Mobility and Modernity in Women's Novels, 1850s-1930s: Women Moving Dangerously

Mobility and Modernity in Women’s Novels, 1850s–1930s Also by Wendy Parkins SLOW LIVING (with Geoffrey Craig) FASHION...

Author: Wendy Parkins

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Mobility and Modernity in Women’s Novels, 1850s–1930s

Also by Wendy Parkins SLOW LIVING (with Geoffrey Craig) FASHIONING THE BODY POLITIC: Dress, Gender, Citizenship (editor)

Mobility and Modernity in Women’s Novels, 1850s–1930s Women Moving Dangerously Wendy Parkins

© Wendy Parkins 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion 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, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized 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 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-52542-9 ISBN-10: 0-230-52542-3

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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Parkins, Wendy. Mobility and modernity in women's novels, 1850s–1930s : women moving dangerously / Wendy Parkins. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-52542-9 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-230-52542-3 (alk. paper) 1. English literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. Social mobility in literature. 3. Women authors, English—Political and social views. 4. Civilization, Modern, in literature. 5. Women and literature—Englishspeaking countries—History—19th century. 6. Women and literature— English-speaking countries—History—20th century. I. Title. PR111.P37 2009 823'.8099287—dc22 10 9 18 17

8 7 6 5 4 3 16 15 14 13 12 11

2008029965 2 1 10 09

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents Acknowledgements

vi

1 Modernity, Mobility and Women’s Agency Myths of mobility, myths of modernity Locating modernity: The lady vanishes? The ‘emotional geographies’ of women’s modernity

1 4 8 15

2 Home and Away North and South Adam Bede

21 22 33

3 Travelling Companions Moths Miss Brown

48 49 61

4 The New Woman’s ‘Wheels of Daily Existence’ The Daughters of Danaus Red Pottage

78 80 93

5 Street Politics The Convert Clash

104 106 116

6 Moving Dangerously Cold Comfort Farm To the North

124 125 131

7 Destinations of the Modern Woman Encountering others: Vernon Lee and Virginia Woolf Surprised by joy(riding): May Sinclair The long trip home

144 147 153 158

Notes

162

Bibliography

178

Index

191

v

Acknowledgements Since I first began to think about the relationship between women’s mobility and modernity, a number of people have provided me with various forms of support and assistance for which I am very grateful. Rita Felski, my first doctoral supervisor, changed the way I think about women and modernity and, more recently, gave me constructive feedback on the first section of this book. Rachel Bowlby was a wonderful sounding board for ideas during her visit to the University of Otago. Bill Germano’s workshop on academic publishing was inspiring and rekindled my love for writing. Lyn Tribble was an extremely supportive Head of Department who smoothed my path in a number of ways so that I could more easily complete this project. Leonee Ormond kindly provided an article I had been unable to locate. More generally, my colleagues in the English Department at the University of Otago have made me feel at home here and provided the kind of informal, lively intellectual exchange that seemed to result in more productive research hours alone with the computer. I am also grateful to the English Department postgraduate students for their sociability and sympathy for the dramas of manuscript completion (and their baking!). Thanks, too, to Lisa Marr for research assistance. Finally, I want to acknowledge the love and support of my family – Geoff, Madeleine and Gabriel – who know a thing or two about mobility themselves. An earlier version of the section on North and South in Chapter 2 appeared as ‘Women, Mobility and Modernity in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South’ in Women Studies International Forum, 27 (2004) and is reprinted here in a revised form with the permission of Elsevier. An earlier version of the section on Red Pottage in Chapter 4 appeared as ‘Home and Away: The New Woman and Bourgeois Domesticity in Mary Cholmondeley’s Red Pottage’ in Women: A Cultural Review, 10:1 (1999) and appears here in a revised form with the permission of Taylor and Francis. Earlier versions of Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 appeared, respectively, as ‘Women on the Streets: Gender and Mobility in The Convert and Clash’ in AUMLA, 108 (2007) and ‘Moving Dangerously: Mobility and the Modern Woman’ in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 20:1 (2001) and are reprinted here in substantially revised form with the permission of the editors. vi

