). Yet Ruth’s acts of devotion to her son also allow her to experience again feelings aroused first by Bellingham. Indeed, Ruth recreates the water lily scene after Leonard’s birth and in spite of remembering her lover’s desertion: She shuddered up from contemplating [her seduction and abandonment]; it was like a bad, unholy dream. And yet, there was a strange yearning kind of love for the father of the child whom she pressed to her heart, which came, and she could not bid it begone as sinful, it was so pure and natural, [. . .] Little Leonard cooed to the flowers, and stretched after their bright colours; and Ruth laid him on the dry turf, and pelted him with the gay petals. (190) Significantly, Ruth is the active admirer in the above scene; Bellingham’s absence and Ruth’s role as a mother allows her to demonstrate affection for their child. At another point in the same scene, she matches the color of Leonard’s cheeks to those of rose petals, just as Bellingham had admired her own coloring while in Wales. Motherhood, here, facilitates an agency enacted within the privileged sphere of maternal nurturance, otherwise disallowed to Ruth. Ruth’s role as “mother” protects her from the dangerous allure of deliberate sexual transgression after her lover re-enters the text. She finds the strength to deny herself Bellingham after his return because she believes that protecting Leonard remains her primary responsibility. Motherhood for Ruth consists of a selfless, indeed, a near religious devotion to her child. It is in this unobserved rejection of vice that Ruth redeems herself in the text, yet she still fears the revelation of her past life. She tells no one of her crisis of temptation; indeed, she seems to consider it a second fall: “Deep shame made her silent and reserved on all her life before Leonard’s birth; from that time she rose again in her self-respect, [. . .] except that she could not, and would not, tell of this

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mocking echo, this haunting phantom, this past, that would not rest in its grave” (310). However, Bellingham’s threat also consists of the power he holds over their joint narrative of sexual pleasure. When he first confronts Ruth, Bellingham reminds her of their past “happiness” in an attempt to woo her back. When Ruth resists, Bellingham switches to a different narrative, thus revealing his willingness to destroy her: “You forget that one word of mine could undeceive all the good people at Eccleston; and that if I spoke out ever so little, they would throw you off in an instant” (298). He possesses the power to portray Ruth as either appropriately passionate or “fallen” and depraved. It is finally Mr Bradshaw, not Bellingham, who exposes Ruth’s past to censure: “It was of no use; no quiet, innocent life – no profound silence, even to her own heart, as to the Past; the old offence could never be drowned in the Deep; but thus, when all was calm on the great, broad, sunny sea, it rose to the surface, and faced her with its unclosed eyes and its ghastly countenance” (333). In the above passage, Gaskell’s prose echoes the letter she received from Dickens about Pasley; Ruth’s “Past” rises up to perhaps drag her back into the “gulf”. Mr Bradshaw chooses to believe the milliner’s conventional story of Ruth’s sexual transgression. In her tale, Ruth is cast as a beautiful seductress: “This young creature was very artful and bold, and thought sadly too much of her beauty; and, somehow, she beguiled a young gentleman” (317). Ruth’s case shocks Eccleston’s residents because she challenges both their belief in stories of voracious female sexuality and their ability to recognize and punish “vice”: “I saw her daily – I did not know her. If I had known her, I should have known she was fallen and depraved, and consequently not fit to come into my house” (347). In the above statement, Mr Bradshaw rejects the evidence of his own experience; he believes that the only way to “know” someone is to know her sexual past. The fact that Ruth has survived seduction and abandonment only serves to indict her further; in the eyes of the pharisaical Bradshaw her elevation to respectability is credited not to powers of goodness but because she “spread her nets well and skilfully” (336). Indeed, Bradshaw’s reaction to Ruth echoes Bellingham’s own response upon finding her at work as a governess: “how the devil had she played her cards so well as to be the governess – the respected governess, in such a family as Mr Bradshaw” (276). Bellingham’s metaphor reveals that he has forgotten what a poor card player – and mistress – Ruth was; she had, in fact, failed when he tried to teach her écarté in Wales (65). In representing Ruth’s seduction, fall, redemption, exposure, and


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then, redemption again, Gaskell deploys and disrupts the conventions of the Victorian seduction novel and moral tract, even as the text echoes Amelia Opie’s Father and Daughter and Adeline Mowbray. As a “fallen woman” who survives seduction, abandonment, and pregnancy, Ruth is an aberration. Once her “true” story is known she begins the “fallen woman’s” expected progress towards death. But the duration of time between Ruth’s seduction and death is particularly notable in its subversion of the cause and effect logic of the “harlot’s progress” narrative construct. Indeed, Leonard is twelve years old when his mother dies. Furthermore, Ruth doesn’t die from either venereal disease or an excess of vice. Instead, she voluntarily exposes herself to disease. Like an “angel of the town”, she walks among the weak in order to heal and not to corrupt (Morgan 95). And, like Esther before her, she subsequently becomes a symbol of almost supernatural power; her knowledge of both desire and death removes her from the constraints of ordinary “good” women and places her in a unique space that is neither a “public” nor a “private” sphere of influence: She gradually became known and respected among the roughest boys of the rough populace of the town. They would make way for her when she passed along the streets with more deference than they used to most [. . .] she was so often in connection with Death that something of the superstitious awe with which the dead were regarded by those rough boys in the midst of their strong life, surrounded her. (388) Ruth walks through the streets untouched and unaccosted; indeed, she self-consciously assumes the role of God’s instrument and is accepted as such: “Such a one as her has never been a great sinner; nor does she do her work as a penance, but for the love of God and of the blessed Jesus” (425). To die in the service of such work truly would fulfill conventions of the Christian heroine; significantly, however, Gaskell’s heroine escapes unscathed from her work in the fever wards. Instead, Ruth dies because she “cares” for Mr Bellingham. Once she learns that he has contracted cholera she insists on nursing him: “I don’t think I should love him, if he were well and happy – but you said he was ill – and alone – how can I help caring for him? How can I help caring for him?” (437). Bellingham’s bout with cholera deprives him of the ability to comprehend Ruth’s presence. She is able to actively “care” for him because the disease has reduced him to infantilism. He represents neither a sexual nor a narrative threat; because he will not

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recognize Ruth he cannot “tell” of her presence. His illness also frees Ruth to go to him without social repercussions. Her role as the town’s sicknurse provides her with free access to her former lover; indeed, she insists on that pretense (437–8). Finally, however, Ruth cannot be content in her assumed disguises. She always fears that her “true” desiring self will be recognized. As “Ruth Hilton” and “Arthur Bellingham” the two lovers transgressed social mores, but a shared narrative of sexual passion survives their metamorphoses into “Ruth Denbigh” and “Arthur Donne”. Indeed, Bellingham eventually narrates her desire back into being. Ruth, already infected with cholera, enters a state of delirium in which past and present have become confused: “she could not remember who she was now, nor where she was” (440). As in Mary Barton, illness grants the “fallen woman” a potential escape from her past, but Bellingham almost brings Ruth back to a sense of herself. He looks up at Ruth as she leans over his sickbed and asks: “Where are the water-lilies?” (442). The self that Ruth momentarily remembers is the self that desires Bellingham, the self that she always seeks to keep secret. The final emergence of that “phantom” – brought back into narration by Bellingham – drives Ruth first into madness, and then into death. Although Gaskell’s text ultimately denies a place for female desire, the author does acknowledge the impossibility of repressing it. And finally, Ruth’s experience with disease and death provides her with yet another “protective fiction”. Only in the narrative confusion generated by illness can she simultaneously be both the “good” Ruth and the “desiring” Ruth. The conventions of the deathbed scene are subverted in this text because if she cannot consciously incorporate her desire for Bellingham, she cannot recognize her “sin”. Unlike Esther, who dies conscious of her sexual fall, Ruth dies in the present tense of her own childhood: “She went from one old childish ditty to another without let or pause, keeping a strange sort of time with her pretty fingers, [. . .] She never looked at any one with the slightest glimpse of memory or intelligence in her face; no, not even Leonard” (444). Whereas Esther dies clutching the picture of her daughter, in full consciousness of the consequences of her actions and convinced that she has sinned, Ruth fails to recognize her son. Her invitation to death is made without any fear or guilt. She dies in the “Eden of innocence” denied to Esther (Mary Barton 292). Ruth retreats to a mental landscape composed of bits and pieces of fragmented language, inaccessible to those who would ask her to “explain” her life. Whereas Esther’s narrative abilities dominate Mary


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Barton – her auditors are compelled to hear the details of her story – Ruth remains an enigmatic figure whose story haunts precisely because of what she refuses to reveal. And, just as Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman, in its accidental but radical incompleteness, allows the reader to choose an ending, Gaskell’s deliberately inconclusive ending refuses to pass judgment upon the heroine. The novel instead concludes by generating a proliferation of identities over the “poor dead body” of Ruth (447); she is Sally’s “lamb” (448), Mr Bellingham’s “beautiful Ruth” (450), and Leonard simply refers to her as “[his] mother” (454). Even Thurstan Benson cannot settle on any one identity for her.20 In his sermon he wants to represent her as a vehicle of “God’s doings”, but he can only see “Ruth, as she had been [. . .] like a woeful, hunted creature” (452). Benson’s sermon fails to take place and Ruth’s headstone remains blank. Finally, in refusing to provide her readers with an “epitaph”, Gaskell disrupts Ruth’s articulation of the final (and fatal) detail of the “harlot’s progress” narrative.

5 Rewriting the “vile text”: Christina Rossetti and the Poetics of Social Reform

“Christina is now an associate, and wore the dress – which is very simple, elegant even; black with hanging sleeves, a muslin cap with lace edging, quite becoming to her with the veil” (Wm. Michael Rossetti, Poetical Works 485). The evocative image of Christina Rossetti, “elegantly” clad in the garb of an Anglican associate and hard at work reforming repentant prostitutes at the St. Mary Magdalene Home for Fallen Women on Highgate Hill even as she corrects proofs for her first volume of poetry, Goblin Market and Other Poems (1860; pub. 1862),1 has inspired a great deal of critical commentary establishing links between her “social” and “literary” work.2 Indeed, as early as 1904, William Michael Rossetti included the above description in a footnote to “From Sunset to Star Rise” (1865; pub. 1875), an interpretively elusive poem which he reads as the dramatic monologue of a “fallen woman”. While I would certainly agree that Goblin Market reflects Rossetti’s lifelong interest in the reclamation of prostitutes, as does her work at Highgate from 1859 to 1870, I would also suggest that in our eagerness to read Goblin Market through the biographical “veil” of Rossetti’s participation in an Anglican Sisterhood, we fail to acknowledge the ways in which her poem’s utopian vision radically differs from the type of reclamation practiced at Highgate.3 It is important to note that Goblin Market was written in 1859, just as Rossetti began her tenure at Highgate, and I will suggest that – in spite of its quasi-fantastical landscape – it represents the pinnacle of Rossetti’s optimistic belief in what we might call “practical” Christian social reform.4 While I believe that Rossetti’s enthusiasm for Anglican “sisterhood” certainly informs her long poem, Goblin Market’s utopianism depends upon Rossetti’s investment in a much broader constellation of discourses: that of Anglican “good works”, secular “feminized” 168

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social reform, and, not insignificantly, Pre-Raphaelite aestheticism.5 Indeed, I will ultimately suggest that after working as a Sister at Highgate, Rossetti produces several poems that, in many ways, contradict the reform lessons of Goblin Market. The trajectory I am tracing throughout this chapter actually begins in the mid–1850s when Rossetti is writing poems such as “A Fair World Tho’ a Fallen” (1851; pub. 1896) and “Up-hill” (1858; pub. 1862); these poems address the reformist role that must be taken by Christians in this world, if they intend to make it to the next. Throughout the 1850s we also find Rossetti romanticizing the vocation of the Anglican Sister, in both the novella Maude (1850), and the poems, “Three Nuns” (1849–50) and “The Convent Threshold” (1858; pub. 1862). And indeed, as other critics have pointed out, it is at this time that Rossetti’s own secular reform work actually begins. In addition to working with the Young Woman’s Friendly Society visiting the poor and the sick, she also volunteered for Florence Nightingale’s mission to the Crimea in 1854. Although she was rejected as too young, Rossetti’s aunt Eliza Polidori did join Nightingale’s nursing “sisterhood”. In Rossetti’s poetry of the 1850s, then, we see her own eagerness to find a vocation, but more significantly, perhaps, she reflects her culture’s general anxiety about the “redundancy” of unmarried Victorian women; it is a surplus which creates not only the unrewarded single woman, who “famished died for love”, but also the prostituted woman, who “shamed herself in love” (“A Triad” 1: 11, 9). Before discussing the complexities of High Anglican theology and the impact of feminized social work, however, I would like to turn my attention to Pre-Raphaelite art and its influence on Rossetti’s poetics of social reform. While her eagerness to find a Christian vocation may have been rooted in her commitment to the parish community and heightened by the example of her Aunt Eliza in the Crimea, it seems likely that she found a focus for her reform interests in the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood’s intent examination of the “Magdalen” in both their visual and literary works. The Hireling Shepherd (1851) and The Awakening Conscience (1853) by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais’s The Bridge of Sighs (1858), and George Frederick Watts’s Found Drowned (1848–50) were all concerned with transgressive female sexuality and its “inevitably” tragic end. Indeed, as I discussed in some detail in Chapter 4, Victorian culture was particularly obsessed with the specter of transgressive female sexuality in these years, and we find representations of the prostitute in art, literature, and medico-moral publications. In the realm of social investigation, W. R. Greg published

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“Prostitution” in 1850, while William Acton’s Prostitution, a text I discuss later in this chapter, appeared in 1857. In fiction we find Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1855), as well as a series of texts by Charles Dickens, including Dombey and Son (1848), David Copperfield (1850), and Bleak House (1853). And William Bell Scott, a sometime member of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, published “Rosabell”, a poem about an illfated “fallen woman” in the 1840s. Yet Rossetti would not have had to look even that far to find evidence of her culture’s increasing interest in the “great Social Evils” of seduction and prostitution. Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti were jointly producing works concerning the “fallen woman” throughout the 1850s. He was particularly preoccupied with the “sinful woman” from about 1853, when he did the pen-and-ink drawing of two penitent prostitutes, Hesterna Rosa, until 1860 and his composition of the sensually exuberant “Song of the Bower”. During those years he also produced several other paintings on the subject: Found (1854–61), Bocca Bacciata (1859), Mary Magdalene leaving the House of Feasting (1857), and Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee (1858). Furthermore, he was working on the poem “Jenny” from 1848 onward.6 I would like to suggest that “Jenny” at least partially influenced the production of Goblin Market. In his long poem, Dante Gabriel envisions a vocation to which Christina Rossetti can bring her passion for High Anglican theology, as well as her yearning for the type of heroic enterprise suggested by Florence Nightingale’s success in the Crimea. “Jenny” gives the fullest poetic expression to the contrary impulses of Pre-Raphaelite art and its desire to represent transcendent female sexuality while distinguishing between its purity and defilement. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s visual art also reinforces the dichotomy between pure and “fallen” women. Although he produced paintings such as The Blessed Damozel (1875) and Proserpine (1873), which reflect the Pre-Raphaelite idealization of the spiritualized sensual woman – perhaps best articulated in the poem “The Blessed Damozel” – most of Rossetti’s paintings tend to represent either the “holy virgin” or the “fallen Magdalen”. Christina herself was a favored model for images of the spiritually pristine Virgin Mary, most famously executed in The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) and Ecce Ancilla Domini (1850). The prostituted woman – often modeled by sexually suspect young women like Fanny Cornford – is inevitably shown either in relation to a male lover or in isolation. In Bocca Bacciata, she boldly gazes out at the presumably male viewer with inviting eyes, while the “fallen woman” of Found cowers against a


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brick wall, averting her gaze from both her country lover and the observer outside of the frame. The female figure represented in The Gate of Memory (1857) hides in a doorway looking out at a world of social interaction which she cannot enter. In every case, she inhabits a very different realm from the virginal Marys modeled after Christina. Gretchen and Mephistopheles in Church (1848) is a crucial exception to this general rule. In this early ink drawing, which takes its theme from Goethe’s Faust, the artist positions a “fallen woman” on the right side of the canvas and a pure woman on the left. Both women kneel at pews but without any acknowledgment of each other. The “fallen” Gretchen’s face is turned away; we see only her disheveled hair and a clenched fist. The Devil sits right behind her tormenting her by enumerating her sins. The pure woman – who looks very much like Christina Rossetti – kneels with hands joined in prayer, eyes closed. In counterpoint to the Devil who torments Gretchen, a small child kneels next to her. I would suggest that this little known drawing provides an interesting visual companion to the poem “Jenny”.7 In “Jenny”, a male speaker muses about the life of the prostitute he has purchased for the evening. Instead of sexual revel, however, the speaker indulges in a favorite cultural pastime; he rehearses many of the stereotypes associated with the prostitute, mourns her lost virtue, imagines how she could be saved, and then carelessly departs. “Jenny” certainly reveals Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s awareness of the debate centering on the figure of the prostitute and the cultural obsession with her condition.8 But Rossetti does not attempt to resolve any of the questions about female virtue that he raises in the poem; indeed that is precisely his point.9 What purports to be a poem about female purity is actually one concerned with male sexuality. Although the speaker supposedly “reads” Jenny, his own lost innocence most preoccupies him. He was once too familiar with the life led by Jenny and still feels a longing for “dancing” on the wrong side of town (31). The speaker cannot look at Jenny objectively because he too is the “vile text” he accuses her of being; the pure woman may not “read” either of their histories (259). The speaker’s desire for the prostitute to “dance the clouds from his brain” is immediately problematic. The following passage, which describes a prostitute’s bedroom, resonates with the discourse surrounding her socially respectable counterpart: the “angel in the house”. Jenny’s room is also a replenishing female center, a desired change from the speaker’s own masculine sphere:

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This room of yours, my Jenny, looks A change from mine so full of books, Whose serried ranks hold fast, forsooth, So many captive hours of youth, – The hours they thieve from day and night To make one’s cherished work come right. (22–7) On one level “Jenny” apparently comments upon the Victorian ideal of separate spheres, which maintained that the “pure” woman serve as the moral and spiritual guardian over a man inevitably “tainted” by the inescapable immorality and degradation of the “real” world. The woman created a private space for this nurturance in the Victorian home, which was envisioned as “a place apart, a walled garden, in which certain virtues too easily crushed by modern life could be preserved, and certain desires of the heart too much thwarted be fulfilled” (Houghton 343). The speaker attempts to procure an approximation of this domestic ideal in his encounter with “poor shameful Jenny, full of grace” (18). But her “grace” is only physical; she “shamelessly” sells herself as a “purchased” soul mate. However, Jenny’s own inaction complicates the speaker’s situation; his sexual desire remains unsatisfied. The prostitute’s passive refusal to fulfill even his sexualized feminine ideal is almost immediately apparent. The speaker only approximates physical contact with her. In the first stanza she is already in a “reverie”, and in the second, she is “too tired to get to bed” (21, 36). Unable to function sexually, she cannot even engage in celibate “merrymaking” and can barely take the glass of wine he presses upon her (96). To the dismay of the speaker, Jenny falls asleep before the middle of the poem, leaving the speaker to “conjecture” endlessly on the “text” of her thoughts. At one point the speaker predicts Jenny’s eventual fate: When, wealth and health slipped past, you stare Along the streets alone, and there, Round the long park, across the bridge, The cold lamps at the pavement’s edge Wind on together and apart, A fiery serpent for your heart. (149–54) Like the seducing Bellingham in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth, Rossetti’s speaker subscribes to the culturally accepted script of the Victorian prostitute’s ill-fated end, even as he participates in her movement


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toward “ruin”. To give the speaker proper credit he does dismiss this highly conventionalized image of Jenny’s death: “Let the thoughts pass, an empty cloud!” (155). However, he also fails to alert Jenny to possible danger; he dismisses her ability to understand her own situation: What if to her all this were said? Why, as a volume seldom read Being opened halfway shuts again, So might the pages of her brain Be parted at such words, and thence Close back upon the dusty sense For is there hue or shape defin’d In Jenny’s desecrated mind (158–65) Yet Rossetti’s speaker recognizes that Jenny’s “tale” could have unfolded in a very different manner; he rejects the notion that women are innately “pure” or “fallen”. As he looks at her sleeping visage, he cannot help but be impressed by the purity of her expression. Although repelled by what he imagines to be her “desecrated mind”, his eyes recognize the arbitrariness of that judgment. He sees in Jenny the shadow of his “pure” cousin Nell: Just as another woman sleeps! Enough to throw one’s thought in heaps Of doubt and horror, – what to say Or think, – this awful secret sway, The potter’s power over the clay! Of the same lump (it has been said) For honour and dishonour made, Two sister vessels. Here is one. (177–84) In spite of the fact that it “throw[s] [his] thought in heaps”, the speaker acknowledges the potential for “honour” in Jenny, even as he sees the potential for “dishonour” in his cousin. The speaker then enumerates “good” cousin Nell’s dangerous qualities; he produces a list not unlike that compiled by Greg in “Prostitution”; she is “. . . fond of fun, / And fond of dress, and change, and praise. / So mere a woman in her ways” (185–7). But the speaker regresses to conventional binary thinking in order to interrupt his musings about a “desecrated” Nell. Just as the prostitute Jenny was

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envisioned meeting her proper end in death, the “pure” woman must also find her rightful end in marriage. The love of a good man has the power to transform Nell’s dangerous potential: “For Love himself shall ripen these / In a kind soil to just increase / Through years of fertilizing peace” (200–2). The repetition of lines 182–4 reinforces the speaker’s horror at his initial vision of essential similarity between Nell and Jenny and adds a particularly evocative coda: “Of the same lump (as it is said) / For honour and dishonour made / Two sister vessels. Here is one. / It makes a goblin of the sun” (206, my emphasis). Unable to rid himself of the disturbing vision of the “two sister vessels”, however, the speaker explores the options for reclaiming the “fallen”: “. . . How atone, / Great God, for this which man has done?” (241–2). At the nadir of hope, the speaker acknowledges his most promising solution only to immediately reject it: “If but a woman’s heart might see / Such erring heart unerringly / For once! But that can never be” (250–2). To return to the beginning of my argument, the speaker’s immediate rejection of the “pure” woman’s ability to aid Jenny is analogous to his own inability to go to her for spiritual replenishment. Paralyzed by his own unworthiness, the speaker cannot consciously enact either his or Jenny’s salvation. He sees the solution in the virtuous woman but believes that any encounter between the “fallen” and the “pure” inevitably contaminates the latter. To reach the “rose” which represents both Jenny’s soul and his own, Nell would have to read “. . . a book / In which pure women may not look, / For its base pages claim control / To crush the flower within the soul” (253–6). Finally, the speaker wants to keep Nell in her own sphere; he maintains the sacrosanct division between his world of “books” – both scholarly and “vile” texts – and Nell’s world of “fertilizing peace” (202). Correspondingly, the male lust which provokes the problem is likewise sealed off from women like his cousin: “Like a toad within a stone / Seated while Time crumbles on” (282–3). Two ossified artifacts align themselves on either side of the speaker forming “A cipher of man’s changeless sum / Of lust, past, present, and to come” (278–9). In the exploration and acceptance of his own base nature the speaker unconsciously realizes the spiritual replenishment he had sought: “And somehow in myself the dawn / Among stirred clouds and veils withdrawn” (333–4). However, the speaker fails to act as savior and he leaves Jenny to her own devices, denigrating her to the end: And must I mock you to the last, Ashamed of my own shame, – aghast


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Because some thoughts not born amiss Rose at a poor fair face like this? Well, of such thoughts so much I know: In my life, as in hers, they show, By a far gleam which I may near, A dark path I can strive to clear. Only one kiss. Good-bye, my dear. (383–90) Having used the exploration of Jenny’s life to “clear” his own “dark path”, the speaker’s final speech is more than a little problematic. No different than Jenny’s other customers, he enjoys Jenny’s services and then twines coins in her “golden hair”, leaving her to ruin. In some odd way the “purchase” of a soul mate is justified; he takes away new knowledge of himself. He tosses off the supposed lesson of the poem – that they share their shame – as casually as his final condescending kiss. He has his “dark path”; she has hers. Having dismissed the “pure” woman as potential savior, the speaker assumes that Jenny will negotiate her own salvation. However, the prostitute remains unaware of this night of enlightenment. The speaker never opens that “volume seldom read”, instead choosing to write his own. Jenny remains “unawakened”, and indeed her fate would seem to be death met at “the pavement’s edge”. The speaker’s final willingness to participate in the buying and selling of feminine comfort indicates that if anything is to be done to save the “fallen woman” someone else will have to do it. I begin with this reading of Dante Gabriel’s poem to contextualize Christina Rossetti’s production of an oppositional poetry. In a significant body of both “social” and “literary” work, the younger Rossetti addresses the very questions that “Jenny’s” speaker raises only to drop. In Goblin Market the poet takes exception to the idea that the “fallen woman” lies beyond the ministrations of her pure sister. The “fallen” Laura – consistently figured as a pastoral Mary Magdalene – is lured into sexual commerce with a group of Goblin men with whom she makes a bad bargain; she exchanges her potentially redemptive golden “curl” for their delicious, but finally unsatisfying, fruit. Once the Goblin men have her curl, however, they refuse further “business” with her, leaving her at the brink of death. Laura’s virginal sister Lizzie decisively alters this allegorical “harlot’s progress”, however, and together they go on to mother a generation of children who will hopefully avoid the illusory delights of Goblin fruits. Furthermore, the poem carefully chronicles Lizzie’s own struggle to become a redemptive agent. The above description of Goblin Market does little to convey

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the fantastical delights of the poem, but before discussing Rossetti’s 1859 production at length, I wish to first explore her rhetorical debt to two other fields of discourse. In her quest to solve the “cipher” of male “lust”, as well as its “necessary” companions, female prostitution and female passivity on the part of “good” women, Rossetti employs the rhetoric of both High Anglicanism and feminized social reform. Goblin Market then effectively challenges the notion that the “vile text” of sexual transgression cannot be read – or rewritten – “properly”. In 1859 Christina Rossetti was already a devout Anglo-Catholic, wellread in both the Bible and Tractarian interpretations of its meaning; indeed, in later years Rossetti herself published several volumes of biblical interpretation. Although the author’s religious beliefs influenced her work in a myriad of ways, I would like to focus on two aspects of Rossetti’s poetry that seem particularly indebted to High Anglican theology and iconography.10 Throughout her career Rossetti produces poetry that details an intense struggle between a longing for death and an idealized reunion with God in Paradise, with the desire for a vocation within a world that mirrors the glories of Heaven. In the latter regard, Rossetti, like other devout Protestants, looks to the work of Christ as a typological model for “proper” worldly behavior. Much critical commentary has suggested that Rossetti is primarily a poet of “renunciation” and “endurance”; she is frequently pigeonholed as an artist who craves a release from this world, resting all of her hopes in the glories of heaven: “Like all poets, Christina must write of love and death, but she writes of them with a difference. For her the common position is reversed; death is the bringer of joy, love the bringer of grief.” (Battiscombe 76) Indeed, this strain of thought is manifestly apparent in poems like “Life and Death” (1863; pub. 1866), in which the speaker baldly states: “Life is not good. One day it will be good / To die, then live again” (1: 10–11). Certainly “Paradise” (1854; pub. 1875) and “De Profundis” (1881) also articulate the yearning to be done with “the world” which can be “a very monster void of love and prayer” (“The World” 1: 8). However, in the 1850s and 1860s, Rossetti quite determinedly counters a presumptuous longing for the next life when there is so much to be done in this one. In “A Fair World Tho’ a Fallen”, written in 1851, Rossetti constructs a set of values for her Christian readers to live by during their earthly lives. She idealizes a careful mediation between a longing for the “grave” and committing the equally “unutterable woe” of “loving this world too much” (“A Fair World Tho’ a Fallen” 3: 13–14). “Comfort” is found only in