1 Modernity, Mobility and Women’s Agency

[T]he law of the land at the present day had deliberately settled that the wife should be absolutely and entirely under the control of the husband, not only in respect of her property, but of her personal movements. For example, a married woman might not ‘gad about’, and if she did her husband was entitled to lock her up; some held that he might beat her … He thought, then, it was clear that votes could not be given to married women consistently with the rules of law as regarded property and the husband’s dominion over the wife’s movements. ( John Burgess Karslake, emphasis added)1 During parliamentary debate over John Stuart Mill’s proposal to extend the vote to unmarried women in 1867, John Burgess Karslake, the member for Colchester, defended his opposition to the bill by referring to the then legal status of wives: it would be inconsistent to enfranchise women when the property and mobility of wives were legally deemed to be under the control of their husbands. In this debate – and much to Mill’s evident frustration – the distinction between married and unmarried women seemed impossible to maintain. To enfranchise women of any status was seen as a precursor to enfranchising married women which opponents viewed with alarm, while it was feared that single women would be disinclined to marry if they had to relinquish the vote in doing so. The significance of Karslake’s objection lies not only in his insistence that women collectively were outside the political domain, but also in his association of women’s immobility with patriarchal control: a woman who could control her own property or vote was a 1

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woman who would – inevitably? – ‘gad about’, leave the confinement of the domestic sphere and elude the authority of her husband. Freedom of movement was implicitly associated with property rights and political entitlements. A woman free to ‘gad about’ would possibly be inclined to take other liberties as well, and this implication was probably not lost on Karslake’s audience, given the tendency of parliamentary debates concerning women’s rights to raise the spectre of an unrestrained female sexuality. For Karslake, a woman with freedom of movement signified a potentially unfettered female agency, which might pose a danger to the stability of social and familial order. In this formulation, women’s location was fixed both spatially (in the home) and temporally (by a legal precedent which ensured historical continuity between past and present). For Mill, by contrast, women – at least potentially – occupied a very different spatio-temporal location: associated with (if not emblematic of) a progressive future, women could no longer be solely confined to the home for the good of all society. Mill’s defence of his proposal, however, also blurred distinctions – in this case, between the new and the old or between the threatening and the familiar. Seeking to reassure his parliamentary colleagues that his proposal for limited female suffrage ‘cannot afflict the most timid alarmist with revolutionary terrors’ (817), Mill acknowledged the ‘strangeness’ of his proposal but continued, ‘Well, Sir, strangeness is a thing that wears off … And as for novelty, we live in a world of novelties’ (819). Furthermore, Mill asserted that ‘a silent domestic revolution’ between men and women had already taken place; for the first time in history, men and women were ‘really each other’s companions’ (821). Mill’s characterisation of modernity as both ever changing and already revolutionised – where ‘mere feeling[s]’ of strangeness or alarm are understandable but unsustainable – is a fitting one with which to begin this study, in which the key concerns are those raised in this exchange between Mill and Karslake: modernity, mobility and the agency and place of women. Examining novels by women from the 1850s to the 1930s, I argue that women’s mobility bears an important relation to questions of women’s agency in a context characterised by major social change in women’s roles and gender identities within a culture undergoing transformation by industrialisation, urbanisation and increasing democratisation. Women fleeing their homes or seeking a new place of connection or opportunity; women retreating to the country or advancing to the city; women travelling by train, plane, car or on foot to be somewhere else: the trope of women’s mobility provided a valuable means to understand and negotiate the nature of modernity