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ministering to others, and carrying out Christ’s earthly work. Indeed, in “What good shall my life do me?” written in the same year as Goblin Market, Rossetti figures Christian charity as a proactive duty: “O ye who taste that Love is sweet, / Set waymarks for the doubtful feet / That stumble on in search of it” (3: 46–8). In the figure of the Magdalen, Rossetti finds a model that encompasses the redeemer and the sinner, as well as an idealized example of a reclaimed and even saintly “fallen woman”. In “Divine and Human Pleading” (1846; pub. 1847), sometimes entitled “Mary Magdalene”, we can already see the poetic genesis for the program of reclamation outlined in Goblin Market. In the guise of a heavenly angel, Mary Magdalene would appear to be as much a model for Lizzie as she is for Laura. In this early poem, a “trembling contrite man” calls upon the “blessed Mary Magdalene” to guide him (3: 9, 3). When the Magdalen appears she has already joined “the Lord of Life” in Heaven: Her footsteps shone upon the stars, Her robe was spotless white; Her breast was radiant with the Cross, Her head with living light. (21–4) I would suggest that this early representation of the Magdalen shares certain qualities with the “sexualized heroines” of The Victim of Prejudice and Father and Daughter. As in those texts, the “fallen woman” appears after she has transcended her infamous past; consequently, her successful struggle to free herself of the “heavy chain” of “guilt” and sin is highlighted, rather than the fact of her sexual transgression (51). Only after the Magdalen has dazzled the “pleading sinner” with the promise of sainthood, does she describe her penitence. The concluding stanzas of the poem detail her acceptance of “Love’s searching fire” (64): “I knelt down at His Feet / Who can change the sorrow into joy, / The bitter into sweet.” (66–8) She casts away her material wealth and offers “My tears [. . .] more precious / Than my precious pearls” (73–4). And once the “fallen woman” has “wept for the great transgression”, the cleansing of sin is a relatively simple task (79): “I sought the King of Heaven, / Forsook the evil of my ways, / Loved much, and was forgiven” (83–4). In Rossetti’s devotional poetry, the Magdalen provides a powerful iconographic example of the meeting of the “pure” and the “fallen” within a single and significantly female body. In consistently conflating the unnamed sinner of Luke 7 with the Mary Magdalene who

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greets Christ after his resurrection, Rossetti employs Christian authority for the definitive interruption of the “harlot’s progress”. In Rossetti’s own poetic mythology, as in the culture at large, the Magdalen serves as a model for both the sinner and the saint. Indeed, the founders of the Anglican Sisterhoods consistently allude to her story in descriptions of their mission. In Is it Well to Institute Sisterhoods in the Church of England, for the Care of Female Penitents? (1851), Reverend T. T. Carter evokes the image of the Magdalen as evidence that his question should be answered with an everlasting yea: “Was His love, . . . who ate and drank with publicans and sinners, to be a pattern to His people, or was it utterly to cease after His ascension? Was His Church to reflect it, or not? Did the wondrous scene beneath the cross, of Mary Magdalene standing beside the Blessed Virgin Mother, convey no lesson, was it never to be repeated on earth?” (quoted in Allchin 70–1). In Maude, an early novella in which Rossetti details the lives of three young Victorian women in search of a vocation, it is the character named Magdalen who enters an Anglican convent with the express purpose of reclaiming “fallen women”. Magdalen’s imaginative evocation of conventual work can be found in a short poem written before her novitiate. In her poem, “good fairies dressed in white” embark on a series of quasi-fantastical good works which presage the allegorical landscape of Goblin Market: “Training perhaps some twisted branch aright; / Or sweeping faded Autumn leaves from sight / To foster embryo life; or binding back / Stray tendrils” (Maude 10). While the character of Magdalen embodies Rossetti’s ideal nun, the representation of Maude reflects the poet’s often ambivalent attitude toward Anglican Sisterhoods in the years just prior to her own work at the aptly named St Mary Magdalene Home at Highgate. On the one hand, Rossetti readily acknowledges that for those who are “called” the vocation of a nun is the only one that they can make, but she also recognizes its inappropriateness for both bored Victorian women like Maude, frustrated by the narrow constraints of their lives, as well as women willing to remain in the “fair world” in spite of its “fallen” nature. Agnes, the most sympathetic character in Maude, foil to both the dreamy ill-fated eponymous poetess and the saintly Magdalen, rejects the choices made by both of her friends in order to reside with her mother and edit Maude’s poems. Yet, in spite of Rossetti’s ambivalence toward the Sisterhoods, they do provide her with an important model of social action. And as one critic has pointed out, they generate an alternative to the “compulsive


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heterosexuality” which positions women as the object of a male gaze (Carpenter 418). In “‘Eat me, drink me, love me’: the Consumable Female Body in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market”, Mary Wilson Carpenter suggests that the establishment of the Anglican Sisterhoods allows for the “radical subjectivity” of Goblin Market: in “the Oxford Movement’s ‘women’s mission to women’ [. . .] the female body is represented as the object of a female gaze” (418). In the next section of this chapter, I would like to further extend Carpenter’s thesis to yet another field of discourse, often in conflict with that of the Anglican Sisterhoods, but also important to the genesis of Goblin Market. Goblin Market ends with an embedded poem: For there is no friend like a sister In calm or stormy weather; To cheer one on the tedious way, To fetch one if one goes astray, To lift one if one totters down, To strengthen whilst one stands. (1: 562–7) In order to fully appreciate the rhetorical nuances of Laura’s composition I think that we must turn our attention to the “secular” models of reclamation which lie behind Goblin Market’s concluding lines, for they also provide insights into the poem’s insistent attention to the economics of seduction and the complex dynamics of sisterhood. The latter part of the 1850s saw a certain amount of public discussion around the perceived failure of the penitentiary system to “reclaim” “fallen women”. A general dissatisfaction with its methods was expressed by a diverse group of commentators. Greg’s moderate call for regulation was taken up in 1857 by William Acton, a social investigator and “medical man”, whose suggestion that Britain regulate prostitution through a modified French plan eventually led to the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s. Although many mid-century social reformers opposed Acton and other proto-regulationists, they were also unhappy with the earlier reform methods of emigration and penitentiaries promoted by Angela Burdett-Coutts and Charles Dickens. Anna Jameson, the social critic and art historian, and Emma Sheppard, an evangelical reformer and author, instead encourage methods of reclamation aimed at addressing the underlying causes of prostitution. They argue for better employment for women and greater unity between women of every class. While Acton, Jameson, and Sheppard have differing agendas, they agree on two points: firstly, that

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the real roots of prostitution are economic rather than spiritual or moral; and secondly, that there were as yet untried strategies for interrupting the “harlot’s progress” and reintegrating former prostitutes back into society. William Acton’s Prostitution, Considered in its Moral, Social, and Sanitary Aspects, in London and other Large Cities: with Proposals for the Mitigation and Prevention of its Attendant Evil was to have long-ranging effects into the 1870s. Like Greg, Acton was strongly influenced by the French social investigator Parent-Duchâtelet. He believed the spread of venereal disease could only be stemmed by governmental regulation and he argued for laws that would enforce the registration of known prostitutes and require gynecological examinations of suspect women. Largely through his influence, the Contagious Diseases Acts for garrison cities were passed in the 1860s. In 1857, however, Acton’s publication was perhaps most notable for its prosaic acceptance of prostitution as an unavoidable form of Victorian enterprise – at one point he compares it to “selling goods at a shop” – subject to governmental checks and balances (158). According to Acton’s logic, if a merchant sells “tainted meat” he is liable to prosecution by the law; an infected prostitute similarly endangers her customers and thereby forfeits the right to privacy enjoyed by other British citizens: . . . we cannot but admit that a woman if so disposed may make profit of her own person, and that the State has no right to prevent her. It has a right, however, in my opinion, to insist that she shall not, in trafficking with her person, become a medium of communicating disease, and that, as she has given herself up to an occupation dangerous to herself and others, she must, in her own interest and that of the community, submit to supervision. (26) Like Greg, Acton accepts the inevitability of prostitution given the economics of male “lust” and the current low wages for female work: “prostitution exists, and flourishes, because there is a demand for the article supplied by its agency” (114). Acton’s argument, with its emphasis upon male desire, initially seems to suggest that men are equal participants in the “great Social Evil”. But after acknowledging the market demands of the male consumer, he quickly shifts blame back to the prostitute: “Gunpowder remains harmless till the spark falls upon it; the match, until struck, retains the hidden fire, so lust remains dormant till called into being by an exciting cause” (119). Acton’s most radical suggestion, and ultimately his main rationale for


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instituting governmental regulation of prostitution, is that prostitutes do not remain exiled. They inevitably re-enter “respectable” society, bringing with them their tainted minds and their “polluted” bodies. According to Acton, and contrary to the popular myth of the “harlot’s progress”, the prostitute’s death rarely occurs at the “pavement’s edge”: I have every reason to believe, that by far the number of women who have resorted to prostitution for a livelihood, return sooner or later to a more or less regular course of life. [. . .] Her return to the hearth of her infancy is for obvious reasons a very rare occurrence. Is it surprising, then, that she should look to the chance of amalgamating with society at large, and make a dash at respectability by a marriage? Thus, to a most surprising, and year by year increasing extent, the better inclined class of prostitutes become the wedded wives of men in every grade of society, from the peerage to the stable. (72–3) Acton goes on to argue against the economic viability of Magdalen refuges; he suggests that they “save” women who will eventually abandon the “gay life” anyway. And, since they focus upon individuals rather than the larger problem, they are inherently flawed: “To leave an open stinking ditch unclosed is bad enough – to leave the morass untouched is fatal” (144). Putting aside his misogynist rhetoric of the polluted female body, some of Acton’s ideas do seem to hover around the edges of Rossetti’s poetry, although in an admittedly inverted state. Goblin Market, written two years after the publication of Prostitution, concerns itself with the “contagion” of male desire while the “fallen” heroine actually does return to the “hearth of her infancy”. But, since Laura returns to the domestic sphere via sisterly communion, rather than through the marriage market, Rossetti’s work also resonates with yet another school of medico-moral rhetoric. In two published lectures, “Sisters of Charity” (1855) and “The Communion of Labor” (1856), Anna Jameson explicitly links the dual lessons of the Anglican Sisterhoods and the Crimean “campaign” of Florence Nightingale as evidence that British women should pursue professional philanthropic endeavors outside of the home.11 Both essays revel in historical and contemporary examples of women – from Elizabeth Fry to Queen Victoria – who exemplify a “masculine” quality of bravery, as well as a “feminine” capacity for tenderness. Jameson carefully employs the gendered language of “female influence” throughout both essays. The woman who acts as “the nurse, the

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teacher, the cherisher of the home” can use those talents to “cherish and purify society”, but Jameson does not spare the social and legal systems which deprive women of the opportunity for meaningful work (29). Although she repeatedly denies that her essays in any way address the question of “the rights of women and the wrongs of women” (162) her rhetoric is often reminiscent of early proto-feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays: “Morally a woman has a right to the free and entire development of every faculty which God has given her to be improved and used to His honor. Socially she has a right to the protection of equal laws; the right to labor with her hands the thing that is good; to select the kind of labor which is in harmony with her condition and her powers; to exist, if need be, by her labor, or to profit by it if she choose.” (Jameson 165) Like Hays, Jameson forcefully argues that legislators – both governmental and social – err in assuming that all women are “always protected, always under tutelage, always within the precincts of a home” (32). She suggests that the needs of “unprotected women” and a country in dire need of social reform can both be met through training women for respectable and adequately remunerated professions. Jameson argues that well-trained women would be able workers in hospitals, prisons, reformatories, insane asylums, and workhouses. While she acknowledges that women can play a role in reforming “the fallen of [her] own sex” – and discusses a model community of reformed prostitutes in Turin – she advises that only some women are suited to this particularly “difficult mission” (79). Ultimately, however, Jameson contends that her vision of skilled working women would lead to the widespread social change necessary to stop women from becoming prostitutes. In her second essay, “The Communion of Labor”, Jameson suggests that low wages for women, as well as the common law doctrine of coverture, “degrade” women: “I look upon these laws as one cause of prostitution, because, in so far as they have lowered the social position of the woman, they have lowered the value of her labor, and thus exposed her to want and temptation, which would not otherwise have existed” (158–9). In addition, she goes on to suggest that the social and economic devaluation of women also lies behind incidents of rape (160). Whereas Acton focuses on the necessity of prostitution as “legitimate” women’s work, Jameson argues that the cure for prostitution lies in securing women more meaningful and respected “vocations” as well as equal protection (rather than more regulation) under the law. Although plain language and careful analysis rather than stunning


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rhetoric characterize the essay, it occasionally mounts a thrilling call to action. This is particularly true of Jameson’s descriptions of Florence Nightingale’s success in training women as professional nurses and their subsequent work during the Crimean War: “Send such a woman to her piano, her books, her cross-stitch; she answers you with despair! But send her on some mission of mercy, send her where she may perhaps die by inches in achieving good for others, and the whole spirit rises up strong and rejoicing” (117). And elsewhere, Jameson deplores the duplicitous nature of “female influence”: “Why is female influence always supposed to be secret, underhand, exercised in some way which is not to appear? – till even our good deeds borrow the piquancy of intrigue, and we are told practically to seek the shade, till morally we fear the light?” (269). It is at moments like these that Jameson’s rhetoric is somewhat reminiscent of Christina Rossetti’s treatment of the “redundant woman”. In poems including “From the Antique” (1854; pub. 1896) and “The Lowest Room” (1856; pub. 1875), Rossetti’s speakers echo Jameson’s longing for a meaningful “battle” with the world outside of the domestic sphere. In “The Lowest Room”, the speaker thrills to the adventures of Homer’s Iliad, claiming that “. . . those days were golden days, / Whilst these are days of dross” (1: 35). After romanticizing the battles of “crest-rearing kings with whistling spears”, she adds that she would rather be a Trojan “wife or slave” than a proper Victorian maiden: “Oh better then be slave or wife / Than fritter now blank life away: / Then night had holiness of night, / And day was sacred day” (69–72). Although the poem goes on to give the speaker’s younger sister an opportunity to rehearse the joys of conventional Victorian womanhood, the speaker’s frustration with her own “tedious” and unfulfilled life ends the poem. Finally, only her reading of the Homeric epic interrupts her otherwise passionless life: “He stirs my sluggish pulse like wine, / He melts me like the wind of spice” (29–30). Rossetti will return to epic poetry in Goblin Market, where we find not only Homeric epithet but also the glorification of the battle hard fought. There are allusions to heroic strife and unfailing courage in both Lizzie’s sacrifice and Laura’s repentance. But before going on to a more thorough discussion of Rossetti’s poetry, I would like to explore just one more aspect of social reform discourse during the late 1850s. At the very beginning of this chapter I suggested that the program of reclamation embedded within Goblin Market was strikingly different from the routine of discipline and prayer followed in Anglican houses of refuge. Indeed, Lizzie’s descent into the glen to battle with the Goblins is much closer in spirit and

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method to that of Evangelical reform, which was characterized by “midnight meetings” in the heart of England’s red-light districts and surprise visits to well-known brothels. The Magdalen’s Friend and Female Homes Intelligencer, a social reform journal active between 1860 and 1865, publishes a fascinating array of sermons, essays, short stories, and – most importantly for the purposes of this chapter – poetry, in an attempt to provide a “rallying point” for “Christians and Philanthropists” working in the field of the “great social evil” (1: 1). Because The Magdalen’s Friend both excerpts pertinent articles from the popular press and publishes work written specifically for the journal, it serves as a particularly apt source for examining this particular school of social reform discourse. The Magdalen’s Friend openly calls for submissions from women reformers, indeed “contributions from ladies are especially desired, and will at all times command a preference” (1: 64). And many of the articles are specifically addressed to women readers: “Female Missionaries to the Fallen”, “Charity in Women” (from The London Review), and “A Woman on a Woman’s Question” (from The Nottingham Review). One writer in particular dominates the pages of the journal’s first three volumes. Emma Sheppard, author of Experiences of a Workhouse Visitor (1857) and An Outstretched Hand to the Fallen (1859), ran a small refuge for “fallen women” in Frome and was an outspoken advocate for more humane reform methods. In a series of articles which include the suggestively entitled “A Fallen Sister”, “The Law of Kindness”, and “Working by Love”, she particularly opposes “Penitentiary gates and walls, and locks and bars”, offering instead a “Ministry of Love” (The Magdalen’s Friend 3: 336–7). Sheppard bases her reform program upon a model of familial “Love”, but more significantly, perhaps, upon female solidarity forged through a recognition of “sisterhood”: “Oh, believe me if you hold out a kindly hand, half the battle is fought. Few would turn away from that outstretched hand; but hold it out as a Sister, not a stern monitress. If they refuse, you have delivered your own soul, which now you have not. Jesus says to us, – all of us – no distinction between the duchess and the midnight streetwalker, ‘Come?’” (1: 17). Sheppard’s own refuge was run along decidedly progressive lines. She encouraged her reclaimed “sisters” to remain in contact with their families, work outside of the refuge, and wear attractive, if plain, garments. In her refuge there are “No reproaches for former sin, no dismal doubtings whether they would accept the offer of a new life, but a certain confidence expressed in the full and loving invitation” (The Magdalen’s


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Friend 3: 336–7). Sheppard’s harsh denunciation of penitentiaries is even-handed. She decries the “gloomy and ascetic nature” of both “Magdalene Hospitals of the ‘Low Church’ and Houses of Mercy of the ‘High Church’” (1: 242). The rhetorical links between Sheppard and Rossetti, both based upon certain theological touchstones of Christian salvation, are immediately apparent, as is their more unconventional articulation of female solidarity. While I would not argue that Sheppard directly influences Rossetti, I would suggest that the ideology of “sisterhood” delineated in Goblin Market reflects a strong current of thought in British female social reform circles, rather than an eccentric utopianism. Such links also appear in the social reform poetry omnipresent throughout the pages of The Magdalen’s Friend. In many respects this poetry shares the same goals as Sheppard’s prose. In each case, middleclass women are asked to employ their imaginations and place themselves in the position of the prostitute. Again and again, they are asked to direct their gaze outward. In the essay “A Fallen Sister”, Sheppard cannily employs several discourses – borrowed from the sentimental novel, the Bible, and the ideology of the separate spheres – to turn her readers’ thoughts to an experience quite unlike their own. Sheppard’s essay specifically addresses itself to women readers: “English ladies, have you ever analyzed these two words, – a ‘sister’ – though ‘fallen’?” (The Magdalen’s Friend 1: 13). She asks them to imagine the experience of their prostituted “sister” even as they lay abed with “the husband of your youth, the children of your love” near them (1: 13). As in Mary Robinson’s Letter to the Women of England, Sheppard insists that her readers “imagine” a world outside of their seemingly safe domestic realm. She asks them to figuratively bring the “street” into their “carpeted rooms”, thus destroying the protective cocoon of separate sphere ideology which arbitrarily divides the “one family” and blinds one woman to the experience of another: “Think for ten minutes of midnight streets, cold pavements, dreary door-steps, dark corners, on which perhaps, the eye of God alone looks, – picture these filled with women, young girls, your Sisters, once fair and loved as you, now debased and humbled, and degraded to the level of the brutes, either cursing, or drinking, or quarreling, or following deeds of darkness such as your mind never can picture” (1: 13). Sheppard ends her essay with a statement of solidarity predicated upon recognition of sameness: “I beg to subscribe myself a sister, with my English sisters, fallen or unfallen” (1: 18). Several poems published in The Magdalen’s Friend echo Sheppard’s call for a “ministry of love” as well as her

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insistence upon turning the pure “sister’s” steadfast gaze toward the “fallen”. Many poems published in The Magdalen’s Friend are represented as the unmediated voice of the “fallen woman” herself. “Sacred Feet”, “The Hospital”, and “The Picture” are simply signed “Magdalene”, while others are entitled “The Appeal of a Fallen Sister”, “The Voice of the Fallen”, and “The Song of the Erring but Penitent Women”. In each of these poems, “pure” female readers are asked to turn “cold averted” eyes toward the “fallen” speaker (“The Voice of the Fallen” 1: 221). In “The Hospital” (1: 94–5), the speaker asks the reader to imagine the streets through her eyes: “Forth ye go in the crowded street, / Where the children of light and darkness meet: / And ye hurry past me with scornful feet, / With eyes of wrath, and cheeks of flame” (1: 94–5). The tone of these poems tends toward the confrontational; once “eye to eye” with a “fallen” sister, what will be the response of the “Christian Lady”?: “What will ye do with me now I stand / Seeking my deathbed at your hand, / And I, a child of this Christian land”. For the most part, the above poems dogmatically tend to assert sameness. But “Neither do I Condemn” (3: 63–4) uses more subtle means to assert “sisterhood” between the “pure” and the “fallen”. One of the more striking aspects of this particular poem is that it purports to address the “fallen” from the subject position of the reformer: “From the depth of guilt and shame, / Polluted one, arise, arise!” In spite of this rather inauspicious beginning, with its echoes of regulationist discourse, the poem then goes on to reassert sameness: O’er the evil of thy name, Mercy weeps with streaming eyes; Not to mock, insult, or brand, Nor with unmeaning words to chill – To thee she holds a helping hand, And deems thee as a sister still. The above lines are particularly interesting in their subversion of the defining trope of Magdalenism; the weeping figure is not the prostituted Magdalen, but rather her reforming sister “Mercy”. The poem goes on to identify the prostitute’s best “Friend” as “God’s anointed Son”, and, in a moment not unlike that of Rossetti’s own “Light Love” (1856; pub. 1866) implores the “fallen woman” to turn her gaze upward: “Yet One will hear thy feeble cry, / Poor suff’ring, sorrowing child of sin” (“Neither do I Condemn” 1: 64). I would suggest that in


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addition to Goblin Market, several of Rossetti’s other poems, including “Light Love”, “From Sunset to Star Rise”, and “Margery”, share a reform vocabulary with the much cruder poetic productions of The Magdalen’s Friend. “Light Love” not only introduces Rossetti’s characteristic thematic and stylistic treatment of the “fallen woman”, but it also indicates her early interest in the subject of sexually transgressive women. In “Light Love” she explores the consequences of an illicit relationship through a dialogue between a man and the woman he is about to abandon. In a movement analogous to that of “Jenny”, the male speaker posits himself as the only good thing in his lover’s “sad” life. The poem opens up with his words: Oh sad thy lot before I came, But sadder when I go; My presence but a flash of flame, A transitory glow Between two barren wastes like snow. What wilt thou do when I am gone? Where wilt thou rest, my dear? (1: 1–7) Comforting the child at her breast, his lover responds: “Is death so sadder much than this – / Sure death that builds a nest / For those who elsewhere cannot rest?” (18–20). However, her lover is unmoved by both her words and the child; he posits further pleasures of the flesh as the woman’s salvation. A new lover will “. . . warm thy coldness to a flush / And turn thee back to May, / And turn thy twilight back to day?” (28–30). He goes on to describe his own new “ripe-blooming” love as his “rose” and his “peach”. Rossetti’s portrait of the male lover represents a Victorian male sexuality which degrades and consumes a woman’s sexuality and then goes on to “fresher” fruit. The male speaker of the poem does not differentiate between the sexuality of his old love and that of his new; in both cases women’s bodies are conceived as something to which he and other men have free access. Nowhere in the poem does either character assert a moral difference between the two women: one “fallen” and one “pure”. For the male speaker, they are significant only in relation to his own sexual desire; while he has sucked the juice out of the old love – she is now “pale” and “cold” – his new love “ripens” and “reddens” before his desiring gaze. His new love will become his bride, not because he cares for her more than the mother of his child, but because her “piece of fruit” is

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protected: “She leans, but from a guarded tree” (65). The careless seducer of “Light Love” does not even possess the limited self-awareness of the speaker in “Jenny”; he remains entirely complicit within a system of morality which privileges virginity as a commodity within the “marriage market”. He yearns for a particularly luscious fruit just out of reach and enjoys the ways in which the inaccessibility of his “new” love further arouses his desire. Indeed, even as he prepares to pay the requisite price of marriage, he exalts in the ways in which deferred desire excites him further. In the last two stanzas of the poem the seduced and abandoned woman’s voice prevails. It is she who recognizes her link of sisterhood to his new love: Thou leavest love, true love behind, To seek a love as true; Go seek in haste: but wilt thou find? Change new again for new; Pluck up, enjoy – yea, trample too. Alas for her, poor faded rose, Alas for her like me. (56–62) The female speaker of “Light Love” mourns the fate of her lover’s future wife; eventually she too will become a “poor faded rose”. She also acknowledges a higher authority than that of Victorian society and its discourse of the “pure” and the “fallen”. Her lover leaves saying, “Farewell, and dream as long ago”, but the poem ends with the woman speaker’s rejection of this small comfort (66). Instead, she looks to her one hope for salvation: “She raised her eyes, not wet / But hard, to Heaven: ‘Dost God forget?’” (69–70). Although this speaker looks to the divine for an answer, she does not expect to receive one. Hopelessly enmeshed in the world of the flesh, her eyes remain unsoftened by Magdalen tears. In Goblin Market Rossetti will pose a more positive scenario, offering the “pure” woman as the mediator between God and his “fallen” daughters. In Goblin Market Rossetti, fully cognizant of the fragile nature of sisterhood in a materialistic and patriarchal society, nonetheless posits salvation as emerging from an ideal relationship between women. The poem emphasizes the strength that is generated when harmony exists between women.12 It also suggests that it is precisely this cooperative power which must be harnessed when one of the sisters sins. Unlike


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the speaker of “Light Love”, Laura is offered salvation; and her savior is her unselfish sister. More significantly, Laura and Lizzie choose not only to read and reject the authorized text of the “fallen woman”, but also to write their own. Goblin Market begins with the cries of the Goblin men: Come buy our orchard fruits, Come buy, come buy: Apples and quinces, Lemons and oranges, Plump unpecked cherries, Melons and raspberries, Bloom-down-cheeked peaches, Swart-headed mulberries, Wild free-born cranberries . . . (1: 3–9) The first lines of the poem immediately position the reader in the same sensory space as that inhabited by Laura and Lizzie. We too experience the irresistible temptation offered by the Goblins; our own mouths tingle for Goblin fruit. The language is sensuous, but the most evocative phrases are intermingled between prosaic lines; they send an almost subliminal message of danger. There is a cannibalistic appeal in the “down-cheeked peaches” and something sexually illicit in the “free-born cranberries”. One of the most overt messages in Goblin Market is that any of us could succumb to the lure of the Goblins, who represent in their mutability an unstable desire for the unknown and the unpossessed. Laura and Lizzie are entranced by the Goblins’ eroticized masculinity; their exotic fruits are quite different from the plain products of their own labor. The first lines of the second stanza suggest that Laura and Lizzie have repeatedly gone together to listen for the Goblins’ cry: Evening by evening Among the brookside rushes, Laura bowed her head to hear, Lizzie veiled her blushes: Crouching close together In the cooling weather, With clasping arms and cautioning lips, With tingling cheeks and finger tips. (32–9)

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Indeed, at first Lizzie, rather than Laura, appears most vulnerable to the Goblin allure; Laura warns her about its danger: “We must not look at goblin men, / We must not buy their fruits” (42–3). While the girls are initially shown helping each other resist the siren song of desire, the poem chronicles the consequences of “unclasping” their arms and going separate ways. Lizzie lets go of Laura in order to cover up her eyes “lest they should look” (51). While Lizzie’s self-defensive action protects her, it endangers Laura. Indeed, Laura’s attitude toward the Goblins radically changes in the space of ten lines. Her eyes seem to look of their own volition and she becomes converted, to the point of entreating Lizzie to “Look, Lizzie, look, Lizzie” (54). Although everyone is tempted, one problematic path to salvation lies in an active, and even selfish, resistance to desire. Lizzie remains pure because when her ears are attacked by Laura’s words, “She thrust a dimpled finger / In each ear, shut eyes and ran” (66–7). While there is a terrible price paid in succumbing to desire, Lizzie will also suffer the consequences of leaving her sister to “look” and “listen” alone. The story of Laura’s “fall” parallels that of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Jenny. Laura is likened to a series of images as she succumbs to the Goblins: “Like a rush-imbedded swan, / Like a lily from the beck, / Like a moonlit poplar branch, / Like a vessel at the launch / When its last restraint is gone” (82–7). Similarly, Jenny is consistently figured in terms of metaphor (“Like a rose shut in a book”) while she and Nell are envisioned as “Two sister vessels” (“Jenny”, 253, 184). And, at the end of the poem, the speaker mockingly figures Jenny as his “Danae”. In Goblin Market, the Goblins prepare for Laura a similar offering: One reared his plate; One began to weave a crown Of tendrils, leaves and rough nuts brown (Men sell not such in any town) (98–101) Like the speaker in “Jenny”, the masculine figures in Christina Rossetti’s poem deify the “fallen woman”, but it is finally only a degrading and mocking diversion to glorify their own actions. However, these Goblins bring their wares into the countryside. One of the conventions of the “fallen woman’s” narrative refuted by Rossetti is that rural women are pure; for her, there is no prelapsarian split between the country and the city. In Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem, the speaker looks back to Jenny’s childhood and imagines an idyllic


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innocence: “When she would lie in fields and look / Along the ground through the blown grass, / And wonder where the city was” (“Jenny”, 137–40). In Goblin Market Christina Rossetti rejects a simple dichotomy between country and city; Laura’s fall takes place in the rural scene and is specific to that environment. In what seems to be a gloss on “Jenny”, Laura and Lizzie are crouched “among brookside rushes” when they are tempted by Goblin fruits supposedly unavailable in the city: “(Men sell not such in any town)”. Goblin Market also suggests that country innocents – widely believed to be most susceptible to sexual transgression – must hear tales of temptation, in order to reject the lure of “goblins”. Laura’s ignorance of “goblin economics” does facilitate her “fall”; she and Lizzie live in a self-sufficient and enclosed world. Laura mistakenly believes that she needs money to buy the fruit: “Good folk, I have no coin” (116). However, what really occurs is the “purchase” by the Goblins of her purity. Laura, the future “Magdalen”, innocently negotiates with her most “precious” commodities. The Goblins take both her “golden curl” and “a tear more rare than pearl” and then pay her with the fruit (125, 127).13 The boundaries between purchaser and product are extremely tenuous. It is she, after all, who possesses the desired product; the fruit is a mere lure to get her to give it to them cheaply. The epithet that describes Laura at this moment – “sweet tooth Laura” (115) – further adds to the confusion. On the one hand, it refers to her desire for the fruit, but it also alludes to the “toothsome” loveliness that attracts the Goblins. By the same token, one can say that Jenny is tempted to give up what the (masculine) city demands – her sexuality – in exchange for material goods; she “enrolls” in a marketplace in which things are both “bought and sold” (“Jenny” 134). If Laura had “looked into the book” which is Jeanie’s – or Jenny’s – story, she would have been prepared to negotiate with the Goblins. But, like Gaskell’s Ruth, Laura learns of Goblin economics only after she falls: “Lizzie met her at the gate, / Full of wise upbraidings, / Twilight is not good for maidens” (141–4). Only then does Lizzie narrate Jeanie’s story: “Do you not remember Jeanie, / How she met them in the moonlight, / Took their gifts both choice and many, / Ate their fruit and wore their flowers” (147–50). It is Lizzie who gets the economics of temptation right. The Goblins’ products are spoken of as “gifts”; they are the purchasers. It becomes even clearer that Jeanie’s story is that of the ill-fated “fallen woman”:

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She pined and pined away; Sought them by night and day, Found them no more, but dwindled and grew gray; Then fell with the first snow, While to this day no grass will grow Where she lies low: (154–9) In short, Jeanie is the “fallen woman” who gets her just “reward”; she dies alone at the “pavement’s edge”. And Laura “falls” because she hasn’t read the “vile text” which offers the information needed to clear one’s “dark path”. The poem itself does not pass judgment on Laura. As in “Jenny”, there is a vision of integral purity: Golden head by golden head, Like two pigeons in one nest Folded in each other’s wings, They lay down in their curtained bed: Like two blossoms on one stem, Like two flakes of new-fall’n snow, Like two wands of ivory, Tipped with gold for awful kings. (184–91) In Goblin Market the equation between pure and impure is not compromised as it is in “Jenny”. Whereas the speaker in that poem felt that to align the pure woman to the “fallen” was to make a “goblin of the sun”, Christina Rossetti’s poem asserts that the essential similarity between Laura and Lizzie remains unchanged by “goblin” seductions. Indeed, in the woodcut illustration executed by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, it is impossible to distinguish between sisters as they lie sleeping (Figure 6). Yet, I would hesitate to read this particular moment as ideal. The positive images of purity are compromised by the vulnerability and passivity of the girls. Like Wollstonecraft’s “fallen” and “pure” women in the Vindication, they share a dangerously uninformed innocence. Laura foolishly believes in the pleasures of Goblin fruit and Lizzie takes a complacent comfort in her own wisdom. Both women awaken to face the consequences of their naiveté. Their old lifestyle of harmonious interaction is destroyed. Even as they complete their chores, “Neat like bees, as sweet and busy”, their hearts and minds follow different paths. Most critical attention has focused on the misery of Laura’s condition: “Her hair grew thin and gray; / She


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dwindled, as the fair full moon doth turn / To swift decay and burn / Her fire away” (277–81). Her spiritual decline is figured in language characteristic of other Rossetti poems: “But Laura loitered still among the rushes, / And said the bank was steep” (226–7). Unlike the speaker in “Amor Amundi”, however, Laura is offered redemption; in Goblin Market there is a “turning back”. But before that salvation can be offered, Lizzie must endure her own crisis. It is important to note that Laura’s dramatic physical and psychological decline is mirrored by Lizzie’s “dimpled” indifference: “Talked as modest maidens should: / Lizzie with an open heart, / Laura in an absent dream, / One content, One sick in part” (209–12). And Lizzie’s self-complacent oblivion continues into the next stanza: “Lizzie most placid in her look, / Laura most like a leaping flame” (217–18). While Lizzie sleeps, Laura suffers; not until “Day after day, night after night” pass does Lizzie take action (269). Goblin Market, then, levels the same challenge to its “pure” readers as the poetry of the social reform movement. Lizzie must be shocked out of her willingness to watch Laura suffer as she weighs the possible consequences of helping her.14 Lizzie – who knew Jeanie’s story but did nothing – must face her own fears in order to save her sister: Longed to buy fruit to comfort her, But feared to pay too dear. She thought of Jeanie in her grave, Who should have been a bride; But who for joys brides hope to have Fell sick and died (310–15) Lizzie seems aware that the Goblins represent a sexual threat; sexual experience is implied in the line: “But who for joys brides hope to have / Fell sick and died”. She also realizes that there is the danger of compromising her own innocence; she “fears to pay too dear”. However, she also knows that she must “market” her own purity in order to save Laura for “She heard the tramp of goblin men, / The voice and stir / Poor Laura could not hear” (307–9). At first it appears that Lizzie is going to enter into the economic world of the Goblins, she brings a “silver penny” and begins “to listen and look” (324, 328). However, Lizzie knows that she can get the fruit as a gift – she possesses the desired object – the trick is to get it without surrendering her purity. In order to save the “fallen woman” and simultaneously avoid the perils of the sexual marketplace, one must have the

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experience of her “fall” but remain virtuous. In the prose work The Face of the Deep, written in 1892, Rossetti writes: “For most persons contact with evil and consequently knowledge of evil being unavoidable [. . .] they must achieve a more difficult sanctity, touching pitch yet continuing clean, enduring evil communications yet without corruption” (quoted in Packer, 147). The Goblins seem to sense the challenge offered by Lizzie. They reject her money – they do not want to be purchased – offering her gifts instead: “Be welcome guest with us, / Cheer you and rest with us” (381–2). Lizzie, however, demands an equal economic relationship and will not participate in a false one. Her refusal to participate on their terms exposes the destructive male sexuality that underlies and determines “market” conditions.15 As in Mary Hays’s Victim of Prejudice, Lizzie experiences a “rape” at the hands of the Goblins but remains “pure”. An informed innocence protects her; she is “Like a fruit-crowned orange-tree / White with blossoms honey-sweet / Sore beset by wasp and bee” (415–17). Lizzie’s refusal to enter into discourse with the Goblins saves her: “Lizzie uttered not a word; / Would not open lip from lip / Lest they should cram a mouthful in: / But laughed in heart to feel the drip” (430–3). Lizzie gets her way without giving in; she not only retains her innocence, but she keeps her penny as well: “Bouncing in her purse, / Its bounce was music to her ear” (453–4). Lizzie’s practical enjoyment of her “penny” is one indication of the secular salvation she offers. As Dorothy Mermin points out, Lizzie “brings the ‘fiery antidote’ and she is the antidote”: “She brings back ‘the fruit forbidden’ without tasting it herself – that is, she shows that it is possible in erotic and artistic matters, if not in Genesis, to know good and evil and not succumb to evil [. . .] like Christ she saves by both her self-sacrifice and by her example” (112).16 For Rossetti, the process of salvation is twofold. Not only must the “savior” struggle to offer it, but the “fallen” must actively take it. Rossetti remained a proponent of this reform tenet throughout her life. In The Face of the Deep she writes: “Love from without cannot accomplish its work, unless there be some response from love within” (273). Laura actively participates in her own salvation. She responds to Lizzie, not because she wants the juice, but because she appreciates her sister’s sacrifice: “She clung about her sister, / Kissed and kissed and kissed her: / Tears once again / Refreshed her shrunken eyes” (485–8). Yet the process of salvation is not an easy one: “Her lips began to scorch, / That juice was wormwood to her tongue, / She loathed the feast: / Writhing as one possessed she leaped and sung” (493–6). But as


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in “Divine and Human Pleading”, once the sinner repents, redemption is made available. When Laura awakens from her “life in death” state, her original innocence has returned: “Her gleaming locks showed not one thread of gray, / Her breath was sweet as May, / And light danced in her eyes” (540–2). However, it is a rebirth that does not repudiate the experience of sin. Instead, Laura and Lizzie are battle weary but wise warriors; images of empowerment gradually replace those of defeat. During Lizzie’s encounter with the Goblins she is compared to “a rush-imbedded swan” (82) while the “golden head” passage equates both women with a symbol of power wielded elsewhere (190–1). Each of their redemptive struggles is hard fought and afterwards they are rewarded with heroic epithet. Lizzie, even as she endures the violence of the Goblins, is compared to “a royal virgin town” that is “Close beleaguered by a fleet / Mad to tug her standard down” but ultimately victorious (418–21). And Laura’s writhing in her anguished struggle with the “antidote” procured by Lizzie is compared to “a caged thing freed, / Or like a flying flag when armies run” (505–6). The spoils of this particular war, however, are the delights of maternity. They both go on to become mothers – and presumably wives – but they do not forget the experience of their youth. The poem concludes where it began, with “clasping arms and cautioning lips” (38). Even as Laura tells the children of her experience in those brookside rushes, she “bid them cling together” by “joining hands to little hands” (560–1) for “. . . there is no friend like a sister/ [. . .] To lift one if one totters down, / To strengthen whilst one stands” (562, 566–7). Laura and Lizzie “rewrite” the experience of the “fallen woman”, providing their innocent country children with a tale of temptation defeated. Whereas Jeanie’s story ended with death, Laura’s ends with a literary rebirth and an insistence upon telling “tales” of sisterhood and survival. Laura and Lizzie’s version of Goblin Market recasts the myth of the “fallen woman” into one that focuses upon successful salvation even as it insists upon the benefits of reclamation to “strengthen” the sister who “stands” strong. Although the story told to the children is a dilution of the actual action, so was Jeanie’s. Their reform tale is offered to stem the tide of corruption so evident to Victorian eyes and to break the generational cycle of temptation accepted. In “Jenny”, the speaker attempts to breach the gap between the prostitute and Nell by hypothesizing a future in which Jenny’s children are pure and Nell’s are not: “And who shall say but this fair tree [Nell] / May need, in changes that may be, / [Jenny’s] children’s children’s charity?” (211–13). Goblin Market rejects this vision of

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generational equality dependent upon a reversal of fortune and instead imagines a world in which women and children not only recover “the rose shut in the book” but write it too (“Jenny” 253). D. M. R. Bentley has suggested that Rossetti’s experiences as an Associate at the Highgate refuge resulted in her vision of sisterly communion in Goblin Market. But given what we know about the workings of an institution like Highgate, it seems very unlikely that Rossetti could maintain such an idealistic perspective once she began working there. Martha Vicinus has described the workings of such “Houses of Mercy”: Throughout the process distance was always kept between the penitents and the sisters. Contamination was avoided by strict regulation and physical separation. Penitents were taught to bow low before any sister and to speak only when spoken to. Although the pure helped the fallen, they had to keep their hands metaphorically unstained. Reform was through punishment. (78) Elizabeth Helsinger and Diane D’Amico have both described Rossetti’s activities at Highgate as fairly limited: “she was expected to pray for the fallen women [. . .] Because of the rule of silence, the rule that forbade the fallen to speak of their past sins, we can be reasonably certain that Rossetti did not listen to confessional tales of personal experience” (D’Amico, “Equal before God” 72–3). And Jan Marsh notes that while Highgate was run as a “House of Mercy” rather than a “House of Correction”, volunteers were expected to keep a careful eye upon the inmates. In true carceral fashion, the very architecture of the building allowed for continual observation: “Each dormitory also contained a bedroom with an interior window allowing night-time surveillance by the resident Sister” (220–1). In a call for more volunteers, the warden asked for volunteers “who by sympathy, by cautious discipline, by affectionate watchfulness, will teach them to hate what has been pleasant to them, and to love what they have despised” (quoted in Marsh, 220). One of the things the inmates were asked to abandon was their love of secular poetry. According to an article in the English Women’s Journal, most of the inmates arrived with volumes of verse which were immediately confiscated and later replaced with “a new Bible and Prayerbook” upon their departure (Marsh 224). We might be tempted to imagine that Rossetti was disappointed by the disparity between her idealized vision of redemptive sisterhood and


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her actual experience at Highgate. After all, her poetry demonstrates both a curiosity about the lives of the “fallen”, as well as a conviction that their redemption depends upon sharing their stories with both sympathetic and unsympathetic auditors. While Goblin Market emphasizes the virtues of a watchful sister, other poems of the period represent sibling surveillance as oppressive. In “Noble Sisters” (1859; pub. 1862) and “Sister Maude” (pub. 1862), prying but “pure” older sisters deliberately destroy the happiness of their admittedly wayward siblings. In both cases, the general tenor of the poetry indicates greater sympathy for the watched than for the watcher. “Noble Sisters” ends with the eldest sister’s spiteful curse: “Go seek in sorrow, sister, / And find in sorrow too: / If thus you shame our father’s name / My curse go forth with you” (1: 57–60). In “Sister Maude”, the younger sister denounces Maude’s predilection to “spye” and “peer” (1: 4), ultimately consigning Maude to a well-earned eternal damnation. And even as Rossetti critiques the sinister surveillance of sisterhood, she celebrates the joys of undermining such “watching” with a well-kept secret. Both “Winter: My Secret” (1857; pub. 1862) and “Memory” (1857–65; pub. 1866) revel in the complex pleasures, as well as the strategic power, of secrecy: “And you’re too curious: fie! / You want to hear it? well: / Only, my secret’s mine, and I won’t tell” (“Winter” 1: 4–6). Rossetti’s sexually transgressive speakers increasingly take refuge in a knowing silence; they purposely defy the “curious” who want to know their stories. In “From Sunset to Star Rise”, “The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children” (1865; pub. 1866), and “A Daughter of Eve” (1866; pub. 1875), sexually suspect speakers refuse communion with other women, since such “sisterhood” depends upon sharing their secrets. In “The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children” the speaker, the illegitimate child of the local lady of the manor, is bound in an unspoken pact with her mother: “Now this is what I mean / To do, no more, no less: / Never to speak, or show / Bare sign of what I know” (1: 413–16). The utopian vision of Goblin Market is absent in late poems, where the fate of the sexual transgressor is inevitably one of solitude and silence. A poem published in 1881 with an unknown composition date, “Brandons Both”, sums up the general attitude of Rossetti’s later reform philosophy: “If you have a secret keep it, pure maid Milly; / Life is filled with troubles and the world with scorn” (2: 9–10). In part, Rossetti’s turn toward the subversive resistance of secretive silence is due to her increasing faith in the “sinner’s” intimate relationship with her God: “Soul, is there not now already a secret

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between Me and thee? I know thy name now, whether thou be Impenitent Sinner or Sinful Penitent. I know it now; but none other knoweth it fully” (Face of the Deep 74). Rossetti pairs her increasing interest in the private landscape of the soul with a decreased interest in the economics of seduction and prostitution. This position inevitably affects her “philosophy” as a poet as well. In a letter written to Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1865, when Rossetti still has a degree of commitment to the “fair world”, we can already see her increasing interest in the life of the individual rather than the general condition of society. She begins her letter by addressing Dante’s objections to including “The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children”, here referred to as “Under the Rose”, in her second volume of published poetry. The writer of “Jenny” seems particularly disturbed with the subject matter his still virginal sister has chosen to write upon. “Under the Rose” is particularly concerned with the reactions of a young woman to her illegitimacy, but it also explores the societal constraints placed on the “fallen” mother. Christina opens the letter with modest deference, “[‘Under the Rose’] herewith [. . .] I meekly return to you, pruned and re-written to order”, but the letter quickly changes tone: As regards the unpleasant-sided subject I freely admit it: and if you think the performance coarse or what-not, pray eject it, [. . .] But do you know, even if we throw U. the R. overboard, and whilst I endorse your opinion of the unavoidable and indeed much-to-be desired unreality of women’s work on many social matters, I yet incline to include within female range such an attempt as this: where the certainly possible circumstances are merely indicated [. . .] where the field is occupied by a single female figure whose internal portrait is set forth in her own words. Moreover, the sketch only gives the girl’s own deductions, feelings, semi-resolutions; granted such premises as hers, and right or wrong it seems to me she might easily arrive at such conclusions: and whilst it may truly be urged that unless white could be black and Heaven Hell my experience (thank God) precludes me from hers, I yet don’t see why “the Poet mind” should be less able to construct her from its own inner consciousness than a hundred other unknown quantities. (The Letters of Christina Rossetti 1: 234, my emphasis) Christina rejects any criticism on a moral basis; she accepts only criticism of her poetic performance. The issue of her own work with the prostitutes at Highgate seems to be an unmentioned factor here; one


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imagines that it must have been on the minds of both Rossettis. In defending the intellectual position expressed in the poem, Christina also defends her preoccupation with the issue on a more literal level. Although she admits that “women’s work” on many “social matters” is useless, the case of the “fallen woman” is well within the “female range”. More importantly, Rossetti emphasizes her growing interest in creating authentic “internal portraits” even as she turns away from “social matters”. Increasingly, Rossetti focuses on internal dialogues between the self and the soul or between the “sinner” and her God; her later poetry and prose tends to focus exclusively on the promise of Heaven rather than on the reformation of the “fair world”. Indeed, in 1870 Rossetti specifically rejects any other kind of poetry: “It is not in me, and therefore it will never come out of me, to turn to politics or philanthropy with Mrs Browning” (The Letters of Christina Rossetti 1: 348). Instead, Rossetti focuses on undifferentiated sinning souls wrapt in private battles with their demons and their God. We can see this shift in Rossetti’s social reform poetics in her revisions to the secular ballad “Margery”, a poem first drafted in 1863, but published as “The Sinner’s Own Fault? So it was” in 1885. “Margery” is very much in the tradition of poems like “Cousin Kate” and “Light Love”, as well as the poetry found in The Magdalen’s Friend. As in “Neither do I Condemn”, the speaker of Rossetti’s poem is the reformer rather than the “fallen woman”, the “Poor guileless shamefaced Margery” of the title (3: 5). The poem opens up by directly confronting the problem: “What shall we do with Margery?” (3: 1). Margery, awash in Magdalen tears, cannot help herself; like Herman Melville’s scribbling Barnaby her very presence shames the speaker: Yes, what the neighbours say is true: Girls should not make themselves so cheap. But now it’s done what can we do? I hear her moaning in her sleep, Moaning and sobbing in her sleep. (3: 16–20) The speaker refutes the hypocritical truisms of her neighbors, who would like her to abandon the “fallen” Margery, by reminding them of their own secret sins: “It was her own fault? so it was. / If every own fault found us out / Dogged us and snared us round about, / What comfort should we take because / Not half our due we thus wrung out?” (3: 31–5). In the final four stanzas of the poem, the speaker

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determines to take Margery out from among her gossiping neighbors and heal her. Like Lizzie, the speaker of this later poem cannot stand by and watch the “harlot’s progress” claim another victim: “. . . I’ll not see / Her blossom fade, sweet Margery” (3: 39–40). In “The Sinner’s Own Fault? So it was”, the 1885 published version of “Margery”, Rossetti strips her now two stanza lyric of any specific referent to the gendered economics of Victorian England, instead considering the genderless promise of Judgment Day. Rossetti keeps just one stanza out of “Margery’s” original eleven and changes the gender of the sinner. She also adds a stanza that focuses on the role of his “redeemer”: The sinner’s own fault? So it was. If every fault found us out, Dogged us and hedge us round about, What comfort should we take because Not half our due we thus wrung out? Clearly his own fault. Yet I think My fault in part, who did not pray But lagged and would not lead the way. I, haply, proved his missing link. God help us both to mend and pray. (2: 1–10) “The Sinner’s Own Fault? So it was” is clearly emancipatory in its ultimate rejection of the title’s seeming assertion and Rossetti maintains her belief in the significance of communion between the “fallen” and the supposedly “pure”. The second stanza stresses both the power of repentance and the reward it provides to the one who sets the sinner on the path towards penitence. Yet it is impossible to ignore Rossetti’s deliberate erasure of the type of secular salvation and feminized social criticism that had characterized her work during the 1850s. In Rossetti’s poetry, we find an ever-increasing privatization of reclamation that puts much more emphasis on solitary battle with “sin” and “temptation”. In The Face of the Deep, Rossetti looks back upon her work at Highgate and remembers its disciplining “righteousness”; the model she evokes is far from Lizzie’s selfless and exuberant offering of her love: “In reformatory work, self-denial must teach self-denial, and self-restraint, selfrestraint” (172). Laura and Margery, struggling in the toils of economic privation, erotic longing, and spiritual nihilism, disappear into an anonymous sinning “self” whose dramas are worked out in the often


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claustrophobic confines of the mind, but rewarded in the expansive reaches of the apocalypse, where all repentant sinners are finally equal. Rossetti turns away from the public sphere and toward an internal landscape just as a new generation of women begin to command public discourse by asserting a politics of social work infused with the poetics of heroic and saintly endeavor developed by the poet and other mid-century writers and social reformers.

6 Reaping the Fruits of Resistance: Josephine Butler and Sarah Grand

Christina Rossetti’s poetics of reclamation finally turns away from work within the public sphere; indeed, the poet explicitly distanced herself from the growing women’s movement as the nineteenth century drew to a close, most famously signing Mrs Humphrey Ward’s “Protest against Female Suffrage” published in the Nineteenth Century in 1889.1 Yet, the political potential of a philanthropic discourse that linked the fate of the “fallen” and “pure” would continue to be harnessed for explicitly radical ends by fin-de-siècle proto-feminist activists and New Woman authors. Indeed, it is a resisting discourse that comes to dominate public opinion as well as governmental policy during Josephine Butler’s successful “crusade” against the Contagious Diseases (CD) Acts of 1864, 1867, and 1869, a battle waged by the reformer in the press as a writer and on the platform as an orator. In addition to her effective contestation of the governmental regulation of prostitution and its requisite institutions of Lock hospitals and medical police, Butler’s prominence as a public speaker facilitated greater frankness on the subjects of female sexuality and venereal disease, as well as the importance of “feminine” influence in public policy-making. I argue that Butler’s opposition to a “conspiracy” of male silence on the subjects of prostitution and sexual transgression, as well as her cultivation of a high profile public persona, set the stage for the emergence of a very particular “feminist” heroine at the end of the century: a figure partly based upon Butler herself. In this chapter, I place Sarah Grand’s representation of a New Woman of “genius” in The Beth Book (1897) in the context of Butler’s campaign against the CD Acts. Grand was a declared admirer of Butler and pays homage to the repeal movement in The Beth Book. Her heroine, a New Woman proto-feminist orator, comes of age just as the 202

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Acts are repealed in the mid-1880s. Grand employs the proto-feminist victory against the Acts to imagine a freer future for Beth; she is divested of a tyrannical husband in the domestic sphere as well as dangerously patriarchal institutions in the public sphere. Most significantly, however, I explore the ways in which Grand constructs her text without an explicit representation of the “harlot’s progress” even as she relies upon her reader’s awareness of it. Employing a narrative strategy dependent upon distanced empathy, as well as disavowal, Grand merely alludes to the intertwined history of the “harlot” and the “reformer”. It functions as a trace narrative in the text, allowing the author to draw upon its literary legacy of protest but yet avoid the risks inherent in representing sexual transgression and social reform. New Woman texts inevitably stress the emergence of the “woman of genius”, whose work among the “poor and friendless” is most significant as a marker of the heroine’s singular abilities, rather than the greater aims of social reform. Indeed, as in the 1790s, politicized activism on the part of women is paired with an emphasis upon the under-appreciated exceptional individual. But at the end of the nineteenth century this tends to be accompanied by an even more explicit privileging of one woman over another, usually upon the basis of class, intellect, and race, as well as sexual reputation. Lessons derived, no doubt, from Butler’s own vexed representation of an empowering (but hierarchical) femininity, as well as an inclusive (and yet racist and imperialist) feminism. I argue that Grand’s response to Butler is further complicated by her reluctance to acknowledge her predecessor as a “mother” even as she simultaneously marks her discomfort with an alternative model of “sisterhood”. Josephine Butler’s campaign was forced to develop a discursive rhetoric capable of countering an economic and class-based objectification of prostitutes, as well as a more generalized pathologizing of female sexuality. In the second edition of Prostitution, republished in 1870, William Acton gives detailed descriptions of how the Contagious Diseases Acts were enforced. Instituted in an attempt to control the spread of venereal diseases in garrison and port towns, the CD Acts focused upon “common prostitutes” patronized by enlisted men in the Queen’s Army. The first Act of 1864 was instituted for a three-year period in eleven English and Irish towns. A woman identified as a prostitute was required to either submit to an internal examination or face sentencing by a judge for her refusal to comply. If found to have a venereal disease, she was then confined to a Lock

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hospital for up to three months while being treated. Over the next five years, however, the power of the policeman and the doctor were further augmented. In 1867, a system of compulsory periodic examinations was instituted; hence, the “medical police” further intensified their monitoring of suspect women. And in 1869, just as regulationists were pushing for an extension of the Acts over all of England, Parliament placed another five districts under their jurisdiction. The period of confinement in the Lock hospital was increased to a maximum nine-month period while moral and religious instruction were added to the medical treatment.2 The punitive tendency of the interrogative male gaze when directed at the prostitute is made manifest in the CD Acts and their primary instruments, the Lock hospital and the medical police. Whereas Mr Bradshaw in Ruth merely bewails the fact that he cannot “know” the sexualized woman’s past; the Lock hospital doctor believes that he can determine a woman’s sexual past by thoroughly examining her. The regulationist doctor interprets female sexuality in a sign system of disease; good women are “clean” while the “fallen” are “contagious”. In the following passage from Prostitution, Acton employs the speculum when he suspects that disease lurks within, successfully hiding from the limitations of his inquisitive gaze. Acton painstakingly details the still unfamiliar gynecological examination endured by the confined women: The patient ascends the steps placed by the bed for the purpose, and the house surgeon separates the labia to see if there are any sores. If no suspicion of these exists, and if the female is suffering from discharge, the speculum is at once employed. [. . .] the examinations are conducted with great rapidity. In the course of one hour and three quarters I assisted in the thorough examination of 58 women. (Prostitution 91) The regulationists emphasize the punitive nature of the internal examination. Acton describes it at length in order to counter accusations that regulation legitimizes “immorality”. Indeed, he argues that the painful examination helps to “suppress” prostitution (149). Given that he spent just under two minutes “thoroughly” examining the suspected women, one imagines that the violence of the experience would serve as a deterrent. The CD Acts institutionalized the obsessive interest in identifying and categorizing female sexual behavior that I have charted from the early Romantic period. Nineteenth-century


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preoccupation with sexual “reputation”, when codified by the Acts, made women vulnerable not only to social exile, but also to the twin behemoths of male dominance: the law and medicine. Yet even as we find the institutionalization of the punitive male gaze, we also find it again countered by a discourse rooted in the feminized social reform I have been discussing throughout Chastity and Transgression in Women’s Writing. In 1869, opponents of the Acts asked Josephine Butler, a well-respected upper-class woman with experience in the reclamation movement, to lead the “Great Crusade” in the press and in the lecture hall. Acton’s second edition of Prostitution was hurriedly presented to the public after Butler’s emergence as an outspoken and powerful critic. Elaine Hadley has recently discussed Butler’s effective employment of the “melodramatic mode” in her writings and speeches. According to Hadley, Butler employs the tools of melodrama, including “familial narratives of dispersal and reunion”, “visual renderings of bodily torture and criminal conduct”, “expressions of highly charged emotion”, and its personifications of “absolutes like good and evil” (3), in order to disrupt “the male preserve of market culture, whose values seem to have fathered the acts” (199). Hadley persuasively argues that Butler’s rhetorical privileging of “moral economy” over a “political economy” simultaneously challenges conservative and masculine privilege, even as it seeks to resurrect “a deference hierarchy, replete with reciprocal rights and obligations, by exploiting the traditional forms of respect due women and the traditional forms of authority due powerful men” (195). Hadley has taught us to read Butler as a savvy writer, noting that the reformer “consciously used [a] hybrid form of hierarchical yet populist rhetoric to engage people of all classes” (195).3 In my own examination of Butler’s writing, I explore her deployment of a sororal discourse of mutual salvation for the “fallen” and the “pure” in her quest for explicitly political ends: equal civil liberties for all women. Butler entered the fray on 31 December 1869. In an article published in the Daily News, she set out to dismantle the legal, social, and medical justification for the Acts. In the early days of her campaign, she organized a Ladies National Association, presented its manifesto to Parliament in the form of a petition and began addressing groups of recently enfranchised working-class men, in spite of the social stigma attached to public speaking, particularly on the subjects of prostitution and venereal disease. She quickly extended her energies to writing pamphlets and addressing groups of women as well. Under her leadership, the repealers also made the CD Acts