Modernity, Mobility and Women’s Agency 3

and women’s place within it. My choice of novels has been determined by an interest in British modernity in particular: even when the novels include settings outside Britain, such as in Moths, Miss Brown, The Daughters of Danaus and To the North, these locations are often defined against, or explicitly contrasted with, modern experience and daily life in the British context. I begin with novels of the 1850s, a historical moment when one form of mobility – the railway – had become a thoroughly accepted form of transport that could still connote innovation and speed, and seemed to mark a clear demarcation from an earlier social formation such as George Eliot presents in Adam Bede (Bailey 2004: 4–5). I end with two 1930s novels, when newer forms of mobility – the car and the plane – had similarly become part of the novels’ everyday world even as they retained the caché of the modern. Locating women in modernity, however, is not only a matter of attending to setting or place but also to the temporal associations or connotations attributed to women. As Mill’s comments on the nature of his times demonstrated, the present was understood in relation to the new or the strange and juxtaposed against a less-enlightened past. The position of women, for Mill, was a sign of modernity and women’s enfranchisement would be another step in the progress not only of women but also of the modern nation. For the bill’s opponents, however, women’s enfranchisement represented a dangerous modernity linked to revolutionary terror and social disintegration. In focusing on representations of women’s mobility in this period of modernity, I argue that these conflicting ideas about the time as well as the place of women were played out in public discourse including the novel.2 As David Harvey has argued, the question ‘what time are we in?’ has recurred from the mid-nineteenth century onwards as a means of expressing and negotiating the uncertainties and dislocations of historical change (1989: 261). The mobility of women – always associated with processes of social disruption or change in the novels discussed in this study – is bound up with considerations of temporality and the nature of the times they occupy. Aiming for the future or longing for the past, women in the novels I examine may be willing participants in the vanguard of change or may be swept along helplessly in the flux of modern life. Their participation in modernity, however, is always framed – and complicated – by a persistent association between women and tradition, the past or nostalgia, as a result of women’s historical connection with the domestic sphere (Felski 1999–2000; see also Johnson 1996). By focusing on women’s engagement with and experience of forms of mobility as depicted by women novelists, I hope to trace some of the complexities

4


of women’s location in modernity and hence to contribute to the expanding scholarly engagement with the gendering of modernity in this period.

Myths of mobility, myths of modernity ‘We’ve got a slogan: “Move dangerously” – a variant of “Live dangerously”, you see. … [W]hat everyone feels is that life, even travel, is losing its element of uncertainty; we try to supply that.’3 In Elizabeth Bowen’s 1932 novel To the North, Emmeline Summers runs a travel agency that eschews the package tour for more adventurous alternatives. ‘Moving dangerously’, Emmeline believes, is a more appealing option for her clients at a time when modern life has become too complacent and settled. Bowen’s novel charts the contradictions of modernity in terms not dissimilar to Mill’s – as a world of possibility, novelty and change, and a world where novelty soon becomes passé and predictable. If Emmeline’s desire for dangerous mobility proves fatal (her car crash ends the novel), immobility brings its own dangers: her widowed sister-in-law Cecilia, who loves to travel, ultimately settles (in every sense) for an unadventurous second marriage. Bowen’s representation of modernity – precarious for some more than others – prefigures a range of recent scholarship which has sought to rethink and redefine modernity by, for instance, acknowledging multiple, alternate or polycentric modernities (Friedman 2006: 434, Felski 2000, Venn & Featherstone 2006). Informed by this scholarship, I am using the term ‘modernity’ here both descriptively – to designate a historical context characterised by industrial, secular, predominantly urban and increasingly democratic social formations – and in a normative sense, associated with a valuing of progress, liberation, transformation, innovation and acceleration. Not merely the same as ‘the present’, modernity is nonetheless figured in opposition to the past, tradition and the primitive (Punter 2007: 8–9). As Susan Stanford Friedman points out, ‘Modernity and tradition are relational concepts that modernity produces to cut itself off from the past, to distinguish the “now” from the “then”’ (2006: 434; see also Felski 1995: 13–14, Punter 2007: 9). Friedman’s provisional definition of modernity draws attention to the significance of the experiential as much as to the empirical in capturing a sense of significant historical change. Modernity, according to Friedman,


involves a powerful vortex of historical conditions that coalesce to produce sharp ruptures from the past. … The velocity, acceleration, and dynamism of shattering change across a wide spectrum of societal institutions are key components of modernity – change that interweaves the cultural, economic, political, religious, familial, sexual, aesthetic, technological, and so forth, and can move in both utopic and dystopic directions. (2006: 433) In all of the novels discussed here, from North and South to To the North, significant change is experienced and negotiated by women whose movement through their social worlds is variously reluctant, exhilarating, dislocating or liberating but always inevitable. If modernity is a condition of radical change – or at least the impossibility of ‘nonchange’ (Punter 2007: 8) – then stasis, even when retreat seems to be desirable, is not an available option. Friedman’s stress on speed, moreover, reminds us that in modernity some forms and modes of mobility have been qualitatively valued over others. The mobile subjects who best embody the values of ‘the new and the now’ (Friedman 2006: 433) are also those subjects deemed to be most at home in modernity – adapting to its pace by literally moving with the times. The modern subject par excellence – not least in critical discussions of the last twenty years or so – is of course the flâneur. For the perfect flâneur, Baudelaire wrote, ‘it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, … [t]o be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home’ (1863/1972: 399–400).4 The pleasures and ease Baudelaire attributes to mobility, through paradoxically associating it with ‘set[ting] up house’, not only valorises a certain kind of urban experience, but also implicitly overturns the usual understandings of home as fixed, immobile and secure from the vagaries of the outside world. As Rita Felski has argued, the meaning and status of home is usually positioned in opposition to a modernity that ‘celebrates mobility, movement, exile, boundary crossing’ (1999–2000: 23). That such a characterisation of the domestic is also relentlessly gendered has been well-noted by feminist scholars who have examined the conflation of home with women’s bodies.5 By emphasising the significance of Baudelaire for the experiential representation of modernity it is not my intention to preclude other accounts of modernity, notably the Weberian account of rationalisation, bureaucratisation and disenchantment (see Weber 1904/1991).