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a crucible in Parliamentary elections, arranging public demonstrations aimed at inciting public feeling against pro-regulationist candidates. Indeed, in 1928 Millicent Garrett Fawcett proclaimed Butler’s success during the Colchester Election of 1870 the “most tremendous triumph that a woman has ever achieved in politics” (Josephine Butler 5). In Butler’s first Daily News article, written in “the name of the thoughtful and Christian women of England” and entitled “An Appeal to the People of England on the Recognition and Superintendence of Prostitution by Governments”, the reformer focuses on the degrading effects of forced examinations; the inevitable failure of the Acts given that they apply only to suspected prostitutes and not the men who frequent them; the likelihood that the Acts will actually spread disease by implicitly condoning “vice”; and finally, the revolutionary potential of “womanhood’s” instinctive defense of their own sex. Butler’s attention to the legal, medical, and social dimensions of the Acts’ multiple injustices remains striking. Although she was not above noting the degrading nature of the Acts when “innocent” women fell under their purview, she also insisted upon the prostitute’s right to civil protection. Butler diligently argued her cause in a series of articles and public lectures directed at specific audiences. In the Daily News article, written for a general audience composed of both men and women, she demonstrates a savvy command over several discourses. She quotes and glosses blue-book statistics, parliamentary debates, and the work of the French regulationist A. J. B. Parent-Duchâtelet. In her “Letter to my Countrywomen, Dwelling in the Farmsteads and Cottages of England” (1871), Butler appeals to a specifically female readership in a conversational address that carefully defines possibly unfamiliar terms of legal and political discourse. In a rhetorical move akin to that of Emma Sheppard earlier in the century, she opens the essay by imagining an encounter between her respectable reader and a suspect woman: “Sometimes, when you have been late at your market-town, you may have passed one such in the street, and have shrunk aside, feeling it shame even to touch her; or perhaps, instead of scorn, a deep pity has filled your heart, and you have longed to take her hand, and to lead her back to a better and happier life” (151). Butler appeals to the reader as a potential reformer; she calls upon “pity” rather than “scorn”. She goes on to emphasize the injustice of laws based upon a double standard of sexual morality and plays upon the fears of her female audience by dwelling on the dangers of false accusation, as well as upon the amount of power held by the


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police, whom she customarily refers to as “paid spies”. Although she readily admits that the CD Acts do not represent a significant danger to respectable middle-class women, she draws upon the essay’s earlier imaginative identification between “pure” and “fallen” to point out the ways in which the laws affect all women who find themselves outside of their home: “if to be out of doors alone at night, or to be seen talking to men in the streets, is to be looked upon as a sign of a bad character, and to give a policeman the right to accuse a girl of prostitution, what woman will not fear to leave her house after dark, or to exchange a greeting with a friend?” (155). Butler painstakingly establishes a “sisterhood” of women all functioning within the public sphere and coming under the observation of men in power. In her body of work, which often details her experiences as a beleaguered public speaker, Butler repeatedly returns to images of women commingling in the streets, where middle-class reformers, working-class supporters, and prostitutes all join forces against the Acts. Butler’s narratives of female solidarity quickly move from representations of dangerous isolation to politely “exchanged greetings” to, finally, political activism. Indeed, Butler would seem to anticipate later suffragette spectacle, first in gathering groups of women in the streets of England to protest the Acts, and then in mythologizing those moments in “spectacular” prose and public oratory.4 Through both veiled and explicit personal revelation, Butler presents herself as a potential model for the reader. In the “Letter”, Butler employs a pseudonym, signing herself “An English Lady”. Elaine Hadley has noted that in ascribing her essay a “letter” addressed to “friends”, Butler signifies an intimate exchange between equals even as her signatory, “English Lady”, evokes aristocratic superiority (195). I am mainly interested in the author’s elevation of yet another “self”: the seemingly middle-class and very respectable “Mrs Butler”. In tracing the efforts of the Ladies National Association which led the repeal movement, she calls particular attention to the exemplary efforts of “Mrs Butler, the wife of the Rev. George Butler, 280, South Hill, Park Road, Liverpool”: “who delicately nurtured, highly educated, refined and sensitive in every thought and feeling, has yet never shrunk from entering the vilest dens of vice, nor ever scorned to take the hand of any woman, however fallen, if by clasping it she can only draw her back to the paths of virtue and peace” (160). Writing in the third-person, Butler describes her own “painful” but “noble” entrance into public speaking: “I leave it to you to think how painful it must have been to a delicate and pure minded woman to speak on such a

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subject in public; but the solemn conviction that she was speaking for God, as well as for her fellow-women, gave her courage and strength” (163). In splitting herself in two – model reformer and admiring commentator – Butler creates the illusion of sisterhood already established. She carefully constructs a laudable public role for “private” women; they are invited to participate in a discourse which profoundly affects all women, but which has been dangerously dominated by male voices, speaking only to one another. In “Men, Men, Only Men” (1870), published in The Shield, the party organ of her Ladies Association, she evokes “sisterhood” as a necessary response to a treacherous “brotherhood” intent upon keeping women isolated within a dangerous silence: “When men, of all ranks, thus band themselves together for an end deeply concerning women, and place themselves like a thick, impenetrable wall between women and women, and forbid the one class of women entrance into the presence of the other, the weak, outraged class, it is time that women should arise and demand their most sacred rights in regard to their sisters” (436–7). Butler never abandoned the rhetoric of sisterhood. In a 1900 address to an organization continuing to protest the regulation of prostitution outside of England, she reminds her audience: “womanhood is solidaire” (An Autobiographical Memoir 215). Yet Butler also draws upon other, less egalitarian, scripts in her evocation of the “reformer’s progress”. Her rhetorical strategies are particularly interesting because of their deliberately shifting representations of the respective power of the social reformer in her relationship to the subject of that reform. As Jenny Uglow points out, Butler’s contradictory depictions of prostitution and reclamation are sometimes due to her willingness to adjust an argument in the name of “tactical expediency” (“Josephine Butler” 150), but I would suggest that they also reflect Butler’s own complex approach to the wrong she sets out to right. A proto-feminist (interested in materially changing the law in the name of social justice and legal equity) as well as an evangelical Christian (determined to rescue the souls of the “fallen” as well as their bodies), Butler plays a series of variations upon the “harlot’s progress” theme, drawing upon a dizzying array of narrative elements drawn from social reform texts and proto-feminist polemic, as well as Christian discourse and Abolitionist rhetoric. But, as feminist critics have noted, Butler’s prose also encompasses classist and racist assumptions about female sexuality and behavior. It is my contention that the entire spectrum of Butler’s formulation – both admirable and otherwise – must be acknowledged before we can understand the full


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consequences of her status as a feminist icon throughout the nineteenth century.5 At times Butler employs the familiar “harlot’s progress” narrative somewhat unproblematically. In her “Letter to my Countrywomen”, she barely revises its story elements in order to indict and include the CD Acts as instruments of a “fall” into ever-increasing viciousness: “So, if a woman is ignorant or frightened, and goes to the surgeon, she is put on the list of common women, and if she is well informed and brave, and goes before the magistrate, she may be imprisoned for life, without ever having been properly tried; and the examination to which she is ordered to submit is so cruel and indecent, that it is shameful even to speak of it; and those who have undergone it a few times, become so hardened and degraded, that almost all hope of saving them is lost” (155). The “legalized indecent assault” exacted upon women by Lock hospital doctors contributes to their “fatal” ending as surely as the more familiar “plot” devices of seduction, rape, and prostitution. Yet, even here, Butler insists that “almost” but not “all hope” is lost. She inevitably carves out a space for the reformer to insert herself into the narrative and thus “rescue” the “fallen”. In an appeal to a gathering of prostitutes, Butler juxtaposes the “fallen woman’s” fatal progress to the “sweetness of family life”. Deliberately lingering over the pleasures of domestic harmony, she plays upon the auditor’s sense of absence from such narratives. She writes of reducing the “unhappy sisterhood” to “sighing and sobbing”. Only then does she offer them “hope”; the redemption she places before them relies upon their willingness to craft a new “progress” for themselves: I dropped on the floor to be nearer and in the midst of them, and spoke words which I cannot remember, but to this effect: “Courage, my darlings! Don’t despair; I have good news for you. You are women, and a woman is always a beautiful thing. You have been dragged deep in the mud; but still you are women. [. . .] Fractures well healed make us more strong. Take of the very stones over which you have stumbled and fallen, and use them to pave your road to heaven.” (An Autobiographical Memoir 213) For Butler, the “harlot’s progress” can be transformed into that of the saint even as the reformer’s divine mission justifies her own presence among the “fallen”. In the above passage, we see a shift in the author’s subject position. As Judith Walkowitz points out, Butler employs a

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double discourse as “mother” and “sister”; the one “hierarchical and custodial” and the other more “egalitarian” (117). In the above passage from the Memoir, Butler may join her auditors upon the floor but she does so as a missionary and a mother rather than as a sister. Her “true” siblings are other Christian wives and mothers, united as an older generation of women intent upon rescuing “fallen” but “darling” daughters.6 As early as 1869, Butler sought maternal sympathy for the nation’s “unhappy sisterhood”: “Think of this, you mothers who are living at ease, in your pleasant drawing-rooms, with your tender darlings around you! [. . .] but you surely will not be content to preserve the holy sweetness of those whom God has given you, without a practical effort to lessen the power of those sinister social forces which are at present driving whole armies of little girls to madness and early graves” (Woman’s Work and Woman’s Culture xix). In part, Butler employs rhetoric of nurturing maternity in order to contest the regulationists’ insistent evocation of paternal power. In his own retelling of the “harlot’s progress” narrative, Acton depicts diseased and corrupt prostitutes “polluting” the bodies of the nation’s young men. He calls upon “fathers” to protect their “sons” by legislating medical intervention as well as a complex system of surveillance and imprisonment aimed at regulating the “fallen woman’s” sexuality: “The reader who is a conscientious parent must perforce support me; for, were the sanitary measures I advocate once in operation, with what diminished anxiety would he not contemplate the progress of his boys from infancy to manhood?” (Prostitution 27). Acton seeks to interrupt the “harlot’s progress” after she has contracted disease but before she begins “poisoning” innocent men; once she is cured, however, he sets her back on the same path. According to Acton, the prostitute deserves nothing better for she is “a woman with half the woman gone, and that half containing all that elevates her nature, leaving her a mere instrument of impurity” (Prostitution 119). As Butler points out, Acton and the other regulationists are interested in making a class of women defined primarily as sex-workers and not as daughters. It is the progress of the father and son and not that of the mother and daughter that most interests him. In language reminiscent of Wollstonecraft in the Vindication, Butler calls upon middle-class women to educate and hence rescue “victims” of male vice and privilege. She insists that most “have really not fallen at all, for they never stood upon any height of virtue or knowledge from which it was possible for them to descend, and if they love darkness, it is because no light ever shone upon them; no tender mother


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ever spoke to them of God or Christ” (“Letter to my Countrywomen”, 151). Butler implores her readers, as Christian Englishwomen, to enter political discourse for the sake of the nation’s children. After citing statistics indicating that most prostitutes lose their virginity between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, Butler asks: “Do [these numbers] not call aloud to us to insist upon the enactment of laws, which shall protect our daughters until they are old enough, and wise enough to protect themselves?” (168). Butler justifies her own embrace of public politics by crossing the discourse of Victorian motherhood with that of the missionary and the suffragist. The history of the repeal movement is necessarily an account of her own entrance into discourse; her personal quest for a language with which to challenge conventional morality comprises a large part of any account of the movement itself. By mythologizing the events of her own life, Butler crafts an inspirational discourse meant to prompt others (like her) to join in an ever-present “crusade” against a corrupt double standard of sexual morality. Although her prose continually embraces the dramatic cadences of the preacher and the sage, she inevitably portrays herself as a quiet and eminently ordinary woman much like her presumed audience or, if her reader is male, like his wife and mother. In her Recollections of George Butler (1892), she depicts “Mrs Butler” as the conventional wife of a young Oxford don in the 1840s: In the frequent social gatherings in our drawing-room in the evenings there was much talk, sometimes serious and weighty, sometimes light, interesting, critical, witty, and brilliant, ranging over many subjects. It was then that I sat silent, the only woman in the company, and listened, sometimes with a sore heart; for these men would speak of things which I had already revolved deeply in my own mind, things of which I was convinced, which I knew, though I had no dialectics at command with which to defend their truth. (95) This telling tableau reveals not only the frustration of an outwardly quiet, well-mannered, domestic Victorian angel, but also Butler’s incipient power to develop a viable “dialectic” and emerge from her position as a “silent” observer. One of the subjects discussed in Oxford parlors at this time was Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth. The “judgment” passed against Gaskell for breaking “silence” on the subject of sexual transgression strikes Butler as “fatally false”: “A moral lapse in a

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woman was spoken of as an immensely worse thing than in a man; there was no comparison to be found between them. A pure woman, it was reiterated, should be absolutely ignorant of a certain class of evils in the world, albeit those evils bore with murderous cruelty on other women” (95–6). Butler recounts this anecdote just prior to detailing her first attempt at reclamation, implying that Gaskell’s refusal to dutifully remain silent inspires her own movement into action. She therefore sets up a genealogy of interruptive discourse. Her private reading of Gaskell leads to action in the public sphere and Butler’s reader, in her own turn, should move from silent reading to vocal activism as together they craft an alternative “truth” to that propounded by men. Appalled by the fate of a young woman imprisoned for infanticide after being abandoned by a university don, Butler “venture[s] to speak” to an Oxford “Sage” about the situation, suggesting that he might remind the male offender of his own “crime”. When he instead “sternly” exhort[s] her to “silence and inaction” (Recollections of George Butler 23–4), she responds, like the Bensons in Ruth, by inviting the young girl into her home after her release from Newgate. In this account of her earliest effort on the behalf of “fallen women”, Butler highlights the necessity of frank speaking and deliberate action, for the sake of the nation and one’s immortal soul, if for no other reason. Butler’s compatriots are fellow respectable reformers, Gaskell and Faith Benson, rather than the “fallen” Ruth. Over the course of her biography, the rhetoric of sisterhood most decidedly transforms into one of motherhood; as Butler moves from “feminine” philanthropy to public activism she asserts an empowering matriarchal privilege. Nearly all accounts of Butler’s decision to lead the repeal movement begin with a description of her greatest trial as a mother rather than her earliest rescue work in Oxford. In 1863 the Butlers watched as their youngest child, Eva, tripped and fell over a banister as she ran to greet them, eventually dying from the fall. Butler describes her death in language that resonates with a repetitive evocation of “falling”: “Never can I lose that memory – the fall, the sudden cry, and then the silence! It was pitiful to see her, helpless in her father’s arms, her little drooping head resting on his shoulder, and her beautiful golden hair, all stained with blood, falling over his arm! Would to God that I had died that death for her!” (Recollections of George Butler 153, my emphases). Butler acknowledges that Eva’s death first tests her faith but eventually strengthens it: “Her flight from earth had had the appearance of a most cruel accident. But do the words ‘accident’ or ‘chance’ properly


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find a place in the vocabulary of those who have placed themselves and those dear to them, in a special manner under the daily providential care of a loving God?” (155–6). Eva’s “fall” comes to be understood in a lexicon of divine communication. In a complicated act of displacement, her daughter’s “fall” (which is simultaneously a “flight from earth”) leads Butler (left behind amongst the earthly) to seek out comfort in the company of other “fallen” women; it seems to me that Butler at this point operates under a mantle of maternal guilt. Her daughter’s death reflects her own failure to protect as a mother should and she subsequently seeks out “other hearts, which ached night and day, and with more reason than mine” (183). Unable to find comfort in the conventional consolations of “music, art, [or] reading”, Butler turns toward active social work in the “hospital and quays and oakum sheds” of Liverpool, where she encounters an “avalanche of miserable but grateful womanhood”, prostituted, criminal, and destitute women, many of whom were dying (185). If Butler initially searches out women whose “misery” might be akin to hers, she quickly becomes their savior rather than their equal: a mother rather than a sister. The act of offering redemption, however, simultaneously saves the redeemer. In the following passage, Butler recalls her initial encounter with Marion, the first woman invited into her home after Eva’s death: Her face attracted me; not beautiful in the common acceptation of the word, but having a power greater than beauty: eyes full of intelligence and penetration, a countenance at once thoughtful and frank, with at times a wildly seeking look as if her whole being cried out: “Who will show us any good?” She was ill, her lungs fatally attacked. I went up to her, and with no introduction of myself said: “Will you come with me to my home and live with me? I had a daughter once.” She replied with a gasp of astonishment, grasping my hand as if she would never let it go again. (Recollections of George Butler 190) If the above passage positions Marion as a “fallen daughter” in need of salvation and Butler as the “mother” capable of “raising” her up to blessedness, it also suggests a somewhat more humbling scenario. Like Wollstonecraft’s Jemima and Maria, both women risk rejection and failure in the questions they pose to one another. Can Marion become a dutiful “daughter”? But also, can Butler show her “good”? In her reported interactions with “fallen women”, Butler repeatedly returns

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to the scene of her daughter’s death, intent upon rescue rather than mere dumbfounded witnessing; although she could not impede Eva’s fall, she must answer Marion’s desperate cry. Although Marion, like Eva, dies, she does so only after ascending to a plane of spiritual blessedness. Butler goes on to record that in the three months during which she lived with them Marion found what she had been “seeking” in religion, becoming so devout that a “well-known divine” announced her a “dying saint” (190–1).7 In Butler’s carefully crafted “recollections”, the rescued “fallen woman” finds a higher path towards God while the reformer achieves a corollary status as earthly redeemer. Ultimately, Josephine Butler represents herself as a disciple of Christ working under the inspiration of dead sainted women: “Marion had ‘prophesied’ to me, before she died, of hard days and a sad heart which were in store for me, in contending against the evil to which she had fallen a victim. I recall her words with wonder and comfort. She would say: ‘When your soul quails at the sight of evil, which will increase yet awhile, dear Mrs Butler think of me and take courage. God has given me to you, that you may never despair of any’” (Recollections 192). Butler insistently promotes a representation of the dead “fallen daughter” which celebrates her mystical ascension to a superior plane. While such rhetoric contests Acton’s misogynistic denial of the prostitute’s sacred humanity, some of Butler’s most powerful prose exalts the dead, and hence silenced, “fallen woman”. She insistently draws upon the most fatal conclusion to the “harlot’s progress” narrative even as she argues for the reincorporation of reformed and educated ex-prostitutes back into society. The saintly silence of dead women justifies Butler’s own “humble” entrance into discourse. Nonetheless, Josephine Butler’s campaign against the CD Acts represents the culmination of the resisting discourse that I have traced throughout this project and, in its very contortions, indicates the transformation of earlier proto-feminist tenets and narrative techniques as the impassioned reformer takes center stage. Butler’s rhetoric often harks back to that of Wollstonecraft and Hays. Her essays, often presented as “Letters” or “Appeals”, are characterized by passionate and unapologetically proto-feminist revisionist renderings of a hypocritical but socially respectable belief system. In rhetoric that draws upon the radically inflected discourse of Romantic-era abolitionist activism as well as mid-Victorian Christian piety, Butler represents her cause as a “holy” crusade that she, as a right-minded British woman, well trained in both Christian doctrine and the tenets of free will and


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civil liberty, must serve.8 In “An Appeal to the People of England”, Butler describes the possible consequences of extending the Acts across England: forced examinations are against both the laws of “man” and those of “God” and justify an “open rebellion” on the part of women deprived of civil and sacred “sovereignty” over their bodies (127). Throughout all of her writings, Butler represents the appeal effort as a holy war. The invitation to lead the repeal forces comes not only from reformers like Harriet Martineau and Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, but “like a voice from heaven” itself (“Letter to my Countrywomen” 161). In an 1870 diary entry Butler writes, “And now it is revolt and rebellion, a consecrated rebellion against those in authority who have established this ‘accursed thing’ among us. We are rebels for God’s holy laws. [. . .] It is now war to the knife. In a battle of flesh and blood mercy may intervene and life may be spared; but principles know not the name of mercy” (An Autobiographical Memoir 73). Butler’s discourse, particularly in its evocation of a “holy war” and all of its attendant glories, resonates with earlier reform discourse as it is deployed in the poetry of Christina Rossetti and the prose of Emma Sheppard and Anna Jameson. In her Recollections of George Butler, Butler offers an alternative icon to the more familiar Mary Magdalene. St Margaret of Antioch, a virgin saint most often represented standing victorious over Satan in the form of a dragon, represents a “symbol of perfect purity”. In most versions of the legend, Margaret emerges unscathed from the very “belly of the beast” after he has engulfed her. Butler describes Raphael’s painting of St. Margaret, which she had seen hanging in the Louvre: . . . she is here represented with her unshod, snow-white feet treading upon the hideous scales of the monster who, conquered by her, writhes and twists in his rage and torment; yet the blast of his foul breath and his cruel talons are unable to reach or hurt her; she appears unconscious of the impurity and cruelty which she has trodden down. Her steady gaze is fixed, not on heaven, but on some object straight before her – some much desired goal towards which she is advancing with steadfast purpose. No speck of impurity has soiled her virgin feet or her white attire, although these are in close contact with the slime of the vanquished monster. (216) Late-century writers inevitably turn to an icon who, unlike the Magdalen, never quite transgresses sexual norms, but is, instead, threatened by male sexual violence. St Margaret, identified as a “beautiful and

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deified heroine of spiritual warfare” by Anna Jameson, is a particularly apt emblem because she endures horrific physical and spiritual trials without succumbing to the patriarchal forces united against her: a pagan father, a lascivious governor, a tribunal urging her to renounce Christianity, and, in the iconography, Satan himself (Sacred and Legendary Art II: 519). St Margaret, through her stoic defiance and absolute faith, converts non-believers because she survives unimaginable physical tortures without injury to her “spirit”. The figure of St Margaret would seem to represent most aptly the reformer herself, particularly as mid-century writers like Rossetti and others envision her. Cloaked in her own “virtue”, she remains immune to the “vice” all around her, even as she inspires others to righteousness. At times, Butler deliberately casts herself into the role of saint. In her writings, she dramatically chronicles the outrages suffered while campaigning against the Acts; on one occasion, she is pelted with refuse and nearly stripped of her clothing. During the Pontefract election of 1872, Butler, like the Christian martyrs before her, is nearly set afire when hired arsons torched the barn in which she was speaking. Butler pointedly notes that the women’s meeting held after she escapes was particularly successful in converting her auditors for “we scarcely needed to speak; events had spoken for us, and all honest hearts were won” (An Autobiographical Memoir 92). Yet, in Butler’s narratives of the “harlot’s progress”, the “fallen woman”, when rescued from the streets, rises to the status of a St Margaret as well. Indeed, in ways that are somewhat reminiscent to the “protective fictions” of Elizabeth Gaskell, Butler’s accounts of the “fallen women” taken into her home steadfastly erase “story” elements that point to the socio-economic forces that lead to prostitution as well as its material conditions. The bodies of the women merely become containers for their “souls”, hence, little attention is paid to either sexual violence or sexual desire. What matters in the narrative idealization of both the reformer and the reformed is their “spirituality”; they are united in a deified resistance to masculine power. Butler’s crusade triumphed. She achieved a political success merely imagined by earlier feminists and reformers, orchestrating a coordinated effort on the part of middle-class British women, working-class men, as well as sympathetic upper-class men with political power. After reformers waged a pitched battle in the press, in the halls of Parliament, and in the streets, the CD Acts were suspended in 1883 and repealed in 1886. In part, Butler’s success was achievable because of the already notable presence of women in the social reform arena.


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Although earlier reformers and writers like Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Christina Rossetti envisioned a somewhat more circumscribed role for women, they had broadened the horizons of “woman’s mission” nonetheless. I would suggest that Butler emerges as a particularly significant figure at the end of the century precisely because she began her career working within the confines of mid-Victorian philanthropic work but insisted upon expanding its reach to the highest level of public policy-making. Indeed, as early as 1869, in her introduction to Woman’s Work and Woman’s Culture, Butler rejects a “separate spheres” philosophy of social reform and questions the efficacy of mid-Victorian rescue work among prostitutes. Unable to effectively integrate women back into the marketplace as “respectable” workers due to prejudice against them, as well as the “fallen woman’s” own lack of education and training, the rescue workers found themselves drowning in “a pool into which a vast tide is continually pouring, which steadily swells the evil in spite of our utmost efforts” (xviii). Neither “the feminine form of philanthropy, the independent individual ministering, of too mediaeval a type to suit the present day” nor “the masculine form of philanthropy, large and comprehensive measures, organizations and systems planned by men and sanctioned by Parliament” (xxxvii) are sufficient. Butler instead seeks a “union” of “feminine home influence” and “masculine” institutions, like Parliament and the petition, to effect material change in the social system. Her own accounts of her early rescue work both celebrate the power of intervention and chart the limitations of “individual ministering”. Butler’s life-story becomes a key element in repeal discourse. Not only does she employ her biography as an ideal model of the “reformer’s progress” in works published throughout the 1890s and into the twentieth century, including Recollections of George Butler (1892) and Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade (1896), but her lifenarrative continues to serve a political purpose for some time after her death in 1906. Butler becomes an icon of the suffrage movement and a feminist exemplar. The first decade of the twentieth century saw the publication of Josephine Butler, a Cameo Life-Sketch (1911) and Josephine E. Butler, an Autobiographical Memoir (1909), a collection of her writings edited into the form of an autobiography. The latter work appears to have been particularly popular since it was republished in a cheaper edition in 1911 and reprinted several times. It was revised and augmented in 1928 when it was republished yet again to celebrate the “Josephine Butler Centenary”. In the same year Millicent Garrett

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Fawcett also published a biography of the reformer. I would argue that Butler continues to command interest after the repeal campaign’s success because she is a feminist “success story”. Indeed, Fawcett declares Butler one of the first suffragists, as well as “the most distinguished Englishwoman of the nineteenth century” (1). Even a cursory examination of the many works published during the years of the suffrage campaign and just afterward reveals the reading public’s avid interest in the explicitly political writings of women. The much-examined New Woman movement in fiction represents only one small portion of a publishing boom which generated histories, biographies, and political studies written by and marketed toward latecentury women interested in social reform, educational reform, and suffrage. Rita Kranidis notes that feminists respond to historical theories of progress in the 1890s (the more conservative of which denounce them as harbingers of apocalypse and degeneration) by generating their own histories of women and the feminist movement (16–17). Butler’s representation of herself as a reformer, as well as biographical treatments of her life, influence later depictions of a particular type of feminist heroine, one explicitly engaged in addressing questions of sexuality and morality as well as political and social change. More broadly, narratives generated by and around Butler further serve the interests of an emerging discourse that we might call feminist history, as evidenced by Fawcett’s interest in honoring Butler’s victory in 1928 after deliberately distancing herself from the repeal moment during the 1870s.9 Butler’s repeal campaign was particularly celebrated by fin-de-siècle feminists for breaking midVictorian taboos against frank discussions of female sexuality and sexual transgression. As Ray Strachey points out, Butler began her career as an orator at a time when “Women hardly ever spoke in public, and it was thought dreadfully ‘advanced’ and likely to be ‘unsexing’: besides, no one believed that a woman’s voice could be heard” (Millicent Garrett Fawcett 45). Chosen by the repealers because of her seemingly unassailable reputation as wife and mother, even Butler was subject to insinuations that to know of and to voluntarily speak on the subjects of prostitution, rape, and venereal disease was to become “tainted” through association. Quite characteristically, Butler openly rejects the underlying logic of the slander, arguing that such constructions of feminine reputation and chastity depend upon the same “conspiracy of silence” responsible for the Acts themselves. Butler instead insists that respectable women must vocally oppose double standards of sexual morality; silence rather than speech when