6


Given the routines of household management and the impact of Taylorisation on domesticity in the twentieth century (see Graham 1999), one might expect that Weber’s account would resonate in narratives of women’s modernity in which the repetitions and monotonies of home life often loomed large. The mobilisation of the concept of boredom for a feminist critique of household duties from the period of New Woman fiction onwards (see Pease 2006), for instance, seems to accord with a Weberian idea of a disenchanted modernity; I look at an example of such a narrative of boredom in Mona Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus in Chapter 4. Even in Caird’s novel, however, the heroine’s desire for mobility as both a symbol of and a means to liberation is bound up with ambitions to experience what modernity has to offer: the diversions and stimulation of city life; opportunities for creative expression and recognition; and expanded networks of social exchange and intimacy. Without mobility – and the sensory, intellectual and creative stimulation it was assumed to provide – there can be no Bildung in The Daughters of Danaus. As is also the case in Vernon Lee’s Miss Brown, the development and education desired (rather than necessarily achieved) by the heroine is a stimulating process of sensory impressions, travel and fleeting social encounters often thought to typify modern metropolitan experience.6 Following Baudelaire’s celebration of mobility, it is not surprising that modernity has been seen as almost synonymous with mobility, such as Lash and Friedman’s claim that ‘modernity is a matter of movement, of flux, of change’ (1992: 1). In his classic study of modernity, All that is Solid Melts into Air, Marshall Berman offered an account of modernity as ‘a state of perpetual becoming’, in which he used the recurring image of the ‘maelstrom’ to capture the constant movement and change modernity brings (1983: 16). Similarly, David Harvey’s (1989) discussion of ‘time-space compression’ stressed the ways new technologies of speed and communication accelerated modern life, bringing the distant closer, and Alan O’Shea has argued that ‘turbulent movement … characterises the condition of modernity’ (1996: 11).7 While these writers have noted the disorientation and turmoil of modern movement, a strong association has also existed between modernity and progress, or purposeful movement towards a better state (more just, more enlightened, more stimulating and more autonomous). In this Enlightenment narrative of modernity, to be modern is to be free to be mobile, to escape confinement, as Elizabeth A. Pritchard has argued in her account of the significance of narratives of mobility for western understandings of liberty (2000: 49).8 In such narratives the freedom of movement is


opposed to the constraints of a feminised household or tradition-bound culture (Pritchard 2000: 51). An alternative view to either the thrills or achievements of modern mobility, however, has stressed the uneven rates of change wrought by processes of modernisation and critiqued the Enlightenment myth of progressive movement. For example, in his critique of Berman, Perry Anderson rejected as simplistic this homogenising account of a modernity defined in terms of constant change and in the process challenged the accompanying notion of a ‘modernist ontology of unlimited selfdevelopment’ (1988: 330). Scholars from a range of perspectives have argued that the movement of modernity was characterised by discontinuities, reversals and unevennesses both in processes of technological and social change and in people’s experience of these processes.9 In these analyses, the focus is not simply on the change and speed associated with modern mobility, but on the temporality of modernity: in their review of the well-known developments in transport and communication in the nineteenth century, May and Thrift conclude that ‘the picture is less of any simple acceleration in the pace of life or experience of spatial “collapse” than of a far more complex restructuring in the nature and experience of time and space reaching through the nineteenth and in to the early decades of the twentieth centuries’ (2001: 10).10 Writers as diverse as Raymond Williams (1973) and Jean Baudrillard (1987) have emphasised the differential temporality of modernity or what Peter Osborne has called ‘the non-contemporaneousness of geographically diverse but chronologically simultaneous times’ (1992: 75). Indeed, as early as the 1930s – and in response to the observed rise of fascism – Ernst Bloch noted the differential temporalities of modernity. In an essay entitled ‘Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics’, Bloch argued that not all people live in the ‘same Now’ (1977: 22). Bloch’s concept of nonsynchronicity – of living ‘out of synch’ with one’s time due to economic stagnation, personal disaffection, regional isolation or a combination of these factors – offers an important early correlative to a view of modernity as an experience of ‘timeless, even and limitless development’ (Ross 1995: 10) and provides a useful term with which to consider the diverse and often problematic ways in which women move through modernity. Not only are the processes of change uneven, but subjects differentiated by class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, occupation or location also experience them unevenly. The nonsynchronicities of modernity, then, mean that the question ‘what time are we in?’ will be answered differently depending on who we are as well as where we are situated.

8


Locating modernity: The lady vanishes? What is it that drags upon us as we move through space? How are different spaces historically formulated as conducive to some subjectivities and not others? (Probyn 2003: 290) Elspeth Probyn’s questions about what impedes or facilitates the movement of certain subjects through different spaces are a reminder that modern mobility depends on a number of historically contingent factors, not least of which is the subject-position of the traveller. Occupying spaces that are familiar or welcoming, or moving easily from place to place, is a matter of feeling ‘in synch’ with one’s surroundings. Typically, however, the most interesting narratives are not necessarily about being in the right place at the right time but rather begin with disruptions or dislocations such as unexpected arrivals or departures. If mobility or travel between contrasting locations has been the stuff of conventional narrative patterns, novels from the nineteenth century onwards effectively deployed these patterns to represent what seemed to be the specific unevennesses of modern life. In particular, as Raymond Williams has argued, the contrasting locations of the country and the city have been an important means of representing modern nonsynchronicities. Writing in the early 1970s, Williams contended that ‘the common image of the country is now an image of the past, and the common image of the city an image of the future’, thus leaving ‘an undefined present’ in which ‘an unresolved division and conflict of impulses’ may be resolved precisely through resort to conventional imagery of space (for example, the innocent countryside, the corrupt/ing city) (1973: 297). In literary studies, any analysis of movement between the locations of the country and the city bears the trace of Williams’s classic study, which recorded his own sense of moving between these sites, ‘look[ing] forward and back, in space and time, knowing and seeking to know this relationship [between the country and the city] as an experience and as a problem’ (1973: 3). In The Country and the City, Williams argued that while modern life was not wholly exemplified by the big city, a key experience of modernity is that of moving between the metropolis and the village, the urban and the rural, and back again. While giving rise to separated modes of literature, the conventionalised representations of the country and the city attest to a ‘connected history’ – the mutual imbrication of the country


and the city that has characterised modern capitalism from the eighteenth century onwards (Williams 1973: 264). I want to consider Williams’s insight – that the movement of modernity cannot be seen simply as a uni-directional movement from the country to the city – in relation to women and modernity. I am not so much interested in the intrepid journeys of historical women travellers, but in movement across more everyday terrains in women’s novels. One way in which this study expands on previous work on women and modernity is that the explored terrain includes non-urban spaces. Representations of the country and the city – and women’s movement between them – are recurring features in the pastoral of Adam Bede, the pastoral-parody of Cold Comfort Farm, the aestheticist novels of Ouida and Vernon Lee, the realism of Gaskell and the New Woman writers, the political realism of The Convert and Clash as well as in the modernism of Elizabeth Bowen. Without wishing to under-estimate the often very different modes, styles and readerships of these novels, I have deliberately chosen divergent texts in order to avoid a simplistic or singular account of women’s mobility or the gendering of modernity. Similarly, by including novels from the Victorian through to the modernist period – and thus resisting the more usual periodisation that divides the two – I hope that a more nuanced consideration of both the continuities and the nonsychronicities of women’s modernity may result. My aim is to show how different spaces are conducive to different subjects at different historical times and, by implication, how women novelists were participating in a dialogue about the nature of modernity through their narrative depiction of women’s changing locations. In the twentieth century, according to Williams, ‘city experience [became] so widespread, and writers, disproportionately, were so deeply involved in it, that there seemed little reality in any other mode of life; all sources of perception seemed to begin and end in the city, and if there was anything beyond it, it was also beyond life’ (1973: 235; see also Highmore 2005: 40). Discussions of women’s modernity – with titles such as Streetwalking the Metropolis and Walking the Victorian Streets – have similarly tended to focus on the city and the opportunities for adventure and danger, pleasure and harm that the metropolis offered to women (Parkins 2001). The increased mobility of women from the latter part of the nineteenth century onwards has seemed, at times, to consist entirely of shopping expeditions and city outings. If we widen the frame to consider the mobility of the female subject beyond the city, however, the picture of women’s modernity becomes more