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faced with a great “evil” compromises the immortal soul. The “reformer” must reach out for the “fallen” or risk perdition herself. If the persona of the reformer tends to engulf that of the “fallen”, it is also true that Butler’s “dialectics” simultaneously unsettles the traditional power relationship between “mother” and “daughter”, as she repeatedly (if sporadically) returns to a discourse of a trans-generational sisterhood. In her Personal Reminiscence of a Great Crusade, Butler writes of the powerful solidarity harnessed in response to the CD Acts. Again we find her characteristic use of both Christian and Democratic rhetoric: . . . the fact that this new legislation directly and shamefully attacked the dignity and liberties of women, became a powerful means in God’s Providence of awakening a deeper sympathy amongst favoured women for their poorer and less fortunate sisters than had probably ever been felt before. It consolidated the women of our country, and gradually of the world, by the infliction on them of a double wrong, an outrage on free citizenship, and an outrage on the sacred rights of womanhood. (42) In all of her writings, Butler stresses the need for women to seize the power of narrative and demand that their voices be heard and accounted for in the making of law and social policy. Feminist historians, including Judith Walkowitz, Lucy Bland, and Susan Kingsley Kent, have persuasively established the importance of Butler’s repeal campaign to the larger suffrage movement. Butler always insisted that the franchise and equal representation were necessary to achieve widespread social change and she celebrated the repeal movement’s impact upon suffrage activism: “The vitality of our Crusade appeared – if I may say so – to cause it to break through the boundaries of its own particular channel, and to create and fructify many movements and reforms of a collateral character” (Personal Reminiscences 44). Butler’s own attention to the equal civil rights of both respectable “motherhood” and the “unhappy sisterhood” eventually placed her at odds with the less egalitarian social purity campaigns that eventually superseded the repeal movement.10 Indeed, even as Butler is adopted as a model proto-feminist reformer, her message is altered to reflect a fin-de-siècle ideal of moral righteousness and proto-eugenicist nationalism. In the literary sphere, Butler’s other “daughters” – the New Woman

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novelists of the 1890s – enthusiastically embrace an idealized representation of Butler while remaining markedly uncomfortable with representations of the “unhappy sisterhood” itself. Lucy Bland argues that the repeal movement of the 1870s and 1880s – in its revelations about venereal disease and its insistent dismantling of the sexual double standard as codified in law – set up the necessary conditions for the emergence of the New Woman in the 1890s: “The ‘marriage debate’ and the ‘new woman’ fiction shifted the social purity focus from prostitution and into the heart of the marital home” (“The Married Woman, the ‘New Woman’ and the Feminist” 145). The sudden emergence and brief flowering of New Woman fiction in the mid-1890s certainly indicates a passionate debate over not only the “character” of the British woman, but the nature of her representation as well. Denounced by her critics as “unsexed” and “unreal”, advocates of the New Woman respond by celebrating her power as the most ideal representation of the British woman; she is a “utopian” figure of possibility (Beetham 91). Rita Kranidis argues that late-century feminist novelists negotiate the divide between their aspirations and a cultural climate of distrust by crafting a “new heroine” who combines “the conventional, tradition-bound figure of womanhood with the enlightened New Woman, whose object is to liberate herself and other women completely from patriarchal repression. And yet for the feminists, this new type of heroine is more a literary and political attempt than an actualized, accomplished fact or an established type” (xiv). Indeed, the transitional and utopian nature of the New Woman was recognized in the 1890s. In “The Psychology of Feminism” (1897), for example, Hugh Stutfield notes that “The New Woman is simply the woman of to-day striving to shake off old shackles” (115), even as he goes on to denounce the attempt. In a “defense” of the figure published in The Westminster Review (1898), Nat Arling suggests that the New Woman takes on the “form” desired by her observer, usually to her detriment. For Arling, she is “the woman who, with a strong sense of her own importance, usefulness, and responsibility, longs to strengthen the cause of right and justice, to make head against evil, to help the fallen, to raise her own sex to the highest level it can attain, and the other to a nobler ideal”. But even as he acknowledges these high “aims” as well as many others, he also notes that they often fall “short” when “solidarised in the flesh” (576–7). Arling’s summary of the New Woman’s interests stresses her insistence upon forthright public speaking as well as her sympathy for the “fallen” of her sex. I would argue that the figure of Josephine Butler insistently hovers


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around such descriptions of the New Woman. The prototypical “womanly woman” as well as an acknowledged “woman of genius”, Butler’s command over public discourse makes her an apt model for the imagined ideal of British womanhood. Sarah Grand has been widely acknowledged for “christening” the New Woman in an 1894 article entitled, “The New Aspect of the Woman Question” (Jordan 19), while her admiration for Josephine Butler has been duly noted by such critics as Elaine Showalter and Theresa Mangum. There is strong biographical evidence indicating Grand’s reverence for the nineteenth-century reformer. In Darling Madame, for example, Gillian Kersley quotes a 1923 interview with Grand in which the author remembers that when she was fifteen she decided to “form a club to perpetuate the principles of Josephine Butler” (28); she was consequently suspended from school for her efforts. The significance of Grand’s Butler-worship to her construction of the New Woman has been less thoroughly examined. In “The New Aspect of the Woman Question”, for example, Grand invokes the rhetorical structures of Butler’s prose as well as her biographical account of the quiet Victorian woman in response to the “Bawling Brotherhood’s” slanderous attacks on the “new woman” as an “unsexed” monstrosity. Grand charts the New Woman’s emergence from the “old” in language that seems to echo Butler’s own account of her life: “the new woman is a little above him, and he never even thought of looking up to where she has been sitting apart in silent contemplation all these years, thinking and thinking, until at last she solved the problem and proclaimed for herself what was wrong with Home-is-the-Woman’s-Sphere, and prescribed the remedy” (271). Note, however, that Grand emphasizes the “new woman’s” recognition of wrongs within the private sphere rather than wrongs committed in the public sphere. Yet, Grand does connect the “new woman” to the “fallen” in the next passage: “When we hear the ‘Help! help! help!’ of the desolate and oppressed, and still more when we see the awful dumb despair of those who have lost even the hope of help, we must respond. This is often inconvenient to man, especially when he has seized upon a defenceless victim whom he would have destroyed had we not come to the rescue” (274). And she explicitly links the New Woman to the repeal movement in the paragraph that follows, although she never mentions Butler by name. Grand mocks recent attempts to “reintroduce the Acts of the Apostles of the Pavements” and insists that a sea-change has occurred since the 1860s when they were first introduced: “the mothers of the English race are

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too strong to allow themselves to be insulted by the reimposition of another most shocking degradation upon their sex” (276). Although here we might see a displaced echo of Butler’s maternal rhetoric, Grand’s prose is finally strikingly different in tone. The fin-de-siècle author employs irony, sarcasm, and a kind of imagistic shorthand, which speaks far more to late-century journalism than mid-century prophetic prose; furthermore, Grand is even less committed to an egalitarian vision of sisterly “solidaire”. Her evocation of the “mothers of the English race” is more decidedly nationalistic, as well as eugenicist, in tone. And, finally, in a section that foreshadows later representations of female figures in The Beth Book, Grand sketches out a necessary distinction between the “new woman” and her less deserving sisters, the “cow-woman” (who would appear to be the conventional “womanly woman”) and the “scum-woman” (who is less clearly defined but described as either the “prey” of men or “ruined” by them, thus suggesting that the “scum-woman” is a “fallen woman”) (270). In the article credited with “birthing” the “new woman”, then, we already see Grand’s insistence upon a hierarchy of women in which literary history’s youngest daughter most decidedly represents the nation’s best hope for the next century. An admirable advocate of radical change, Sarah Grand insistently agitated for legal, social, and political reform in both the literary text and the public sphere. She stands as a feminist icon because she successfully marries a writing career with political activism; she actively campaigned for woman’s suffrage and served as the president of the Tunbridge Wells branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. And yet, Grand often reiterates regressive platitudes about womanhood, sexuality, and nationality, thus crystallizing many current anxieties about the feminist movement’s legacy of middleclass conservatism. The Beth Book, an autobiographical bidlungsroman, insists upon “birthing” the prototypical New Woman after she has already been declared dead. Published in 1898, it appears three years after the Oscar Wilde trial and the subsequent backlash against figures of “sexual anarchy” like the “Decadent” and the “New Woman”.11 The novel opens with the heroine’s metaphorically charged entrance into the world: “just as the grey dawn trembled with the first flush of a new and brighter day, the child arrived unassisted and without welcome, and sent up a wail of protest” (9). The text then painstakingly charts Beth’s very rise to consciousness, indeed, some passages seem to suggest modernist stream-of consciousness writing as well as the lyricism of


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Romantic poetry. At other points, the novel is unrelenting in its accretion of realistic details as it chronicles Beth’s development into a “woman of genius”, in spite of her family and friends. Enmeshed in the double bind of the “exceptional woman”, Beth is continually forced to defend her aspirations and ambition in scenes that evoke others from earlier texts, particularly the novels of Wollstonecraft, Opie, and Hays. When one male friend insists that “Men write books [. . .] not women, let alone gels!”, Beth responds by citing the achievements of Austen, Edgeworth, and Burney (noting that the latter wrote Evelina when she was only a “gel”). Yet Beth’s historical evidence serves only to convict her of presumption: “‘Oh!’ said Sammy, jeering, ‘so you’re as clever as they are, I suppose!’” (172). As a young and notably freethinking girl, Beth silences Sammy by physically besting him. The same scene is replayed later in the novel, when Beth’s husband insists that only “exceptional women” write books. As a young matron, Beth responds with a question which may also be read as an assertion: “And why manyn’t I be an exceptional woman?” Again, her male interlocutor responds with a “jeer”: “Coarse and masculine!” (366). Just what Dan declares “coarse and masculine” remains unclear; it could be either the writing of books and/or it could be the “presumption” of an ordinary woman to genius. Of course, the reader already knows that Beth is “exceptional” and so Dan’s denunciations of his wife serve only to convict him of the self-serving stupidity that invariably dictates his actions. Although she initially responds to Dan’s “jeers” with retreat, Beth ultimately answers him by publishing a well-received book and by triumphing in the lecture hall. The Beth Book differs significantly from the other works I have discussed in Chastity and Transgression in Women’s Writing. It does not offer the narrative of a “common prostitute” nor that of a genteel “fallen woman”. Although she is like the sexualized heroines of the Romantic period in her transgression of intellectual boundaries, Beth differs from them because she remains “pure”; indeed, she expresses equal amounts of disgust for both sexual transgression and hypocritical social mores. While Beth’s freethinking and often outrageous behavior continually scandalizes, she never actually transgresses the boundaries of acceptable sexual behavior – although she is often suspected of doing so. Beth’s transgression lies in her refusal to accept codes of Victorian behavior that others insist she must perform without question. She refuses to mold herself to the romantic ideal propounded in fatuous novels with their “faultlessly beautiful heroines” boasting “golden hair yards long” (373). At the same time,

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however, she also refuses the alternative model of the self-sacrificing and respectable mid-century social reformer. Indeed, Beth, upheld as an ideal “heroine” by the narrator, most identifies with the author behind the text. She sees herself as the rightful heir to a respectable literary tradition dominated by the “many women [who] have written, and written well” (366). Grand’s novel, then, charts the rise of a “new” heroine as creator, acutely aware of a feminized literary and social history against and through which she defines herself. Part of that history includes Josephine Butler’s campaign against the CD Acts. While it is true that the novel’s allusions to the Acts perform the familiar function of connecting “legalized” and “common” prostitution, they also remind readers of the power of feminized public discourse. The Beth Book cannily evokes “old” narratives of social reform and sexual transgression in order to establish a “new” narrative that charts the ascent of the “woman of genius”, a figure necessarily set above both the “reformer” and the “harlot” while yet remaining distinct from conventionally respectable figures. Butler’s crusade against a legislated double standard of sexual morality remains an important – even necessary – plot element in the narrative but remains secondary to the text’s primary evocation of the heroine’s rise to power. The political and spiritual awakening of Grand’s heroine, Beth Caldwell Maclure, is thus both dependent upon and yet distanced from her interaction with “fallen women” and their “saviors”. In other words, Grand’s text references the CD Acts and feminist resistance to them in a form of narrative shorthand; she simultaneously alludes to the horrors of prostitution and unregulated male sexuality as well as the transformative power of “feminine” forces of social reform but successfully subsumes larger social issues to the novel’s primary focus upon the “new” woman of genius. Beth, naive enough to marry without knowing anything about her husband’s profession, simultaneously learns of the legislation and opposition to it. The Maclures reside in Grand’s fictional world, inhabited by the feminist heroines of her other novels: including Ideala, the eponymous protagonist of Grand’s first novel, and Angelica Kilroy from The Heavenly Twins. The key moment in the text involves Beth’s discovery of her husband’s work as a doctor in a Lock hospital that carries out the work of the Acts. Her epiphany is orchestrated by the community of radical women who initiate her into the world of feminist discourse. Ideala and Angelica lead the opposition to the Lock hospital in their midst. Along with several other upper-class ladies, they form an “advanced woman’s party”, which seems to be based


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upon Butler’s own Ladies Association. After Ideala recognizes that Beth may be the “genius for whom we are waiting”, they resolve to inform her of her husband’s vocation, as well as “the whole horrible apparatus for the special degradation of women” instituted with the passage of the Acts (390, 398). Grand’s representation of Dr Daniel Maclure owes a significant debt to Josephine Butler’s descriptions of Lock hospital doctors, whom Butler invariably portrays as proponents of vice and brutal violators of women. Dan Maclure, an unrepentant sensualist and small-minded petty tyrant, represents the most dangerous threat to Beth’s “destiny” as a New Woman. In part, he is dangerous because she initially responds to his attentions with some delight; the daughter of a “goodold-fashioned-womanly woman” (175), Beth runs the risk of replicating her mother’s fate. The narrator observes, “The atmosphere in which she now moved was sensuous, not spiritual, and although she was unaware of this, she felt its influence. Dan made much of her, and she liked that; but the vision and the dream had ceased. Her intellectual activity was stimulated, however, and it was not long before she began to think for herself more clearly and connectedly than she had ever done before” (338–9). On the one hand, Dan’s initiation of Beth into the “sensuous” pleasures of sexuality triggers a fall from a Wordsworthian state of spiritual grace, in which the “vision and the dream” had predominated. Yet it is a “fortunate fall” because she must subsequently develop her powers of critique in order to contest the dangerously base “vision” of womanhood her husband also attempts to impose upon her. The possessor of a gaze both lecherous and condemnatory; he teaches Beth to “read signs of depravity in the faces of men and women”: That a handsome woman could be anything but vicious had apparently never occurred to him. He was very high-minded on the subject of sin if the sinner were a woman, and thought no degradation sufficient for her. In speaking of such women he used epithets from which Beth recoiled. [. . .] The subject had a horrible kind of fascination for her; she hated it, yet could not help listening, although her heart ached and her soul sickened. She listened in silence, however, neither questioning nor discussing, but simply attending; collecting material for which she had no use at the moment, and storing it without design – material which she would find herself forced to turn to account eventually, but in what way and to what purpose there was no knowing as yet. (339)

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Without belaboring the point, in the above passage we find yet another example of the “womanly woman’s” progress toward the “new woman” she will become. It replicates many of the story elements found in Josephine Butler’s account of her initial “silence” in the face of sexual hypocrisy and her subsequent search for a contestatory “dialectics”. Beth eventually comes to recognize that Dan’s supposed “moral exasperation” merely disguises his own venality and she ultimately rejects his attempts to chronicle female sexual depravity. She refuses to listen to his accounts of “the natural history of humanity”, insisting that “knowing it, and delighting in it as a subject of conversation, are two very different things. Jesting about that side of life affects me like mud on a clean coat. I resent being splashed with it, and try to get rid of it, but unfortunately it sticks and stains.” (349) Characteristically, Beth steadfastly holds herself above the “pollution” of transgressive sexuality even as her awareness of the “harlot’s progress” narrative facilitates her growth as a feminist thinker and activist, providing, as it does, an apt metaphor for the plight of the “degraded” wife. Beth learns of her husband’s profession on the same day she catches him romancing a private “patient” in their garden. Thus, Dan proves himself to be dangerous in both the public and private spheres; as in Romantic-era texts, bad husbands make for bad citizens. Employed by the government, he carries out “degrading” examinations of women within the Lock hospital and, at home, he continues his brutalization of women. Significantly, however, the woman most degraded by Dan’s actions in the private sphere is Beth herself, rather than Bertha, Dan’s mistress. Grand’s narrative concentrates on the debilitating effects marriage has upon the heroine rather than upon the victimization of the “fallen woman”. As Dan’s wife, Beth learns to “read signs of depravity in the faces of men and women” but she never quite learns how to read redemption there. The text alludes to the presence of a teeming underworld of “fallen women” and lecherous men in its evocation of Dan’s work at the Lock hospital but never directly represents any actual prostitutes. Furthermore, Beth never asserts any affinity with the “fallen women” that she does encounter, notably dismissing Bertha as a “parasite” whom she “pities” with “royal contempt” (403).12 Although the heroine acknowledges socio-cultural connections between most women on the basis of gender, she steadfastly holds herself above “degraded” prostitutes and never acknowledges any sororal connection to them. In The Beth Book Grand consistently represents sexually transgressive women as “vicious” rather than victimized.


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While Dan mouths platitudes seemingly lifted from regulationist literature, insisting that “Sanitation is our business” (400), Beth also characterizes the prostitute and “fallen woman” as dangerously “unclean”. Although the novel clearly aligns itself with the repeal movement, particularly in its repudiation of the sexual, legal, and moral double standard shored up by the Acts, Beth employs social purity and eugenicist arguments in her debate with Dan over the wisdom of the legislation. Most notably, perhaps, she argues that her husband’s work is bad for the “race”: “And what are you doing to improve the race, to strengthen its power to resist disease? [. . .] Nature decrees the survival of the fittest; you exercise your skill to preserve the unfittest, and stop there” (442). The question here is, who qualifies as the “unfittest”? Beth indicts the middle-class men who spread venereal disease to their virtuous wives but remain protected by the Acts, as well as the doctors (like Dan) who participate in the deception of “good women”. Yet, she would seem to equally condemn prostitutes as dangerously “unfit”. When Beth confronts Dan about his profession, she accuses him of “pandering” (399), suggesting that she sees the Lock hospital doctor working with the prostitute rather than against her. Thus, the respectable middle-class “woman of genius” in The Beth Book lines up in opposition to Lock hospital doctors, unfaithful husbands, and “fallen women”. All wallow in “congenial mire” from which the “exceptional woman”, like Butler’s St Margaret, emerges untouched, indeed, somehow mystically “purified” by her encounter with vice. Grand, unlike Butler, however, chooses to represent her unsullied “ideal” Englishwoman as notably uninterested in sororal solidarity. In her compelling book-length treatment of Grand and her work, Theresa Mangum argues that “Beth’s knowledge of the Contagious Diseases Acts forces her attention from the murk of her personal life to the public sphere, as she realizes that her marriage mirrors the relative positions of women to men and their institutions in the larger world” (169). While I would agree that the novel’s evocation of the Acts conveys a critique of Britain’s social, legal, and medical institutions at the end of the century, I would also argue that, finally, Beth’s response to Dan’s profession is far more ambivalent than Mangum portrays it. Mangum suggests that “the revelation of Dan’s mysterious career is the crisis that destroys the marriage” (165) yet there is a significant gap of narrative time between Beth’s discovery of her husband’s profession and her final break with him. Indeed, Beth does not leave her husband because of his work at the

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Lock hospital but rather because she discovers yet another secret; in addition to working as a regulationist doctor, Dan is a vivisectionist: “His hands in particular, his handsome white hands, had a horrid sort of fascination for her. She had admired them while she thought of them as the healing hands of the physician, bringing hope and health; but now she knew them to be the cruel hands of the vivisector [. . .] and when he touched her, her delicate skin crisped with a shudder” (445). Dan’s experiments with vivisection are certainly linked to his work at the Lock hospital; Josephine Butler had employed an analogy between vivisection and enforced gynecological examination at some length in her 1869 “Appeal to the People of England”. Yet the analogy manifests itself in a characteristically ambivalent manner in Grand’s novel. While the text never puts Beth in close proximity to any of the Lock hospital’s patients, she does find a small terrier, half-dead, in Dan’s laboratory, thus revealing her husband’s work as a vivisector. She finds the dog (like the sexually suspect women also subject to Dan’s examination) “fastened into a sort of frame in a position which alone must have been agonising” (437). At this point in the text, Beth responds with an extreme reaction, quite unlike her rather muted response to revelations about Dan’s work in the Lock hospital: “Beth had heard of these horrors before, but little suspected that they were carried on under that very roof. She had turned sick at the sight, a low cry escaped her, and her great compassionate heart swelled with rage.” The above scene can be read as a trenchant (if metaphorical) critique of the CD Acts and their attendant abuses. Grand sets the scene of gynecological examination within the precincts of the family home rather than the Lock hospital itself, thus allowing for a graphic representation of the metaphorical resonance between “common” and “legalized” prostitution. But, yet again, the novel turns away from even a displaced representation of the horrors perpetrated upon the literal prisoners of the hospital. The small dog terrorized by Dan finally has much more in common with Beth than with the incarcerated prostitutes because both this particular dog and Beth deserve better fates. He (like Beth) is “well-bred” and demonstrates “the greatest intelligence” (436), and, hence, doesn’t deserve to be subject to Dan’s “handsome white hands”. Lurking beneath Grand’s conflation of “public” and “private” scenes of degradation, as well as her historically specific analogy between vivisection, enforced gynecological examination, and marriage, seems to be a disturbing suggestion that some animals and women don’t (and perhaps shouldn’t) escape the Lock hospital. In confounding the “brutalising” examinations of women as


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legislated by the CD Acts with the circumstances of Beth’s unfortunate marriage, Grand’s text finally privileges her heroine’s refusal to accept the terms of “legalized prostitution” and yet sets her well above the degraded “common prostitute”. Grand further distances the reader from the specific site of reform discourse by setting the novel not in the midst of the movement but after its success has been assured. In her last conversation with Dan, Beth offers to return to him if he will give up his post at the Lock hospital, pointing out that “the next session will end this iniquity” (482). When Dan bitterly blames “you cursed women” for the expected repeal of the Acts, Beth responds with a blithe assertion of the public influence of women: “women have proved that what they choose to do they can do” (483). In The Beth Book, the representation of the CD Acts matters, not only because it indicts British society for legislating a sexual and moral double standard that victimizes women, but because it allows Grand to celebrate womanhood’s defeat of them.13 The novel ends with a vision of a possible future for women working in the wake of Butler’s success. The text depends upon the reader imagining – with Grand – the possibilities for a “woman of genius” after 1886. Hence Beth is explicitly represented as the “daughter” born from previous feminist struggles. Although certainly introduced into the text as the spiritual heir to Josephine Butler as well as the successor to Grand’s earlier heroines, Ideala and Angelica, Beth transcends the category of “daughter” even as her youth, naiveté, and childlessness preclude her from claiming maternal authority. Indeed, in The Beth Book, Grand creates a feminist “woman of genius” who is not a mother, daughter, or sister but someone who functions outside of traditional categories of womanhood. Instead, she is most consistently represented as the long awaited “Christ-figure” of the woman’s movement. After reading Beth’s work in manuscript, Ideala lectures a group of women who have been shunning the heroine because of her marriage to Dan: “Why, she is just what I have missed being with all my cleverness, or I am much mistaken, and that is a genius. And what is more important to us, I suspect she is the genius for whom we are waiting. Why, why didn’t you name her? It is the old story. She came unto her own and her own received her not” (390). Ideala goes on to condemn the rank and file for “martyring” their greatest leaders, hence unveiling the text’s cynical stance on sororal “solidaire”. In every representation of Beth’s interaction with members of her own sex – respectable or fallen, conservative or progressive, of her own class or “below” her – the

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marks of her “genius” irrevocably isolate her. Not particularly intimate with her own sisters, Beth “adopts” girls of the lower classes in her youth but always in the name of pedagogy or pleasure. As the leader of the “Secret Service of Humanity”, for example, Beth does little more than perform spectacles of female heroism. As an adult woman, Beth’s isolation is initially forced upon her. She begins her writing career secretly, carving out a “room of her own” in the attic of her husband’s house. As Ann Heilmann brilliantly points out, Beth’s retreat recuperates a “female tradition” both personally, since it is furnished with her Aunt Victoria’s belongings, as well as more universally, since she immerses herself in the reading of women’s biographies, embarks upon embroidery to support herself, and deliberately sets about writing for women rather than men (298–9). Yet, Beth (and the novel) most privilege female solidarity in its absence, for even after she commits herself to the cause of women, she insists upon a “hallowed seclusion”. Indeed, her vocation as a feminist speaker sits awkwardly upon Beth, largely because of her discomfort with being part of a “crowd”. After her most successful engagement, the newspapers herald the arrival of a “great teacher” (527) but Beth herself “cowers” from the memory of the “crowd that rose and cheered and cheered and seemed to be rushing at her” (524). The subject matter of Beth’s public speaking, as well as her published writing, remains deliberately vague in the novel. Although the reader is told that the subject of her earliest lecture is “The Desecration of Marriage” we learn little else about its content. Instead, the novel focuses upon the force of Beth’s physical presence and the response of the audience. “Her clear, dispassionate voice” creates a “kind of awakening” in her auditors; Ideala’s eyes “kindle” and Mrs Orton Beg “nods” in agreement as Beth “held the hall, and was still rising from point to point, carrying the audience with her to a pitch of excitement which finally culminated in a great burst of applause” (419). As a “woman of genius” it is her “mesmeric” quality that is important, rather than the “object” upon which her gaze settles. Indeed, the novel consistently idealizes Romantic modes of genius and creativity, particularly as manifested in the life and work of Percy Bysshe Shelley; Beth is often portrayed as a divine messenger who serves as the conduit for a power nearly beyond her control. Quite deliberately, I think, Grand rewrites her representation of an “exceptional woman” as it appeared in Ideala, the first novel in her “social problem” trilogy. In that text, the heroine actually does interact with “fallen women”, at one point comforting a diseased and dying prostitute with a sympathy quite akin


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to that represented in Josephine Butler’s texts: “[Ideala] knelt once more beside the bed, and raised her in her arms, and let her head rest on her shoulder. All the woman in her was throbbing with tenderness for this poor outcast” (Ideala 115). In order to surpass Ideala, however, and take her place as a “new” New Woman “of genius”, Beth necessarily remains at a careful remove from actual scenes of reclamation. Her place is at the podium and her proper sphere is one of solitude, abstract thinking, and inspired oratory. Yet, as many critics have pointed out, Grand does not choose to end the novel with Beth’s ascension to a public recognition of her “genius”. In its final three paragraphs the text reintroduces the possibility of romantic love; indeed, it insists upon it, for Beth feels that “Something was wanting” (527). As she stands by a window the morning after her great triumph, Beth sees Arthur Brock riding towards her, the young painter she had met and nursed during her sojourn in a London garret after her final break with Dan. The conclusion of The Beth Book has generated more critical attention than any other moment in Grand’s oeuvre. Rachel DuPlessis, Joseph Boone, and Jane Aldridge Miller all read the novel’s conclusion as compromised either in terms of politics, narrative experimentation, or both. For Miller, “the final effect of [Grand’s] novel is one of stasis and narrative satisfaction; her heroine’s rebellious energies are made to conform to the more dominant needs of the novel, such as social integration and closure” (20). Terri Doughty and Kate Flint, however, have stressed the “openendness” and ambivalence of the novel’s conclusion. Although Arthur’s return could signify the satisfaction of romantic conventions, the final scene resonates with allusions to Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott”, a narrative that ends far from happily for the heroine (Flint 296). Theresa Mangum has read the novel’s conclusion as a “qualified” romantic ending: “In many ways this part of the plot seems to be offered as proof that the New Woman retains the qualities of womanhood her critics feared she had lost, the abilities to nurture others and to sacrifice herself to others’ needs” (189). But Mangum also points out that Beth falls in love with Arthur Brock while still married to Dan Maclure, thus the romance plot in this novel “invalidates” the “marital contract” (191). I would argue that the novel quite deliberately reintroduces the possibility of transgressive female sexuality at the very moment of its ending. Although Beth tells her husband that she will leave him if he doesn’t resign his position at the hospital, it is Dan who makes the final ultimatum. He asks Beth to rescind the alibi she provides Alfred Cayley Pounce when he is

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accused of a crime he didn’t commit; Alfred’s alibi ironically convicts Beth of socially (if not sexually) transgressive behavior. Of course, Beth refuses to deny that she spent the night talking with a fellow writer (and fending off his advances); thus, she begins her independent life in the uncomfortable subject-position of sexual transgressor. Indeed, all of her male relatives explicitly renounce her as such. Her brother warns “Beth not to apply to him if she should be starving, or to claim his acquaintance should she meet him in the street” (490). And even Arthur Brock, Beth’s “soul-mate”, initially suspects that Beth may be an “adventuress” as well as a member of the “unsexed crew that shriek on platforms” (509). On many levels then, Grand’s novel invokes the intertwined histories of the “fallen woman” and the feminist activist in its concluding pages. And in its final three paragraphs, the text actually suggests that Arthur and Beth may pursue an illicit romantic relationship. But the novel ends just at the moment of connection between the two lovers, forcing the reader to write her own “ending”. Do the allusions to “The Lady of Shalott” suggest that Arthur will force Beth to abandon her art before he abandons her? Or, do they suggest that Beth, the redemptive “woman of genius”, will successfully rewrite one of the Victorian era’s most coercive representations of female creativity and keep both her “art” and her “man” even in the face of social stigma? Of course, Grand does write the “ending” to a similar scene in Ideala when the heroine finally refuses to enter a “free union” with a professed lover. My point, however, is that Grand deliberately chooses not to write any conclusion to The Beth Book, hence the later text remains charged with the potential of sexual transgression. Finally, I would suggest that the conclusion of The Beth Book, resonant as it is with overt allusions to the Lady of Shalott, also evokes another model of romantic love, female creativity, and literary power, one based upon the life of the Victorian woman author renowned for both her art and unconventional sexual behavior: George Eliot.14 In Beth’s extended dialogue with Alfred Cayley Pounce, a pompous literary critic interested in both taking her as his mistress and influencing her as an author, she refuses to celebrate sexual immorality or “laxity in the marriage relation”. While Grand’s heroine vociferously rejects the literary model represented by George Sand as one determined by “ruinous” passion, she takes as her positive model George Eliot’s “serener spirit” (471). In this conversation, an author’s narrative technique and sexual irregularities are conflated. Although both are known for their sexually transgressive behavior, Beth distinguishes between


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Sand’s disorderly body (and text) and Eliot’s “ethical” and contemplative legacy. In her defense of Eliot, Beth argues that the author “acted openly, she deceived no one, and injured no one” in her relationship with G. H. Lewes. Beth turns her defense of Eliot into a critique of contemporary marital relations; she poses a series of hypothetical questions, all of which indirectly serve as an indictment of the modern married state. Although she leaves the most leading of the questions unanswered (“. . . have Church and State arranged the relations of the sexes successfully enough to convince us that they cannot be better arranged?”), Beth insists that “’holy matrimony’ is often a state of absolute degradation whereas “two honourable people can live together honourably without the conventional bond” (473). At the very conclusion of the argument, Beth somewhat unexpectedly asserts that “the legal bond is best” but, given her own “degrading” marriage and subsequent separation, her defense of the “legal bond” rings false. In both admiring George Eliot’s art and in defending her “irregular” relationship with Lewes, Beth allows for the possibility that she too will pursue an unconventional (although “true”) marriage with Arthur Brock. Most interesting here, for my purposes, is that Grand only alludes to the possibility of transgressive sexual behavior without actually enacting it within the text. Thus, Beth – “woman of genius” – carries with her the legacy of the powerful and creative “fallen woman” without actually suffering its literal or literary costs. I would finally argue that the conclusion of the novel then quite clearly fulfills the narrative thrust of the entire text, that is, the figure of the “woman of genius” as heroine accrues power from a host of more dangerously inflected models of transgressive behavior, even as she remains carefully distanced from them. Although she has been victimized by a hypocritical society (like the “fallen woman”), Grand’s New Woman heroine proves herself capable of rising up as an all-powerful creative figure. Her self-sacrificing and heroic nature (based upon the model of the reformer without the detriment of any clear commitment to a particular political cause) when married to great art and potential sexual freedom (like George Eliot – and I would suggest – Mary Wollstonecraft), thus allows for the possibility of a radically new narrative. Yet, Grand’s text never insists upon such a reading, instead depending upon an effective narrative strategy of suggestion and displaced allusion. In its explicit revelations about the workings of male power and its consequences for women, The Beth Book harkens back to the novels of Wollstonecraft, Opie, and Hays. Like her predecessors, Grand

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explicitly links political action by women to their epiphanic awareness of formerly hidden mechanisms of masculine privilege. And Beth’s role as a public proponent of women’s rights revives the Romantic tradition of activist heroines in women’s writing. Yet Grand’s text also stresses divisions between women: between Beth and her staunchly conservative mother; between Beth and her husband’s mistresses; and finally, between Beth and the women examined by Dan in his role as a regulationist doctor. Although repulsed by her husband’s profession, as well as the institutional ends it serves, Beth does little to actually protest or end the CD Acts and their associated abuses. She merely absents herself from a situation “degrading” to her own aesthetic and literary sensibility. Grand’s narrative of redemption is employed to rescue the “pure” woman, rather than to raise the “fallen”. Her recognition of “wrongs” done to prostituted women at the hands of her husband (and the state) does not inspire solidarity between the feminist activist and prostitute; instead, it widens the divisions between them. Unlike Wollstonecraft’s Maria, who escapes her madhouse prison with Jemima, Beth abandons the Lock hospital without even a backward glance to the women left behind. And although the novel ends with the image of Beth reaching for the pleasures promised by Arthur, she never actually grasps them.

Coda to Chapter 6: Writing the New Wollstonecraft

In a letter believed to have been written to Mary Hays in the Summer of 1797, and just a few months before her death, Mary Wollstonecraft warns: “We ought not to be too anxious respecting the opinions of others. – I am not fond of vindications [. . .] I am easy with regard to the opinions of the best part of mankind. – I rest on my own” (Collected Letters 413).1 And yet, in spite of Wollstonecraft’s distaste for them, vindications have abounded. The legacy of William Godwin’s Memoirs, as well as the collapse of radical idealism, may have suppressed overt considerations of Wollstonecraft’s life and work throughout most of the mid-Victorian period, but as Barbara Caine points out, Wollstonecraft continued to “haunt” memoirs and letters, as well as nineteenth-century constructions of women’s education and feminism. Indeed, as early as 1855 George Eliot addressed Wollstonecraft’s legacy in a brief essay entitled “Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft”. Eliot proclaims her admiration for the “rational” writer with a “loving woman’s heart” and lauds the Vindication as “eminently serious, severely moral, and withal rather heavy” (333). By 1898, the year of The Beth Book’s publication, Mary Wollstonecraft had again become a fit “subject” of study.2 Between 1876 and 1917 at least nine biographical essays and three book-length biographies appeared, as well as innumerable sketches of her life in encyclopedias and “histories” of nineteenth-century literature. In the same decades we find the publication of her Letters to Imlay (1879) and a collection of selected writings, as well as the re-publication of A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1889), and two different editions of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1890 and 1891). The simultaneous rise of the suffragist and her literary sister, the New Woman, certainly fuels the reclamation of Wollstonecraft as an icon 235

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and ideological model but it also determines the form in which she is resurrected. In order to “vindicate” Wollstonecraft at the end of the century and deploy her story for their own purposes, New Woman-era writers – and specifically her biographers – purify the more troubling “narrative” elements of her life-story. At the same time, they construct a canon of her texts that reinforces their biographical emplotment and serves the rhetorical needs of a “modern” generation of women activists working for greater autonomy in the realms of politics, social work, and literature. In order to make Wollstonecraft palatable to late nineteenth-century readers, her well-known sexual improprieties are transformed into evidence for an innate “womanliness”; rather than shown treading the “harlot’s” path, Wollstonecraft is depicted as the ideal romantic heroine. Discussions of Wollstonecraft’s life first emerge in the context of the Shelley family’s desire to both exonerate and mythologize their rather problematic progenitors, all with somewhat questionable pasts: William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and even the once “fallen” but finally respectable Mary Shelley. C. Kegan Paul, first commissioned by the Shelley family to chronicle the life of the paterfamilias, William Godwin, and allowed unprecedented access to a large cache of personal papers and manuscripts, initially reopens the discourse around Wollstonecraft in his 1876 biography of William Godwin, and then again in his influential 1879 edition of the Letters to Imlay. Mathilde Blind, a devoted Shelleyite, is the first author connected to the “woman’s movement” to explicitly address Wollstonecraft in the context of what we would now call “feminist” history. In her 1878 New Quarterly Magazine essay, Blind asserts: “Whether our sympathies are favorable, opposed, or simply indifferent to the present movement for securing to women certain professional privileges and political rights, from the historic point of view it should at least not be forgotten that it was Mary Wollstonecraft who, in this country, boldly ventured to raise a voice on behalf of her sex” (390). Blind’s essay was followed by Elizabeth Pennell’s book-length account of Wollstonecraft’s life, commissioned for W. H. Allen’s “Eminent Woman” series.3 The initial emphasis upon biography eventually leads to a reconsideration of Wollstonecraft’s work. Two editions of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman appeared in the 1890s, one prefaced by Millicent Garrett Fawcett and the other by Pennell.4 All four authors approach their subject from vastly different ideological positions: Kegan Paul as a literary biographer, Blind as a Victorian feminist, Pennell as a professional writer intent upon

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producing a popular treatment of an “Eminent Woman”, and Fawcett as a leading suffragist activist. But all emplot Wollstonecraft’s life along similar lines, necessarily engaged (although for different reasons) with anti-suffragist rhetoric intent upon identifying and silencing the dangerously “unsexed” New Woman then making her presence felt in the public sphere (as an advocate of social reform), in the political sphere (as a suffrage activist), and in the literary sphere (as a new type of heroine). Given the highly charged gender rhetoric swirling around “the Woman Question” at the end of the nineteenthcentury it initially appears curious that it is precisely at this moment that Mary Wollstonecraft reappears. Certainly the fin-de-siècle Suffragist and the New Woman – like Wollstonecraft herself – that “hyena in petticoats”, as she was termed by Horace Walpole in her own time, were assailed by a variety of slanderous appellations. And yet, I would argue that telling Wollstonecraft’s life narrative becomes important at this historical moment because of the sexualized reputation she brings with her. Through the careful deployment of biographical “fact”, Wollstonecraft’s late nineteenth-century defenders “prove” that the most notoriously “unsexed” British Heroine and Proto-New Woman was, in fact, deliciously female after all. At issue here, I would argue, is the changing definition of “unsexed” as it is applied throughout the nineteenth century by those opposed to women’s rights. At the end of the eighteenth century, when it is most associated with Richard Polwhele and other Anti-Jacobin propagandists, it is most often used to identify a dangerously sexual woman, one whose heterosexual urges threaten to overwhelm both them and society.5 The “sexual fall” most feared is the fall out of chastity and into promiscuity and vice. But at the end of the century, to be an “unsexed” woman is to be suspiciously masculine. The most dreaded late-century “fall”, if you will, is the “fall” out of an appropriately feminine subject position. Wollstonecraft, an infamously “unsexed female” philosopher in her own time – suspected of pursuing the married painter Fuseli and known to have been the lover of at least two men to whom she was not married – provides an opportunity to deny the myth of the masculine “rights of woman woman” at the end of the nineteenth century. Pennell writes: “Those who know her only as the vindicator of the Rights of Women and the defiant rebel against social laws, may think her case calls for little sympathy. But the truth is, there have been few women so dependent for happiness upon human love” (Life of Mary Wollstonecraft 32–3). And in a gesture that is to become nearly stereotypical in its repetition, Mathilde Blind employs

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a technique akin to ekphrasis as she turns her reader’s gaze towards John Opie’s well-known painting of Wollstonecraft: Does she bear any affinity to the popular notion of what a ‘Woman’s Rights Woman’ must necessarily be according to the eternal fitness of things? Would that the reader could see the admirable portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft [. . .] could see the lovely face, with its soft winning eyes, dimpling cheeks, and abundant coils of rich brown, silken hair, encircling a countenance essentially feminine in its contour! [. . .] No less winning, according to William Godwin, were the manners of this remarkable woman, whose smile of bewitching tenderness, he says, all who know her will so well recollect, and which won, both heart and soul, the affection of almost every one who beheld it. (396–7) I quote from Blind at length because in the above passage we find the primary pieces of evidence used to vindicate Wollstonecraft as an “essentially feminine” woman at the end of the nineteenth century: her striking beauty and her capacity to love men deeply and to be loved in return. Again and again, Wollstonecraft’s biographers allude to Opie’s portrait of the author, executed just after her marriage to Godwin (Figure 7). As early as 1798, the publisher of Godwin’s Memoirs emphasized Wollstonecraft’s personal beauty by commissioning an even more flattering, and conventionally pretty, engraving of the Opie portrait for the biography’s frontispiece (Figure 8). And as late as 1879, C. Kegan Paul was still enthusing over Charles Heath’s engraving: “More than one print was engraved of that portrait, in which is well preserved its tender, wistful, childlike, pathetic beauty, with a look of pleading against the hardness of the world, which I know in only one other face, that of Beatrice Cenci. But those prints can have no notion of the complexion, rich, full, healthy, vivid, of the clear brown eyes, and masses of brownish auburn hair” (Preface to Letters to Imlay, xxxiii). Like Paul, Elizabeth Pennell also links Wollstonecraft to the ill-fated heroine of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s historical drama and, again, specifically in a rendering of her heroine’s defiant response to her father’s physical and psychological brutality. Wollstonecraft’s defense of her mother becomes yet another crucial element in the emplotment of her life-narrative, most famously deployed perhaps by Virginia Woolf in her 1929 essay on Wollstonecraft.6 Pennell, however, was already preparing the groundwork for later mythologizing in 1885:


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. . . before she had left her home there must have come into her eyes that strangely sad expression, which Kegan Paul, in speaking of her portrait by Opie, says reminds him of nothing unless it be of the agonized sorrow in the face of Guido’s Beatrice Cenci. No one can wonder that she doubted if marriage can be the highest possible relationship between the sexes, when it is remembered that for years she had constantly before her, proofs of the power man possesses, by sheer physical strength and simple brutality, to destroy the happiness of an entire household. (Life of Mary Wollstonecraft 20) Both Paul and Pennell chart Wollstonecraft’s appropriately feminine pathos – as well as her more problematic defiance of her father – back to her horror at the destruction of the domestic sphere. In associating Wollstonecraft’s father, a drunkard and a wife-beater, to the arguably more depraved Count Cenci, late nineteenth-century biographers further justify what otherwise could be seen as early evidence of Wollstonecraft’s dangerously rebellious nature, and all in the name of domestic harmony. Indeed, Fawcett employs Opie’s portrait to the same effect, only in 1891 she can direct her readers to the National Portrait Gallery where Wollstonecraft joined that pantheon of British fame after Lady Jane Shelley’s death in 1889. Fawcett draws upon yet another source of authority as well. Godwin’s own words offer further evidence of Wollstonecraft’s innate femininity: “Her husband wrote of her soon after her death, ‘She was a worshipper of domestic life.’ If there is anything in appearance, her face in the picture in the National Portrait Gallery speaks for her” (Woman’s Suffrage 6). Wollstonecraft’s biographers exonerate the feminist philosopher’s rather unconventional sexual history through their construction of a properly demure and loving heroine. The reader’s gaze is next directed to the even more compelling evidence found in her letters to Imlay, edited and published by C. Kegan Paul in 1879 and enormously popular. Kegan Paul insists: “No one can read her letters without seeing that she was a pure, high-minded and refined woman, and that she considered herself, in the eyes of God and man, his wife” (William Godwin 1: 215). Although her biographers present other justification for the “irregular” nature of Wollstonecraft and Imlay’s relationship – the dangerous climate in Revolutionary France and Wollstonecraft’s unwillingness to saddle Imlay with her debts, for example – the letters provide the best evidence of the “purity” of Wollstonecraft’s love. “No one who has read Mary’s letters to Mr Imlay can fail to see that she

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considered this union of the most sacred nature. But for those letters, so full of passion and pathos, breathing in every line the very soul of fidelity and love, we should have had a comparatively cold and shadowy idea of Mary Wollstonecraft’s genius [. . .] [in them] the sweet, noble, affectionate nature of woman stands fully revealed” (Blind, 404). And Wollstonecraft’s letters to Godwin serve to vindicate her second “irregular” love relationship: “Mary’s notes [to Godwin]”, Pennell argues, “are essentially feminine. Short as they are, they are full of womanly tenderness and weakness” (Life of Mary Wollstonecraft 319; Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin 189).7 Pennell reads A Vindication of the Rights of Woman as the ultimate expression of Wollstonecraft’s proto-Victorian commitment to the adage: “Work thou in well doing!” (Life of Mary Wollstonecraft 53–4). Although its importance to the history of feminism is certainly acknowledged, the Vindication’s call for better-educated English wives and daughters is stressed by all of Wollstonecraft’s fin-de-siècle biographers and editors. Fawcett writes: [Wollstonecraft] did not sanction any depreciation of the immense importance of the domestic duties of women. She constantly exalted what was truly feminine as the aim of woman’s education and training; she recognized love and the attraction between the sexes as a cardinal fact in human nature, and “marriage as the foundation of almost every social virtue.” Hence, very largely from her initiative, the women’s rights movement in England has kept free from the excesses and follies that in some other countries have marred its course. Mary Wollstonecraft [. . .] is the essentially womanly woman, with the motherly and wifely instincts strong within her. (Preface to Vindication 19) All of Wollstonecraft’s fin-de-siècle biographers attempt to elide any traces of “the harlot’s progress” as it might appear in accounts of her life. They transform her into the prototypical “womanly woman” instead. C. Kegan Paul’s interest in Mary Wollstonecraft derives largely from his scholarly desire to construct a history of ideas that incorporates the work of Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Wollstonecraft; his interest in her feminism is secondary at best. But Blind, Pennell, and Fawcett explicitly link their biographical treatments of Wollstonecraft to late-century campaigns for “woman’s rights”. And yet, it would also be an error to conflate their ideological positions. Mathilde Blind, for example, is the only one of Wollstonecraft’s many


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biographers willing to recommend The Wrongs of Woman to her readers. And Pennell and Fawcett finally come to very different conclusions about the impact of Wollstonecraft’s work upon “the cause”. Pennell discusses Wollstonecraft’s relevance to contemporary feminist activism in an article written the year before her preface to the Vindication. In “A Century of Women’s Rights”, written in 1890, Pennell contends that Wollstonecraft’s legacy “remind[s] women of the old state of slavery from which they have so recently been freed” since all of her “theories have become facts” (417). Indeed, Pennell’s overt hostility toward continuing feminist agitation for greater personal liberty within the domestic sphere, more access to education, and – most significantly perhaps – the vote, emerges in the preface’s concluding statements. Amazingly enough, she asserts that if Mary Wollstonecraft were “living today” she would actually range herself with the anti-suffragists against “women disordered by the ‘fever of a public mission’”. And she continues: “Let woman be herself; that was what she asked [. . .] The main thing was to be done with shams for evermore, not to substitute for the old sham sensibility of puppetdom, the new sham sexlessness of emancipation” (Preface to Vindication xxiii). In contrast, Fawcett – a committed suffragist and president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies — insists that “the battle in which Mary Wollstonecraft took a leading part is still being waged” in 1890 (Preface to Vindication 15). Fawcett argues that the merit of Wollstonecraft’s individual life and work is negligible in and of itself: “The vastness of the change [in women’s status]”, Fawcett writes, “[and] its appearance, almost simultaneously, in various ways in different parts of the world, indicates that it proceeds from causes too powerful and too universal to be attributed to any particular individual” (9). Fawcett, as we have already seen, then goes on to stress Wollstonecraft’s “keen appreciation of the sanctity of women’s domestic duties” as well as the ongoing commitment of suffragists to the same mission. According to Fawcett, contemporary activists, like Wollstonecraft, enter public discourse and demand the vote because they want to make Englishwomen better wives and daughters. In spite of their contradictory political positions, both Pennell and Fawcett point to the Vindication as the most important of Wollstonecraft’s works. Pennell, because she wants to argue that its “theories” have become “facts”. And Fawcett, because its agenda of domestic feminism suits her engagement with anti-suffragist rhetoric and her own employment of such a model. Neither Pennell nor Fawcett see any value in the unfinished Wrongs

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of Woman. Although Pennell “defends” its “plainness of speech”, insisting that Wollstonecraft takes no “delight in impurity and uncleanness for their own sakes”, she also condemns it. The “stories of Maria, Darnford, and Jemima” are “records of shame, crime, and human bestiality little less unpleasant than the realism of a Zola” (Life of Mary Wollstonecraft 275).8 And it would appear that the close relationship between Maria, an educated upper-class heiress, and Jemima, a former prostitute and thief who acts as Maria’s madhouse keeper, gives Pennell particular pause. In a brief summary of the novel, she implies that Maria and Darnford escape the madhouse together while Jemima plays an appropriately secondary role: “Finally, by a lucky accident, the two prisoners make their escape, and Jemima accompanies them” (Life of Mary Wollstonecraft 272; Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin 160). Pennell deliberately misreads or misrepresents the novel here; in Wollstonecraft’s text, Darnford leaves the madhouse without Maria and Jemima rescues her. Pennell also elides Jemima’s importance to the preferred ending of the novel: “In [Maria’s] despair”, she writes, “she attempts to commit suicide, but fails. When consciousness and reason return, she resolves to live for her child” (272, 160). Pennell strategically neglects to mention that Jemima reunites mother and daughter and exhorts Maria to live. One can see why Pennell manipulates the plot as she does; she insists throughout that Wollstonecraft, although an independent heroine, paradoxically lives for and through others. But I would also like to argue that Pennell cannot acknowledge the ways in which Wollstonecraft links Maria’s fate to Jemima’s; to do so, given Pennell’s tendency to read Maria as Wollstonecraft’s alterego, would put the philosophical heroine in dangerous proximity to a former prostitute. It is certainly true that the Pennell and Fawcett versions of Wollstonecraft dominate discourse. The Wrongs of Woman is the only major work of Wollstonecraft’s not republished at the turn of the nineteenth century, although interested readers could find excerpts of it in Camilla Jebb’s 1912 collection of selected writings.9 It would appear that New Woman admirers successfully reform the scandalous Wollstonecraft of the Victorian era into a figure who forwards the political goals of late nineteenth-century feminisms. But the “eminent woman” claimed by fin-de-siècle biographers is the author of a dutifully domestic Vindication and the essentially feminine Letters to Imlay; for the most part, they willingly sacrifice the disturbingly “coarse” creator of The Wrongs of Woman. While it could be said that the heroine of The Wrongs of Woman, as well as Wollstonecraft herself, exemplify sexually suspect political activists,


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late nineteenth-century feminism continues to posit a necessary split between the sexualized silent “victim” and the highly visible and vocal emancipated New Woman. Consequently, the New Woman Wollstonecraft is an unthreatening proponent of better marriages for well-educated and privileged exceptional women rather than the Wollstonecraft willing to acknowledge a complex relationship between chastity, class and reputation, as well as the necessity for dialogue among women. Edwardian “vindications” of Mary Wollstonecraft ultimately triumph by tempering Wollstonecraft’s more radical representations of chastity and sexual transgression, as well as their relevance to feminism.

Notes Introduction: Interrupting the Harlot’s Progress 1. I am thinking here of Joyce Hemlow’s work, as well as other critics from the fifties and sixties. More recently, critics including Margaret Anne Doody, Julia Epstein, and Kristina Straub have re-evaluated earlier assumptions about Burney. 2. I will note here that authors continue to play with the provocative possibilities of intersecting the “domestic” path toward marriage with the dangerous “harlot’s progress” in a range of texts from the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century, including Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline (1784), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), and George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860). The later two texts, in particular, draw upon the evocative image of the “wandering woman” in representations of their beleaguered heroines. 3. Armstrong’s sole reference to Wollstonecraft merely alludes to an early piece of conduct writing (65). In The Sign of Angellica Janet Todd also privileges an ideologically potent if socially conservative history of women’s writing. 4. Much eighteenth-century literary criticism averts its gaze from representations of the sexually transgressive heroine in order to focus upon the domestic heroine. See Patricia Meyer Spacks and Susan Staves for analyses of eighteenth-century “fallen women”. 5. Although I commit an anachronism by imposing the term “feminism” upon the “rights of woman” debates of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, I do so in order to avoid the technically correct but unwieldy phrase “rights of woman woman”. Since I believe that the political and philosophical work of Wollstonecraft and her contemporaries represents “a germinal feminism in process” I usually refer to it as “protofeminism” (Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue 272). 6. In The Heroine’s Text Nancy Miller suggests that the eighteenth century generates two “femnocentric” narratives: the “euphoric” text which ends with integration into society through marriage and the “dysphoric” text which concludes with a sexually transgressive heroine’s early death. Miller does note that her focus on male-authored texts limits her analysis to plots that inscribe masculine fantasies about “female destiny” (x–xi). The femaleauthored narratives I examine try to avoid both marriage and death. 7. In Imagining the Penitentiary, John Bender argues that in the very act of constructing a “narrative penitentiary” detailing the corrupt power structures complicit in Moll’s “tragic” destiny (for example, the Church and Bridewell) Hogarth also implicitly suggests that the “institutions we see might intervene to retell [Moll’s story]” (120). 8. While I find Homans’s argument to be useful in demonstrating narrative experimentation, I read The Wrongs of Woman very differently. 244

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9. See the debate waged between feminist narratologists, including Susan Snaider Lanser and Robyn Warhol, and “traditional” narratologists such as Gerald Prince and Seymour Chatman. My own integrationist approach aligns me with Lanser and Warhol rather than Prince and Chatman. 10. See Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Claudia Johnson (Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel), and Anne Mellor (Romanticism and Gender), and Lisa L. Moore. 11. For years, Victorian criticism on the “fallen woman” was dominated by studies that focused on the seamy “underside” of Victorian culture. Steven Marcus’s The Other Victorians, led to the work of innumerable literary critics and historians, including Michael Pearson, Fraser Harrison, and Eric Trudgill. Françoise Basch’s 1974 study of the fallen woman inaugurates feminist considerations of Victorian sexual transgression. See, for example, the work of Nina Auerbach (The Woman and the Demon), Sally Mitchell, and Helena Michie. 12. Although texts written in the 1820s and 1830s do represent “fallen women”, I have not found any that significantly engage in narrative interruption as I have defined it. The sexual transgressors of Letitia Landon’s Ethel Churchill and Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, for example, both published in 1837, are either minor characters or remain securely within destructive rather than proactive plots. 13. My specific interest in writers actually working within the social reform movement does limit my focus to Gaskell and Rossetti in this study. Certainly, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) might generate an interesting reading based upon the thesis I set forth here. Although Marion Earle’s role in the text is never quite equal to that of the eponymous heroine, her narrative powers are significant, as is her self-aware analysis of the social forces that have propelled her into the subject position of sexual transgressor.

1. Imagining the Sexualized Heroine 1.

2.

See Frances Ferguson’s exchange with Timothy Reiss in Gender and Theory as well as Anne Mellor’s critique of Susan Gubar’s argument in “Righting the Wrongs of Woman: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria”. Wollstonecraft’s Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) is a significant intervening text between the Vindication and Wrongs of Woman. Its narrator, “Mary”, moves easily between the public discourse of the travelogue and the private exchange of “love” letters. She possesses the voice of the confident social critic from a Vindication and, without excuse, also occupies a series of other subject positions. A travel writer, intent upon collecting data, “Mary” is a celebrant of nature and the imagination. A nursing mother dedicated to her daughter, she writes passionate and loving letters to the father of her child that suggest a somewhat “irregular”, and probably doomed, relationship between the couple. Although Wollstonecraft ends a Short Residence abruptly, it would seem likely that the narrator’s ability to act as writer, “Romantic” thinker, and mother will possibly interrupt the sad end suggested by her lover’s desertion. Indeed, in

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3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

Notes a powerful reading of the text, Gary Kelly argues that the presence of the narrator’s “Appendix” precludes a dystopian ending by “reaffirming” the “‘female philosopher’s’ confidence – or hope – that the divided social order that seemed to have retaken her in the last letter is after all passing away, and will leave her and humanity free at last” (Revolutionary Feminism 193–4). See Catherine N. Parke, Tilottama Rajan’s The Supplement of Reading, and Mellor’s “Righting the Wrongs of Woman: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria”. See Laurie Langbauer and Shawn Maurer on the role of motherhood in The Wrongs of Woman. See Kate Ferguson Ellis as well as the fifth chapter of Mellor’s Romanticism and Gender. I have found Rajan’s work in The Supplement of Reading to be particularly helpful to my understanding of how political fiction might prompt political action in The Wrongs of Woman, as well as other Romantic texts. Rajan argues for the first reading. She suggests that Maria’s “plea for divorce is simply a plea to reenter the matrimonial system over again” (The Supplement of Reading 179). In Revolutionary Feminism, Kelly argues for a more optimistic reading: Maria “reclaims female sexuality from [an] instrument of the trivialization and oppression of women in court society to [a] manifestation of women’s subjective equality of ‘mind’” (215). Poovey argues that in idealizing the consummation of Maria’s relationship with Darnford “the narrator – and, by implication, Wollstonecraft herself – has just fallen victim to the very delusion it is the object of this novel to criticize” (98).

Coda to Chapter 1 1. 2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

See Mitzi Myers, William St. Clair, and Anna Wilson. See also Daniel O’Quinn, “Trembling: Wollstonecraft, Godwin and the Resistance to Literature”. Godwin destroyed Wollstonecraft’s comedic representation of her relationship with Imlay. In the Memoirs he writes, “In January 1796, [Wollstonecraft] finished the sketch of a comedy, which turns, in the serious scenes, upon the incidents of her own story. It was offered to both the winter-managers, and remained among her papers at the period of her decease; but it appeared to me to be in so crude and imperfect a state, that I judged it most respectful of her memory to commit it to the flames” (255). Wollstonecraft writes: “Yet thus to give a sex to mind was not very consistent with the principles of a man who argued so warmly, and so well, for the immortality of the soul” (Vindication 42). The Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination was first published under the pseudonym of Anne Frances Randall. In the “Advertisement” to the second edition (also published in 1799) Robinson declares herself the author. The Letter is also listed amongst Robinson’s works in the Memoirs of Mrs. Robinson, Written by Herself (1801). In The Female Advocate (1801), the author enters the debate over “the long exploded subject of female merit” after hearing an “arrogant assumer of

Notes

7.

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male merit” assert that a woman had “arrived at [her] zenith of improvement, at the age of twenty-one” (4). In response, she suggests that men prefer young and naive women because they are then most vulnerable to “the wicked, cruel, and insinuating art of gallantry and seduction” (6). Like Robinson, she recommends that a young woman’s education should include at least a vicarious knowledge of seduction. “What infinite consequence and importance is it to us”, she wittily advises, “that we read both men and books” (22). Robinson numbers herself among the forty women writers she lists at the end of her text. Her descriptions of each woman’s literary output stress the range of their writing. Authors noted by Robinson include Elizabeth Inchbald, Hannah More, Clara Reeve, Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, and Anne Yearsley.

2. ‘To think, to decide, and to act’ 1. Examples of the wandering Romantic transgressor are found in Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and Art, as well as William Wordsworth’s “The Thorn”. Late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century newspapers were also filled with accounts of homeless homicidal “fallen women” and their abandoned (or murdered) illegitimate children. For a more complete account of various narratives of late eighteenth-century “wandering” see Susan Staves’s “British Seduced Maidens”. 2. Jemima describes her inevitable movement into prostitution as follows: “Fate dragged me through the very kennels of society: I was still a slave, a bastard, a common property. Become familiar with vice, for I wish to conceal nothing from you, I picked the pockets of the drunkards who abused me; and proved by my conduct, that I deserved the epithets, with which they loaded me at moments when distrust ought to cease” (The Wrongs of Woman 59). And the first Mary, in The Victim of Prejudice, also recounts her transformation into a “monster” (67). Both echo Millwood’s vengeful attitude toward the society that has “ruined” her: “I know you and I hate you all; I expect no mercy and I ask for none; [. . .] All actions seem alike natural and indifferent to man and beast, who devour, or are devoured, as they meet with others weaker or stronger than themselves” (The London Merchant IV.ii). 3. Eleanor Ty carefully traces links between The Victim of Prejudice and Clarissa in Unsex’d Revolutionaries. Most critical attention has been directed toward Mary Hays’s first novel, The Memoirs of Emma Courtney, rather than the more recently “discovered” Victim of Prejudice. See Terence Hoagwood, Gina Luria, and Katherine Rogers. 4. Rape was a capital crime in England until 1841, but cases against rapists were only pursued when the “property rights” of another man were asserted. See Anna Clark’s Women’s Silence, Men’s Violence: Sexual Assault in England 1770–1845. 5. Mr Raymond remembers seeing Mary’s mother in a “tavern of doubtful reputation”, just as she is about to be arrested for abetting in the murder of a man “contending” with another for her favors: “A woman, with a wan

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6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

Notes and haggard countenance, her clothes rent and her hair disheveled, had fainted” (59) who “breathed a heavy sigh, and, raising her languid eye-lids, her eyes, wild and vacant, encountered mine” (60). In Unsex’d Revolutionaries, Ty stresses the psychological bond established between mother and daughter as Mary lives her mother’s life over again through reading and in her dream life. Although I find Ty’s argument thought-provoking, I would stress that Hays’s heroine always returns to a “rational” world after “embracing” her mother in a liminal state. In other words, Mary does not descend into a dream-vision, but instead emerges and acknowledges the trials of the “real” world, as well as the very material constraints against enacting “desire” for either the mother or the lover. Hays first employs the image of a “magic circle” which constrains “domestic” women in the Appeal: “[Married women] find themselves enclosed in a kind of magic circle, out of which they cannot move, but to contempt or destruction. And however confined or mortifying to their feelings this prison of the soul may be, they can never hope for emancipation, but from superior power. In this circle, in this prison therefore, during the reign of youth and beauty they gambol and frisk away life as they best can; happily blind and thoughtless as to futurity. But what comes then?” (111). An ardent admirer of revolutionary principles, Amelia Alderson attended the treason trials of 1794 as an enthusiastic supporter of Tooke, Hardy, and Holcroft. She later “confessed” in an autobiographical fragment that they marked “the most interesting period of my long life” (quoted in Brightwell, 52). In her correspondence with Susannah Taylor during the early 1790s, Alderson openly expresses her dissatisfaction with an increasingly reactionary government: “Hang these politics! how they haunt me. Would it not be better, think you, to hang the framers of them?” (Huntington MSS. OP 59). Elsewhere, Alderson exults: “I believe an hour to be approaching when salut and fraternité will be the watchwords for civil slaughter throughout Europe; and the meridian glory of the sun of Liberty, in France, will light us to courting the past dangers and horrors of the republic, in hopes of obtaining her present power and greatness. It will be an awful time; may I meet it with fortitude!” (quoted in Brightwell, 48–9). Frankly, the evidence here is unclear. While there is no archival evidence that Amelia Opie continued corresponding with Godwin after her marriage, her husband was one of the few friends with him in the days immediately following Wollstonecraft’s death. I specifically address such responses to Opie in Chapter 3, in the context of the author’s most discussed novel, Adeline Mowbray. I explore the nature of Opie’s personal relationship with Wollstonecraft in the next chapter. Both Staves and Ty have also noted the significance of this image. Ty suggests that Opie draws upon a range of “dramatic” plots and figures in order to “stage” what might be called a “Freudian ‘family romance’” (Empowering the Feminine 135). Other women writers of this period also figure infanticide as a male crime. In Hays’s The Memoirs of Emma Courtney, the heroine’s husband kills the child he has conceived with another woman. In Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman Jemima’s rapist buys the potion used to end her pregnancy.

Notes

249

Interestingly enough, this issue returns to prominence in suffragist texts written late in the century, when again the right of a woman to keep her child is contested by the powerful men in her life. I am thinking particularly of Votes for Women by Elizabeth Robbins. 14. See Staves and Gary Kelly’s “Amelia Opie, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Maria Edgeworth: Official and Unofficial Ideology” for alternative readings of the tale’s conclusion.

3. Diverting the Libertine Gaze 1. Opie’s reputation as a “conservative” author has been based upon readings of texts heavily revised after she became a Quaker in 1825. For example, until 1999 the most widely available edition of Adeline Mowbray was the Pandora version of 1986, based upon the revised text of 1844. For the purposes of this chapter I refer to Oxford’s recent edition of the novel that uses the original 1805 text and note where there is a significant difference between Romantic and Victorian texts. 2. See Jane Spencer’s The Rise of the Woman Novelist (32). 3. As Opie’s first biographer and the daughter of the author’s executor, Cecilia Brightwell is perhaps most responsible for Opie’s reputation of Victorian “respectability”. Brightwell’s published versions of the original letters were edited heavily, all with the intention of portraying the author as an eminently proper “lady writer”. For example, in one letter Opie openly – and cynically – speculates as to whether or not Helen Maria Williams is the virgin she claims to be (Letter to Susannah Taylor, Huntington MSS. OP 61). Brightwell carefully edits out all speculation about Williams’s sexual status in the memoirs. In this particular case the letter is intact; many other letters are heavily scored over and impossible to read. 4. Literary critics are divided on the extent of Godwin’s interest in Opie, née Alderson. At issue is a journal entry in which Godwin notes: “Propose to Alderson”. Until William St. Clair’s The Godwins and the Shelleys, most critics assumed that the “proposal” was one of marriage, and Dale Spender implies that such an interpretation is still possible (317). St. Clair (somewhat tendentiously) suggests that the letter concerned a “proposal” made to Mr Alderson to support an indigent poet arrested for debt (164). Although an actual proposal of marriage cannot be definitively proven, Godwin was certainly romantically interested in Alderson in the years just prior to his relationship with Wollstonecraft. 5. Opie’s life encompasses many contraries, from radical bluestocking to conservative Quaker; hence, her biographers endlessly recreate her in their own image. Brightwell and Lucy Stebbins writing in 1854 and 1952, eras of the “domestic heroine”, frame Opie’s life according to that standard. Biographers writing during periods of the “suffragette” and the “flapper” – Clara Whitmore (1910) and Jacobine Menzies-Wilson and Helen Lloyd (1937) – stress the irreverent and radical Opie. Not insignificantly, these shifts correspond to a lesser or greater respect for Wollstonecraft’s Vindication. Margaret Eliot MacGregor’s 1933 biography remains the most even-handed in its treatment of the life.

250

Notes

6. In later editions Godwin alters his analogy: the chambermaid becomes a valet and the prostitute a profligate. Such changes are consistent with Godwin’s later revisions to Political Justice. Don Locke addresses revisions to this section at great length in A Fantasy of Reason: the Life and Thought of William Godwin (168–79). 7. The description of Sir Patrick O’Carrol’s library is rife with allusions to his promiscuity: “Scarcely had the works of our best poets found their way to [Mrs Mowbray’s] library; and novels, plays, and works of a lighter kind she was never in the habit of reading herself, and consequently had not put in the hands of her daughter. Adeline had, therefore, read Rousseau’s Contrat Social, but not his Julie; Montesquieu’s Esprit des Loix, but not Lettres Persanes; and had glowed with republican ardour over the scenes of Voltaire’s Brutus, but had never had her mind polluted by the pages of his romances” (55). The narrator is at some pains to indicate that it is not “republican” narrative that endangers young girls, but instead the novel and the romance. Significantly, Wollstonecraft also criticizes Rousseau for his “voluptuous reveries” even as she admires his other “mighty sentiments” (Vindication 25). In the 1844 edition, Opie entirely removes the scene of Adeline reading La Nouvelle Heloise. 8. In the revised edition of the novel, Opie excises all descriptions of the men physically touching Adeline, as well as allusions to her possible willingness to sexually accommodate more than one man at a time. In the later edition, Opie also fails to identify the more aggressive “gentleman” as a law student, thereby lessening the social critique implicit in the passage. 9. I discuss a more successful attempt at dialect in an article on Opie’s abolitionist poetry. See “Tales of Truth?: Amelia Opie’s Abolitionist Poetics” in Romanticism and Women Poets. 10. For another reading of Adeline’s relationship with Savanna, see Carol Howard’s “‘The Story of the Pineapple’: Sentimental Abolitionism and Moral Motherhood in Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray”. 11. See Nina Auerbach’s Communities of Women for a comprehensive discussion of this reoccurring trope in women’s literature. 12. In “A Dying Daughter to her Mother”, a poem written much earlier than Adeline Mowbray, but published in the same year, Opie foreshadows the relationship between Adeline, Editha, and Mrs Mowbray. In the poem an estranged daughter writes to her mother and implores her to gaze upon her grandchild. As in Adeline Mowbray the child looks the way her mother once looked: “O raise the veil which hides her cheek, / Nor start her mother’s face to see, / But let her look thy love bespeak, . . . / For once that face was dear to thee” (Poems, 4). In the poem, however, the child has a slightly different function than that stressed in the novel; she serves as a reminder of her grandmother’s sin and not just her mother’s: “Thou’lt wish, with keen repentance wrung, / I’d closed my eyes upon thy breast, / Expiring while thy faltering tongue / Pardon in kindest tones expressed” (7). In the novel, of course, the deathbed scene actually does occur and Mrs Mowbray and Adeline do make peace with one another.

Notes

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4. Victorian Reclamations 1. Although I do not discuss Gaskell’s “Lizzie Leigh” in this chapter, the 1850 tale also explores the possibilities and limitations of feminized social reform. The “fallen” Lizzie’s mother and future sister-in-law forthrightly challenge social disapproval in order to reclaim her. But the narrative also reflects some anxiety about reclamation since Lizzie’s return home demands the “sacrifice” of her small daughter. Nanny’s death effectively punishes her repentant mother, mitigates Mrs Leigh’s joy upon finding her daughter, and tempers Susan Palmer’s conjugal happiness. 2. In Sense and Sensibility we find the two “fallen” Elizas; they haunt the margins of the text, as well as the fringes of the respectable social circle that admires Marianne and Elinor. An interesting exception to this general Austen rule is Lady Susan (1793–4), in which we find a sexually transgressive eponymous heroine; nonetheless, it could be argued that her “virtuous” daughter eclipses Lady Susan by the end of the tale. 3. See also Frank Mort, Linda Mahood, and Russell Dobash. In The Imprisonment of Women, Dobash notes the differences between Romantic and Victorian social reform methods in a discussion of Elizabeth Fry’s work (47). 4. For a different reading of this scene, see Amanda Anderson (123). Anderson argues that Gaskell “disguises” Esther in order to protect Mary from contamination. 5. Gaskell further develops this model of “familial” reform in “Lizzie Leigh”. As I mentioned in an above note, the twin efforts of Lizzie’s mother and her future sister-in-law rescue the heroine. I argue that Gaskell widens the “familial” net in Ruth, where the heroine is reclaimed through a figurative adoption into the Benson clan. 6. Gaskell’s Esther certainly influences Dickens’s depiction of “fallen women” in both David Copperfield and Bleak House. More intriguing, perhaps, are the links between Esther and Inspector Bucket. 7. The Reverend Ralph Wardlaw lists the “love of dress” as the fourth cause of prostitution (108). Helena Michie discusses the relationship between the prostitute and her dress at some length in The Flesh Made Word. 8. I have borrowed the phrase “medico-moral politics” from Frank Mort. In a study influenced by the work of Foucault, Mort discusses the ways in which Victorian discourse on prostitution commingled the religious, the medical, and the political. I am employing the term to refer to the diverse narratives generated by the religious reformers, philanthropists, and social scientists of the period. 9. See Charles Bernheimer’s Figures of Ill Repute for a reading of ParentDuchâtelet’s own “narrative” of female sexuality and “pollution”. 10. See Aina Rubenius for a discussion of Henry Mayhew’s work in relation to Gaskell’s novels. 11. Greg’s utopia of regulation was instituted in several port cities with the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1867, and 1869. I take up the question of the CD Acts as well as Josephine Butler’s campaign against them in Chapter 6. 12. Other significant contemporary accounts of the prostitute include: William Tait’s Magdalenism: an Inquiry into the Extent, Causes and Consequences

252

13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

Notes (1840) and William Logan’s An Exposure from Personal Observation of Female Prostitution in London, Leeds, Rochdale, and Especially Glasgow, with Remarks on the Causes, Extent, Results and Remedy of the Evil (1843). Studies of prostitution proliferate after this point, but for the purposes of this chapter I restrict my focus to the 1840s and 1850s. See Jennifer Uglow’s account of their friendship in her biographical account of Gaskell’s life. Winifred Gérin and Aina Rubenius both focus on Gaskell’s social work in their analyses of Ruth. See Alexander Welsh’s discussion of Dickens’s fascination with the prostitute and its relation to his representation of memory in From Copyright to Copperfield. There is a long history of theological debate over the identity of the Magdalen. As early as 1516, scholars questioned whether or not the “sinner” who washes Christ’s feet with her tears in Luke 7 is actually the Mary Magdalene mentioned by name in John 8. Victorians were also aware of the possible error in conflating these two figures, but iconic representation had so irrevocably linked the two figures that the “Mary Magdalene” of the period was usually represented as the “sinner” of Luke 7. See Anna Jameson, Sacred and Legendary Art I: 363–404. See Rosemarie Bodenheimer, The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction and Hilary Schor, Scheherezade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel. Nina Auerbach reads Ruth as an example of the “fallen woman’s” ascent through “sexlessness” (Woman and the Demon 179–80). Monica Fryckstedt also sees Ruth as a failure because of Ruth’s extreme innocence (164). I find these readings ultimately unconvincing since they rearticulate contemporary reactions to the novel without incorporating the Victorian sense that there was something darker going on in Gaskell’s text. Patsy Stoneman reads against the grain of much Ruth criticism. She suggests that Gaskell reveals Ruth’s sexual desires in a “sub-text of imagery and dreams” (100). While I essentially agree with Stoneman’s reading of the text, I would like to stress the narratological aspects of Gaskell’s system of reformation and the role played by desire within that system. See Rosemarie Bodenheimer for an alternative reading of Ruth as an “asocial” Wordsworthian child of nature (153). Schor stresses the narrativity of Gaskell’s social reform project but argues that the heroine is “sacrificed” by the author because of Gaskell’s “frustration with social change” and with the inability of fiction to enact new narratives (73–4). Schor’s reading poses the representation of Ruth against Wordsworthian “fallen women”. I am interested in putting Gaskell’s text in conversation with another tradition, inaugurated by Wollstonecraft rather than Wordsworth.

5. Rewriting the ‘vile text’ 1. Given my emphasis upon the composition history of Rossetti’s work, I’ve included composition and publication dates whenever possible. The degree

Notes

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

253

of specificity allowed to modern scholars is due to the exhaustive work accomplished by R. W. Crump, editor of The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti. See essays by D. M. R. Bentley, Mary Wilson Carpenter, and Diane D’Amico for other discussions of Rossetti’s efforts at Highgate. Other works of interest include studies by Lona Mosk Packer, Antony Harrison (“Christina Rossetti and the Sage Discourse of High Anglicanism”), and Jan Marsh. Bentley suggests that Rossetti may have actually written Goblin Market while working at Highgate and reads it as a double narrative addressed to both penitents and Sisters. But his argument rests upon the rather doubtful suggestions that Rossetti inaccurately dated the poem and that a poem like Goblin Market would have been read at Highgate. It has long been the received opinion that Rossetti began working at Highgate in 1860. However, Marsh argues that the author began there as early as August 1859 (221). In Christina Rossetti in Context Harrison fully explores the mutuality of Rossetti’s position as both a devout Anglican and a Pre-Raphaelite by tracing the PRB’s interest in the “sacramental aesthetic” (29). Due to the well-known vicissitudes of Dante Gabriel’s publishing history “Jenny” was begun in 1848, rewritten in 1858, but not published until 1870. I was unable to secure an image of this drawing. I first encountered it in Alastair Grieve’s The Art of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (5). It can also be found in Virginia Surtees’s The Paintings and Drawings of D. G. Rossetti, A Catalogue Raisonné. Amanda Anderson’s discussion of “Jenny” focuses on the poem’s connections to social reform discourse and its representation of female sexual and linguistic agency. See Kris Lackey for a discussion of the “scholar-john’s” motivation in seeking out Jenny. See the work of Antony Harrison as well as George B. Tennyson’s Victorian Devotional Poetry and Diane D’Amico’s “Eve, Mary, and Magdalene: Christina Rossetti’s Feminine Triptych” for discussions of Rossetti’s Anglicanism. See Janet Galligani Casey’s discussion of Florence Nightingale and her significance to Goblin Market. In this idealization of sisterhood, Rossetti departs from the general tenor of her secular poetry in which sisters are often in competition with one another and therefore reluctant to act together. In “An Apple Gathering” (1857; pub. 1862), for example, other women mock the bereft speaker. In “Cousin Kate” (1859; pub. 1862), an unwed mother “howls in the dust”, castigating both her lover and his new bride, her “cousin” Kate. Significantly, Kate’s betrayal causes the speaker the most pain. Rossetti had used the same end rhyme structure, curl/pearl, in “Divine and Human Pleading”, in which Mary Magdalene remembers her act of penitence: “My tears were more precious / Than my precious pearls; – / My tears that fell upon his Feet / As I wiped Them with my curls” (1: 73–6). Carpenter and Elizabeth Helsinger also discuss Lizzie’s “heroinism”. See Richard Menke’s unique gloss upon this familiar scene (128).

254

Notes

16. Jerome McGann argues that Lizzie is more than a “Eucharistic emblem”: “because Lizzie is primarily a ‘friend’ and a ‘sister’, rather than a ‘savior’, the poem finally takes its stand on more secular grounds” (251).

6. Reaping the Fruits of Resistance 1. See Jan Marsh’s discussion of Rossetti’s position on suffrage in her biography of the author’s life (464–9). 2. See Judith Walkowitz’s Prostitution and Victorian Society for the definitive historical work on the CD Acts. 3. In her chapter on Butler and George Meredith, Hadley is particularly interested in the social reformer’s role in a gendered discursive struggle waged between the “intellectual liberal elite” and the “bourgeoisie” at the end of the century, as each side endeavors to establish their vision of England as dominant (6). 4. See Barbara Green’s “From Visible Flâneuse to Spectacular Suffragette?: The Prison, the Street, and the Sites of Suffrage” for a discussion of late century “visibility politics” (69). 5. In Beyond the Pale, Vron Ware discusses the vexed nature of Butler’s rhetoric in opposition to the extension of the acts to India: “she saw Indian women as being potentially equal to all women in their role as the moral guardians of society, while at the same time being victims of laws and practices from which only their spiritual mothers, British women, could free them” (156). 6. I would suggest that my reading is further supported by Butler’s frequent allusions to the comradeship she enjoyed with her actual sisters, both of whom participated in early reclamation work as well as the later repeal campaign. 7. Like the Reverend and Faith Benson in Gaskell’s Ruth, the Butlers decline to reveal Marion’s “true” story to the visiting minister. 8. Josephine Butler’s father was a passionate abolitionist and she credits her early sense of injustice to his speeches on the horrors of slavery (An Autobiographical Memoir 11). Butler overtly employs rhetoric from the antislavery movement in repeal polemic, frequently referring to the later movement as an “abolitionist” cause. 9. Ray Strachey notes that: “Mrs Butler’s Crusade was one which shocked and outraged public opinion, and by its nature and subject roused up the fiercest opposition; and Mrs Fawcett and many others believed that it would seriously damage the Suffrage cause if the two movements appeared to be too much connected” (Millicent Garrett Fawcett 52). Fawcett only embraced Butler’s cause after public opinion shifted in the wake of W. T. Stead’s sensational reporting about widespread “white slavery” in the Pall Mall Gazette. 10. As Lucy Bland points out in Banishing the Beast, Butler was extremely unhappy with the “repressive” ideological stance taken by the most prominent social purity organizations (98–9). She resigned her membership in the Social Purity Alliance when she determined that the campaign was directed largely against prostitutes rather than the conditions exploiting them (Uglow 158–9).

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11. Nearly all accounts of the genre set 1895 as the endpoint of its dominance. Several critics, including Linda Dowling, Elaine Showalter, and Theresa Mangum have explored the connections between New Woman literature and that of the Decadence movement; all argue that New Woman ideology depends upon a repudiation of the Aesthetes. In The Beth Book, there is a pointed aside directed at Oscar Wilde: “The works of art for art’s sake, and the style for style’s sake, end on the shelf much respected, while their authors end in the asylum, the prison, and the premature grave” (460). 12. As a young girl Beth meets a “Mrs Crome”, her response to this “specimen” of a “pronounced type” resonates with both class disdain and moral judgment: “long afterwards she associated the smell [of onions] with theatres, frivolous talk, and a fair-haired woman smiling fatuously on the brink of perdition” (205). 13. While Mangum has suggested that Grand’s discussion of the CD Acts is still pertinent because of concern over their reimposition in England and the colonies, it is also true that the novel represents the acts as an insignificant threat to women’s autonomy. 14. In Sexual Anarchy, Showalter discusses “Queen George’s” influence upon fin-de-siècle writers, including Sarah Grand (64–6).

Coda to Chapter 6 1. 2.

3.

Ralph Wardle believes the letter to be written to Mary Hays because Hays quotes from it in her “Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft”. Although I have not yet found evidence that Grand had read Wollstonecraft, there are striking similarities between her text and Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman. Like Maria, Beth is a “genius-child”, whose talents are woefully misunderstood in her conventional family (The Beth Book 220). As an adult woman, trapped in an unhappy marriage, she also suffers from some of the same indignities Maria does in her marriage to George Venables. Like Venables, Dr Daniel Maclure, Beth’s husband, opens the heroine’s mail and summarily commandeers her income from a small inheritance. Pennell’s British editor at W. H. Allen, John H. Ingram, made extensive changes to her manuscript before publication; at one point Pennell considered taking legal steps to stop publication of the biography (The Early London Journals of Elizabeth Robins Pennell 62–3). Roberts Brothers, Pennell’s American publishers, released the biography as she had written it. I cite primarily from the American edition, entitled The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft, but note where the texts overlap. The British edition was entitled Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and so I have distinguished between the texts by referring to their titles. Both editions were successful enough to warrant reprints. Roberts Brothers brought out a second edition in 1890 and the Allen edition was republished in 1893 and 1909. Pennell was not the only author who came into conflict with Ingram. According to Pennell’s journals, Helen Zimmern asked Robert Browning to intervene when Ingram attempted to revise her biography of Maria Edgeworth (93–4).

256 4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

Notes Olive Schreiner, rather than Pennell, was initially commissioned for Walter Scott’s edition of the Vindication. I think that we can safely speculate that had Schreiner’s work appeared, the debate over Wollstonecraft’s life would have developed differently. Schreiner never published any of her preface; she insisted that all of the material generated for it eventually appeared as part of Woman and Labour. While it could be argued that “unsexed” also carries connotations of asexuality during the late eighteenth century, it was most often deployed against women identified as particularly sexual. Woolf alludes to Wollstonecraft’s defense of her mother in a comparison to Austen: “If Jane Austen had lain as a child on the landing to prevent her father from thrashing her mother, her soul might have burnt with such a passion against tyranny that all her novels might have been consumed in a cry for justice” (13). Woolf also describes Opie’s portrait in her essay, stressing the subject’s “resolute” and yet “dreamy” visage (14). Wollstonecraft’s late-century biographers underpin their construction of their beautiful and domestic ideal with further narrative emplotting. All of the biographies stress Wollstonecraft’s loyalty to her siblings, her devoted nursing of her dying mother, and her “earnest orthodox piety” (Paul, William Godwin 1: 182). Indeed, Pennell goes so far as to insist that “Religion was as important to her as it was to a Wesley or a Bishop Watts” (The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft 97; Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin 163). In the British edition of the biography, the description is altered in typical fashion to “shame and crime, little less unpleasant that the realism of a Zola” (Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin 161). In an explanatory narrative that weaves together carefully chosen excerpts, Jebb continues to promote Pennell’s reading of the text by suppressing any affinities between Maria and Jemima. She too asserts that “Darnford and [Maria] succeed in escaping from the asylum, Jemima accompanies them” (283).

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Index abolitionist theme Adeline Mowbray, 106, 129–30, 250 in Butler, 208, 214, 254 Acton, William, 12, 170, 179, 180–1, 182, 203–5, 210 Prostitution, 170, 180, 203–5, 210 Adam Bede, 16–18, see also Eliot, George Adeline Mowbray, 11, 94, 105, 106, 111–35, 139, 214, 249, 250 contemporary and current critiques, 107–9 contract theory, 119–20, 125 feminine utopias, 133–5 libertine gaze, 124–5, 116–17, 133 narrative technique, 109, 118–19, 128, 113–24 representation of “free love”, 106–7, 113–24 representation of Savanna, 129–30 response to Godwin’s Political Justice, 113, 114–16, 119 response to Wollstonecraft and Vindication, 109–10, 111, 112, 122–3, 130–5 see also Opie, Amelia Alderson Alderson, Amelia, see Opie, Amelia, see also Father and Daughter, Adeline Mowbray analepse (flashback), 10, 77, 80, see also narratology Anderson, Amanda, 13, 144, 146, 153, 251, 253 Anti-Jacobin Review, 55 Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women, 9, 57, 62, 67, 69–72, 80, 248 response to Vindication, 70–1, 72 rhetorical mode, 69–70 see also Hays, Mary Armstrong, Nancy, 2–3, 5, 10, 18, 244 Auerbach, Nina, 245, 250, 252 Aurora Leigh, 245, see also Barrett Browning, Elizabeth

Austen, Jane, 3, 140, 223, 251, 253 Lady Susan, 251 Mansfield Park, 140 Sense and Sensibility, 251 Awakening Conscience, The, 169 Barton, Mary (Mary Barton), 14, 145–6, 147 Battiscombe, Georgina, 176 Bender, John, 4, 244 Bentley, D. M. R., 196, 253 Bernheimer, Charles, 251 Beth Book, The, 15, 202–3, 222–34, 255 influence of Butler, 223, 224–6, 229 narrative technique, 203, 222, 229, 232–4 “New Woman” of genius, 15, 202–3, 218, 219–23, 230–1 representation of Ideala, 224–5, 229, 230–1, 232 and Romantic texts, 226, 233–4, 255 see also Grand, Sarah Bhaba, Homi, 129 Bland, Lucy, 219, 220, 254 Blind, Mathilde, 15, 236, 237–8, 239–40, 240–1 Bocca Bacciata, 170, see Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Bodenheimer, Rosemarie, 252 Bridge of Sighs, The, 169 Brightwell, Cecilia, 107, 107–8, 111, 249 Brontë, Charlotte, 244 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 199, 245 Burke, Edmund, 34 Burney, Frances, 1–3, 15, 223, 244 Evelina, 1–2, 3, 10–11, 16, 140, 223 The Wanderer, 89 Butler, Josephine, 7, 14–15, 142, 202, 203–19, 220–2, 224–6, 227, 231, 251

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268

Index

Christian basis of work, 208, 215–17 comparisons with Wollstonecraft and Hays, 210–11, 213, 214–15 daughter’s fall, effect on Butler, 212–14 “holy war” representations of Butler, 214–15 matriarchal stance of Butler, 210, 211, 212–14, 219 rhetorical mode, 205, 207–11, 213–14, 218–19 “saintly” transformations, Butler’s belief in, 209–10, 214–16 works: “Appeal to the People of England”, 206, 215, 228; Autobiographical Memoir, An, 208, 209, 216, 254; “Letter to my Countrywomen”, 206–7, 209, 211, 215; “Men, Men, Only Men”, 208; “Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade”, 217, 219; Recollections of George Butler, 211, 212–13, 214, 215, 217; Woman’s Work and Woman’s Culture, 210, 217 Caine, Barbara, 235 Carpenter, Mary Wilson, 179, 253 Casey, Janet Galligani, 253 CD Acts see Contagious Diseases Acts chastity Hays’s views, 71–2, 80 Wollstonecraft’s views, 26–30 Chatman, Seymour, 5, 245 Christian basis Butler’s work, 208, 214–15, 219 Rossetti’s work, 176–9 Wardlaw’s reforms, 149–50 Wollstonecraft’s “natural Christian” view, 65–6 Clarissa, 28, 30, 78, 87–8 class issues, Wrongs of Woman, 23, 39–41, 48–9 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 17, 146, 147 Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, 34, 235

“common” prostitution, 31 in The Beth Book, 224, 228–9 Jemima’s story as example, 45–9 see also prostitution Conger, Syndy McMillen, 25 “contagion” metaphors Hays’s, 81, 83, 84 Rossetti’s, 181 see also “contamination theme” Contagious Diseases (CD) Acts, 14, 15, 179, 180, 202, 203–4 Butler’s views, 203, 205–11, 214–15, 216–19 references in The Beth Book, 15, 224–5, 227–9 “contamination” theme in The Beth Book, 225–7 in Goblin Market, 175 in “Jenny”, 174 see also “contagion” metaphors Critical Review, The, 107, 122, 109 Culler, Jonathan, 5 D’Amico, Diane, 196, 253 David Copperfield, 144, 170, 251, see also Dickens, Charles De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris, 149, see also Parent-Duchâtelet, A. J. B. Desire and Domestic Fiction, 2–3, see also Armstrong, Nancy Dickens, Charles, 136, 144, 164, 170, 179, 245, 251 David Copperfield, 144, 170, 251 Gaskell’s letters to, 153–4 Dobash, Russell P., 139, 251 “domestic woman” narrative, 2–3 Butler’s views, 211–214, 207–8 Grand’s views, 221–2, 225 Hays’s views, 57, 91, 247 Opie’s views, 96, 135 Wollstonecraft’s views, 32, 49–50 Drowned! Drowned!, 12 education Hays’s representation, 71–2, 81 Opie’s representation, 95–6, 112–13 Robinson’s views, 73–5

Index in Ruth, 137, 157 and sexualized heroines, 79–80 Wollstonecraft’s views, 26–30, 79–80 Egg, Augustus, 11, 12, 78 Eliot, George, 16, 17–18, 232–3, 235, 244, 255 “Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft”, 235 Mill on the Floss, The, 244 see also Adam Bede embedded narratives, use of, 77, 137, see also narratology emigration policy, 153–4 Equivocal Beings, 39–40, see also Johnson, Claudia Esther (Mary Barton), 14, 137, 144–9 Evelina, 1–2, 3, 4, 10–11, 16 see also Burney, Frances “fallen women”, 6–7 “demon” figures, 16–17 passive recipients, Victorian “fallen women” as, 11, 12–13, 138, 212–14 primary actors, texts with “fallen women” as, 15–16 proximity to “chaste” women, 1–2, 9, 14–15, 18, 26, 30–2, 51, 67–8, 140, 221 “respectable”–“fallen” women, Hays’s link, 67–8 see also prostitution “fallen women” paintings/ engravings, 4, 11–12, 170–1 “familial” reform model Gaskell’s, 145–6, 154–6, 251 Opie’s, 134–5 Sheppard’s, 184 Father and Daughter, 10, 76, 77–8, 92–105, 106, 127, 128 comparisons with Rossetti’s work, 177 comparisons with Vind . . ., Wrongs . . ., and Victim . . ., 76–80, 94, 95, 96, 100 narrative techniques, 77, 94, 103–4, 105 reclamation in, 99–100, 102–3

269

storytelling theme, 97–8, 101 see also Opie, Amelia Alderson Fawcett, Millicent Garrett, 15, 206, 217–18, 236, 239, 254 and suffrage movement, 237, 240, 241 views of Wollstonecraft’s works, 240, 241, 242 Felski, Rita, 134 Female Advocate, The, 58, 246–7 female desire, see female sexuality female role in social reform in late-century texts, 202–3, 205–19, 221–2 in mid-Victorian texts, 12–14, 140–4, 168–9, 181–3, 198–9 in Romantic texts, 72, 102–3, 112, 131–5 female sexuality Gaskell’s view, 166 Greg’s model, 143 Wollstonecraft’s attitudes towards, 22–5 female solidarity models Butler’s, 205–8, 210–14, 216 Opie’s, 132–5 Rossetti’s, 188–9 Sheppard’s, 184–5 feminism, 1890s, 13, 14–15, 202, 217–18, 219, 237, 241, 252 “feminist counter public sphere”, 134 Ferguson, Moira, 129 Fitzhenry, Agnes (Father and Daughter), 77–8, 92–105 Flint, Kate, 231 Foucault, Michel, 19 Found Drowned, 12, 169 Fuseli, Henry, 55 Gadt, Jennifer Carter, 132 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 14, 18, 96, 105, 136–7, 152–4, 216, 217 influence upon Butler, 211–12 philanthropic activity, 136–7, 152–4 “protective fictions”, 137–38 works: “Lizzie Leigh” 136–7, 153, 251; North and South 136 see also Mary Barton, Ruth

270

Index

Gate of Memory, The, 171, see also Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Gérin, Winifred, 155, 252 Glenmurray, Frederic (Adeline Mowbray), 111, 116, 118–22, 124–5 compared with Godwin, 106 Goblin Market, 8, 14, 169, 177, 178, 181, 183–4, 188–96, 200, 252 composition history, 168, 253 Jeanie’s story, 191–2, 195 “Jenny” compared, 170, 175–6, 190–1, 192, 195–6 Lizzie’s role, 175, 193–5, 254 salvation process, 194–5 see also Rossetti, Christina Godwin, William, 8, 9, 64–5, 78, 80, 100, 108–9, 246 Kegan Paul’s biography, 236, 239 relationship with Opie, 93, 107, 108, 110–11, 248, 249 relationship with Wollstonecraft, 55, 56, 58–62, 76, 239–40 works: Posthumous Works . . ., 60–1, 62 see also Memoirs of the Author of the Rights of Woman, Political Justice Grand, Sarah, 15, 202–3, 221–34 Butler’s influence, 202–3, 221–2 works: Ideala, 230–1, 232; “New Aspect of the Woman Question”, 221–2; see also Beth Book, The Green, Barbara, 254 Greg, William, 12, 142–4, 148, 151–2, 158, 169–70, 180, 251 “Prostitution”, 142–4, 151–2, 158, 170, 173 Gretchen and Mephistopheles in Church, 171, see Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Gubar, Susan, 23, 24, 245 gynecological examinations, 204, 209, 228–9 Hadley, Elaine, 205, 207, 254 Harlot’s Progress engravings, 4–5, 16, 18, 244

“harlot’s progress” narrative, 4–7, 244 and interruptive discourse, 5, 6–7, 75–8 Opie’s representation, 76–8, 93, 96–7, 98, 101, 103, 105 in late-nineteenth-century texts, 14–15, 203, 208–11, 214, 216, 223, 232–34, 240 in Romantic texts, 10–11, 28–31, 66–7, 79, 139–40 in Victorian texts, 11–14, 136–7 Wollstonecraft’s representation, 26–8, 29–31, 46, 48–9, 51–2 see also “fallen women” Harrison, Antony, 253 Hays, Mary, 3, 10–11, 34, 62, 74, 78, 80, 92, 105, 138, 142, 182, 194, 214–15, 233–5 contagion metaphors, 81, 83, 84 “magic circle” image, 91, 247 relationship with Wollstonecraft, 64–6 works: Memoirs of Emma Courtney, The, 248 see also Appeal to the Men of Great Britain on Behalf of Women, “Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft”, Victim of Prejudice, The Heilmann, Ann, 230 Helsinger, Elizabeth, 196 heroine as author in Adeline Mowbray, 125, 132–3 in Beth Book, The, 223–4, 230–1 in Victim of Prejudice, The, 80, 83–4, 91–2 Highgate Hill Home for Fallen Women, 168, 178, 196–7, 253 Hireling Shepherd, The, 169 Hogarth, William, 4–5, 6, 28, 29, 77, 78, 87, 137, 158 Holmes, Richard, 108 Homans, Margaret, 5, 244 Houses of Mercy, see penitentiary system Hunt, William Holman, 169

Index Imlay, Gilbert, 55, 59, 61, 66–7, 246 Inchbald, Elizabeth, 140, 247 infanticide narrative, 16 in Adam Bede, 17 in Father and Daughter, 98, 248–9 Jameson, Anna, 12, 179, 181–3, 215–16, 217 “Communion of Labor”, 181, 182–3 Sacred and Legendary Art, 216 “Sisters of Charity”, 181–2 Jebb, Camilla, 242, 256 Jemima (Wrongs of Woman), 8, 9, 33, 37–8, 53–4, 60, 67, 86, 96, 213, 234, 247 Hays’s view, 67 life story, 44, 45–9, 247 Pennell’s view, 242–3 relationship with Maria, 39–43 “Jenny”, 170–5, 187, 188, 190, 253 Goblin Market compared, 170, 174, 175, 190–1, 192, 195–6 see also Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Johnson, Claudia, 9, 94, 109 views on Opie, 93–4, 109 views on Wollstonecraft, 39–40, 48, 56–7, 245 Kaplan, Cora, 23, 24, 25, 39–40 Kelly, Gary, 108, 246, 249 Krandis, Rita, 218, 220 Ladies National Association, 205–6, 225 “Lady of Shalott”, 231, 232 Landes, Joan B., 23 Lanser, Susan Snaider, 245 Lecky, William, 12 Lectures on Female Prostitution, 142, 149–50, see also Wardlaw, Ralph “legal” prostitution, 31 in Adeline Mowbray, 127 in The Beth Book, 15, 224, 228–9 in Wrongs of Woman, 49–51 Letter to the Women of England 9, 58, 62, 72–5, 78, 81, 246 rhetorical mode, 72 role of the imagination, 73–4

271

Lillo, George, 78–9, 84, see also London Merchant, The Lloyd, Helen, 249 Lock hospitals, 203–4 in The Beth Book, 224–5, 226–8 see also penitentiary system Locke, Don, 250 London Merchant, The, 78–9, 247, see also Lillo, George Macaulay, Catherine, 65 MacGregor, Margaret Eliot, 249 Magdalen figure 137, 150, 186–7, 188, 199, 215–16, 252 Pre-Raphaelite examination of, 169–70 in Romantic texts, 101, 113, 127 Rossetti’s view, 177–8, 186 in Ruth, 137, 158–9 Magdalen houses, see penitentiary system magdalen paintings, Rossetti’s, 170–1 Magdalene, Mary, 78, 150, 158–9, 175, 177–8, 215, 252 Magdalen’s Friend, poems in, 184–7 Mahood, Linda, 138 Mangum, Theresa, 221, 227, 231, 255 Maria (Wrongs of Woman), 8, 33, 35–8, 53–4, 60, 132, 213, 234, 242–3 Godwin’s biographical links, 61 life story, 40–1, 43, 49–51 relationship with Darnford, 44, 48, 51–3 relationship with Jemima, 39–43 marriage Godwin’s view, 114–15 Grand’s view, 227–9, 230, 231–2 Hays’s views, 57, 91, 247 Opie’s views, 113–14, 116–20, 122–3, 124–7 Wollstonecraft’s views, 28–9, 32, 34–6, 38–9, 49–51 Marsh, Jan, 196, 253, 254 Mary Barton, 14, 136–7, 144–9, 150, 152 comparisons with Ruth, 136–8, 144, 145, 153, 154, 156, 165, 166–7

272

Index

and Romantic texts, 145, 148 storytelling theme, 137, 145, 146–8, 166–7 see also Gaskell, Elizabeth Mayhew, Henry, 7, 149, 151, 251 medico-moral perspectives, 137, 138, 140, 142–4, 149, 151–2, 158, 251 Mellor, Anne, 245, 246 “Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft”, 62, 64–9 “fallen woman” narrative, 66–7 rhetorical mode, 64, 68–9 see also Hays, Mary Memoirs of the Author of the Rights of Woman, 8–9, 59–62, 64–5, 93, 133, 246 and “backlash”, 11, 55–6, 58, 60–2, 108, 109 comparisons with Adeline Mowbray, 110, 122 editorial choices by Godwin, 8, 61, 62, 76 late-nineteenth-century response, 235 see also Godwin, William Mermin, Dorothy, 194 Michie, Helena, 149, 245, 251 Millais, John Everett, 169 Miller, Jane Aldridge, 231 Miller, Nancy, 244 Millwood (London Merchant), 78–9, 247 modesty Hays’s view, 71 Wollstonecraft’s view of true, 27–8 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis, 79 Monthly Review, The, 107 moral virtue/physical chastity confusion, 6, 10–11, 27, 30 Morgan, Susan, 165 Mort, Frank, 251 motherhood in Butler, 210, 212–14, 219 Adeline Mowbray, 112–13, 123, 124, 132–3, 250 Father and Daughter, 95–6 Hays’s view, 71, 96 Ruth, 138, 159, 162–4 Wrongs of Women, 35, 48, 54

narratology, 4–5, 6–7, 10–11, 13, 76–7, 244 disruptive discourse, Wrongs of Woman as model, 76 embedded narratives, use of, 77, 137 flashback (analepse), 10, 77, 80 flashforward (prolepse), 77 “linear” narratives, 4–5 narrative poetics, 5 prolepse (flashforward), 77 story–discourse distinction, 5 Nead, Lynda, 141, 144 New Woman, 14–15, 219–22, 235–6, 242–3 in The Beth Book, 202–3, 218 see also Beth Book, The New Woman era writers, views of Wollstonecraft’s work, 236–43, 255–6 Nightingale, Florence, 169, 181, 183 Nouvelle Heloise, La, 106, 112, 250 Nyquist, Mary, 52 Opie, Amelia Alderson, 10–11, 75, 78, 80, 92–4, 106–11, 138, 235, 249 political position, 106–8, 109, 249 view of Godwin and Memoirs, 110–11 view of Wollstonecraft, 106, 108–10, 111, 131–2, 248 works: “Dying Daughter to her Mother, A”, 250 see also Adeline Mowbray, Father and Daughter Opie, John, 93, 248 portrait of Wollstonecraft, 238–9, 256 Packer, Lona Mosk, 253 Parent-Duchâtelet, A. J. B., 149, 151–2, 180, 206 Parke, Catherine N., 246 Past and Present, 11, 12, see also Egg, Augustus Pateman, Carole, 120 Paul, C. Kegan, 236, 238, 239, 240, 241, 256

Index penitentiary system, 32, 58, 149, 151–2, 178, 179, 181, 183–4, 202 Gaskell’s view, 153, 154 Houses of Mercy, 196–7 Lock hospitals, 204, 224–5, 226, 228 Magdalen houses, 135, 138–9, 140, 185 see also Lock hospitals Pennell, Elizabeth, 236, 237, 238–40, 255, 256 position on suffrage movement, 241–2 views of Wollstonecraft’s works, 240, 241, 242, 243 works: “Century of Women’s Rights, A”, 241; Life of Mary Wollstonecraft, 237, 239, 240, 242, 256 physical chastity/moral virtue confusion, 6, 10–11, 27, 30 political aspect of Victorian social reform, 141–2, see also reform movements, social reform political influence, Butler’s, 14–15, 216–19 Political Justice, 111, 113, 114–15, 119, 120, 250, see also Godwin, William political position, Opie’s 106–7, 109, 248, 249 “political power” requirement, Hays’s, 70–1 “political” woman, Wollstonecraft’s influence as, 55–6 Polwhele, Richard, 59–60, 62, 237 Unsexed Females, The, 59–60 Poovey, Mary views on Opie, 93, 109 views on Wollstonecraft, 23, 24, 246 Pre-Raphaelite art, influence on Rossetti, 169–75 Prince, Gerald, 245 private/public spheres interrelationship, 10, 23, 24–5, 28–9, 31, 32, 57, 63, 165, 171–2 Prochaska, F. K., 140–1

273

“prostitute” metaphor, Wollstonecraft’s, 26 Prostitution (Acton), 170, 180–1, 203–5, 210 “Prostitution” (Greg), 142–3, 151 prostitution, 7, 12–13, 115 “chaste” women, role in consigning others to prostitution, 32, 139–47, 154–6 economic roots of prostitution, 151–2, 179, 180 “literal” and “literary” compared, 7, 144–6, 160–1 Wollstonecraft’s views, 25–33, 45–6, 48, 55 see also “common prostitution”, “legal prostitution” proto-feminism, 244 “backlash” against, 55–9, 105, 107 and “gender debates”, 5–6, 9–10, 62–4 influence on Victorian writers, 13 treatises, 4, 7, 9, 57–9, 62–75, 244 public/private spheres interrelationship, 10, 23, 24–5, 28–9, 31, 32, 57, 63, 165, 171–2 “pure” women’s role in saving the “fallen”, 12–13, 14, 18 in Adeline Mowbray, 133–5 Butler’s views, 203, 206–8, 209–10, 215–16 in Goblin Market, 14, 175, 188, 192, 193–4 in “Jenny”, 174, 192 Quaker minister role in Adeline Mowbray, 131–2 race stereotyping, Opie’s views 130 Radcliffe, Mary Ann, 58 Rajan, Tilottama, 62, 76, 246 rape of Mary Raymond (Victim of Prejudice), 87–8, 247 Raymond, Mary (Victim of Prejudice), 11, 77, 80–92, 93, 132, 139 reclamation movement, Victorian, 14, 136–7, 138–44, 148–54, 178–87, 205, 211–14, 217

274

Index

Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex, 57–58, see also Wakefield, Priscilla reform movements, 14–15 reformer discourse, “fallen women” as object of, 12–13, 14–15, 138, 149–52, 212–14 refuges for “fallen women”, see penitentiary system Reid, Marion, 12, 141–2, 148 Reiss, Timothy, 23 religious beliefs Hays’s views of Wollstonecraft’s, 65–6 Rossetti’s, 176–9 Wardlaw’s, 149–50 revolutionary principles, Opie’s, 93–4, 106, 248 Richardson, Samuel, 28, 30, 78, 87 see also Clarissa Robinson, Mary, 58, 62, 72–5, 92, 246, 247 see also Letter to the Women of England . . . Romantic period influences, 11, 13, 14, 138 Rossetti, Christina, 8, 14, 18, 96, 136, 168–201, 215, 216, 217, 252–4 Anglican sisterhood, Rossetti’s involvement in, 168–9, 178–9, 253 devotional writings, 176–8, 194, 198, 199–201 experiences at Highgate, 168–9, 196–7, 198, 253 Goblin Market, 188–96 influence of pre-Raphaelite art, 169–70, 175–6 poems other than Goblin Market, 187–8, 197–200 religious beliefs, 176–9, 197–98, 253 social reform context, 168–9, 179–87, 198–9, 201, 202, 254 works: “Amor Amundi”, 193; “Apple Gathering”, 253; “Brandons Both”, 197; “Convent Threshold, The”, 169; “Cousin Kate”, 199, 253;

“Daughter of Eve”, 197; “De Profundis”, 176; “Divine and Human Pleading”, 177, 195, 253; Face of the Deep, The, 194–5, 198, 200; “Fair World Tho’ a Fallen”, 169, 176–7; “From Sunset to Star Rise”, 168, 187, 197; “From the Antique”, 183; “Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children”, 197, 198–9; “Life and Death”, 176; “Light Love”, 186, 187–8, 189, 199; “Lowest Room”, 183; “Margery”, 187, 199–200; “Mary Magdalene”, 177–8, Maude, 169, 178; “Memory”, 197; “Noble Sisters”, 197; “Paradise”, 176; “Sinner’s Own Fault? So it was”, 199, 200; “Sister Maude”, 197; “Three Nuns”, 169; “Triad”, 169; “Under the Rose”, 198–9; “Uphill”, 169; “What good shall my life do me?”, 177; “The World”, 176; “Winter: My Secret”, 197 see also Goblin Market Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 11, 168, 170, 190, 192, 198 see also “Jenny” and magdalen paintings Rossetti, William Michael, 168 Rousseau, J. J., 47, 80, 106, 111, 112, 113, 250 Roxana (in various texts), 79 Ruskin, John, 136 Ruth, 136, 150, 154–67, 170, 172, 191, 204, 211–12, 252, 254 comparisons with Mary Barton, 136–8, 144, 145, 152, 154, 156, 166–7 comparisons with Romantic texts, 154, 157–8, 160, 165, 167, 252 desexualization of sexual transgression, 160–1 disguise, role of, 137, 145, 154–5, 160, 166 narrative technique, 137, 157–8, 164–5

Index Pasley’s influence on, 153–4, 159–60, 164 reception history, 155, 160–1, 211–12 role of Faith Benson, 137, 154–7, 158–9 storytelling theme, 137, 155–7, 161–2, 164 see also Gaskell, Elizabeth St Margaret of Antioch, 215–16, 227 Sand, George, 232–3 Sapiro, Virginia, 24–5, 32, 244 Savanna (Adeline Mowbray), 129–30, 134 Schor, Hilary, 252 Schreiner, Olive, 256 “sexual danger” narratives, 1–3, 10–11 sexuality Godwin and Polwhele’s avoidance, 62 Hays’s views, 66 Wollstonecraft’s attitudes towards, 22–5 sexualized heroines, emergence of, 3–4, 6–8, 10–12, 15, 16, 21–33, 75, 136 association with Wollstonecraft, 8–9, 55–6, 58–9, 62–4 literary sources, 78–9, 80 middle-class audience, 2–3 Shelley family, 236 Sheppard, Emma, 12, 179, 184–5, 206, 215 Showalter, Elaine, 221, 255 sisterhood models Butler’s, 207, 208, 209, 212, 219, 254 Rossetti’s, 188–9, 192, 193–4, 253 Sheppard’s, 184–5 Sisterhoods, Rossetti’s involvement in, 168–9, 178–9 Smith, Charlotte, 244 social contract theory, 120 “social problem” novels, 136 social reform, 13–14, 136, 136–44, 148–54, 216–19 Butler’s, 14–15, 203–19 mid-Victorian, 13–14, 138–44, 148–52, 168, 169, 179–87

275

political aspect of Victorian social reform, 141–2, 216–17 Romantic philanthropy, 102–3 see also reclamation movement social work, effect of expansion, 12–14, 134–5, 136, 138–9, 214–17 Solomon, Abraham, 12 Southey, Robert, 110 Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 244 Staves, Susan, 244, 247, 248, 249 Stebbins, Lucy, 109, 249 Stoneman, Patsy, 163, 252 story–discourse distinction, 5 storytelling themes, 18–19, 78 Adeline Mowbray, 132–3 Father and Daughter, 97–8, 101 Goblin Market, 175, 179, 195–6 Ruth and Mary Barton, 137, 147–8, 155–6, 161–2 Victim of Prejudice, 80, 83–5, 91–2 Wrongs of Woman, 33–8, 41–3, 44, 47 Strachey, Ray, 218, 254 Stutfield, Hugh, 220 suffrage movement, 202, 218–19, 237, 241, 254 Butler as icon, 202–3, 217–18 Todd, Janet, 244 Tomalin, Claire, 107–8 Ty, Eleanor, 90, 109, 246, 247, 248 Uglow, Jennifer, 155, 208, 252, 254 “unsexed’ definition, 237, 256 Unsexed Females, The, 59, see also Polwhele, Richard Van Sant, Ann Jessie, 139 venereal disease, 149, 180, 203–4, 227 Vicinus, Martha, 196 Victim of Prejudice, The, 10–11, 67, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80–92, 93, 118, 127, 247–8 comparisons with Rossetti’s work, 177 comparisons with Wrongs . . . and Father . . ., 76–80, 83–4, 86, 88, 94, 96, 100

276

Index

deviation from “harlot’s progress”, 80, 81, 83–4 representation of Mary’s mother, 83–5 representation of rape, 87–8, 247 see also Hays, Mary Victorian period influences, 12–13, 14, 136–7, 138–44, 148–54 Pre-Raphaelite art, 169–70 Vindication of the Rights of Women, A, 7, 8–9, 21–33, 56, 58, 63, 87, 134–5, 242, 246 “alluring mistress” metaphor, 25–6, 55–6, 113 analogy, Wollstonecraft’s use, 25–6, 30–1 Godwin’s view, 59–60 Hays’s view, 64–6, 69–70, 72, 88 influence on Opie, 83–4, 95, 111, 112, 116, 117 late-nineteenth-century editions, 236, 256 manners–morals distinction, 26–7, 30 reception history, 23–5, 72–3, 74, 235, 240–1 and Wrongs of Woman, 48, 49–50 “virtue–vice” perspectives, 25, 29–30, 62–3, 89, 111–12, 123, 139–40, 146–7, 161 “Vision of Liberty”, 55 vivisection theme in The Beth Book, 228 Wakefield, Priscilla, 57–8 Walkowitz, Judith, 7, 138, 209–10, 219, 254 Waller, Ross Douglas, 161 “wandering woman” image, 77, 94, 98, 117, 244, 247 Wang, Orrin N. C., 25 Wardlaw, Reverend Ralph, 142, 143–4, 148, 149–51, 158, 251 Ware, Vron, 254 Warhol, Robyn, 245 Watts, George Frederick, 11–12, 169 Welsh, Alexander, 252 Whitmore, Clara, 249 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 3, 5, 7, 21–54,

78, 87, 91, 92, 93, 105, 112, 210, 213, 214–15 contemporary critical debate, 23–5 conventional heroines, rejection of, 8–10, 21–3 “dangerous sexual transgressor”, Wollstonecraft viewed as, 56–7, 58, 60 late-nineteenth-century reemergence of work, 15, 235–43, 242–3, 255–6 on the “novel of the passions”, 21–2 Opie’s view, 106, 109–10, 111 portrait by John Opie, 238–9, 256 posthumous reputation and influence, 8–9, 15, 55–75 works: Letters to Imlay, 61, 235, 236, 238, 242; Posthumous Works . . ., 60–1, 62; Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, A, 8, 24, 58, 59, 60, 66, 67, 235, 245–6; see also Vindication of the Rights of Women, A; Wrongs of Woman, The; “Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft”; Memoirs of the Author of the Rights of Woman Woolf, Virginia, 238, 256 Wrongs of Woman, The, 8–9, 10, 21–2, 24, 31, 33–54, 75, 213, 234, 243 Beth Book, The, compared to, 255 comparisons with Adeline Mowbray, 112, 118, 120, 127 comparisons with Victim . . . and Father . . ., 76–80, 83–4, 94, 96 concluding fragments, 53–4, 60, 76 disruptive discourse, Wrongs of Woman as model, 21–2, 34–6, 51–2, 76 Godwin’s biographical links, 60–1 Hays’s response, 67, 70, 81, 83–4 Jemima’s tale, 44, 45–9, 67, 247, 248–9 late-nineteenth-century reception, 242 Maria–Jemima relationship, 36–43 story telling theme, 33–4, 36–8, 41–3, 47–8

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