10


complex and interesting.11 Williams did not consider the gender specificity of modern spatial and temporal experience but his understanding of the representation of modernity in novels as not coterminous with narratives of city life is important for tracking the mobility of the female subject in this study. If representations of movement from the country to the city and back again form part of the complex response to modernity, then attention must also be paid to women’s mobility across and between villages, towns, suburbs and rural landscapes in order to enhance the understanding of a modernity characterised by the ‘intersection of different historical temporalities’ (Anderson 1988: 324). By considering the relationship between the country and the city ‘as an experience and a problem’ – specifically for women in the novels I discuss – I hope to develop Williams’ account of the times and spaces of modernity encountered in literature in new directions. As a by now substantial body of feminist scholarship has shown, historically, women’s relation to modernity has been both tenuous and ambiguous. In her examination of the gender of modernity, Felski emphasised the centrality of the female subject in varying narratives of modernity: For every account of the modern era which emphasises the domination of masculine qualities of rationalisation, productivity, and repression, one can find another text which points – whether approvingly or censoriously – to the feminisation of Western society, as evidenced in the passive, hedonistic, and decentred nature of modern subjectivity. (1995: 4–5) If modern cultural narratives often depict a struggle between rational progress and nostalgic tradition, stories about women may expose the limitations of such a binary account of modernity by showing that women are situated in an ambiguous relation to both (Friedman 2006: 438). In The Gender of Modernity, Felski posed a question that has become something of a rallying call to subsequent feminist scholars: ‘How would our understanding of modernity change if instead of taking male experience as paradigmatic, we were to look instead at texts written primarily by or about women?’ (1995: 10). In isolating mobility as a trope of modern women’s experience I hope to outline one response to this question and follow other recent explorations of women’s modernity in this vein (see, for example, Ardis & Lewis 2003, Parejo Vadillo 2005). Where this book differs from others, however, is in its


attention to feminine mobility beyond the city streets and women’s negotiation with non-metropolitan aspects of modern culture. Women in the novels under discussion in the following pages, moreover, are often seen as embodiments of modernity when they are not in the city: from the New Woman in the suburb to the career woman in a country cottage, heroines are often dislocated from settings where they may seem to belong and are often an unsettling presence for those around them. I would not dispute that urban culture and locations were significant for the representation of modern women’s experience – as a diverse range of feminist scholarship from Wilson (1991) to Conor (2004) has shown. I argue, however, that representations of modern women’s experience risk becoming limited and partial if only the city is considered and that, consequently, the spatio-temporal complexities of modernity may be reduced to a singular account of speed, fragmentation and change. Like modernity, mobility – with its connotations of escape, liberation and adventure – has also been gendered as masculine, not least through its differentiation from the home environment. It is perhaps surprising, then, that romanticising mobility has been as much a temptation for feminists in late modernity as for Baudelairean flâneurs. Recently, a number of feminist scholars have explored the problematic identification of women with home and the assumption that leaving home is ‘a necessary condition of liberation’.12 In the women’s narratives I consider here, a similar association between liberation and leaving home is often present, but so too is a desire for the comfort, security and intimacy that a stable location can provide. The ambivalence with which representations of home are often imbued in the novels under discussion serves as a reminder that the home, too, was a site of modernity for women and that women writers often used representations of home to ‘insist on women as participants in their times’ (Rumbarger 2006: 4) by situating women’s agency within as well as beyond the domestic. To some degree, my attention to women’s mobility in novels from the mid-nineteenth century onwards may seem consistent with Deborah Epstein Nord’s recent emphasis on nineteenth-century women’s narratives as ‘outward bound’ – featuring heroines who crave ‘adventure and escape’ (2007: 3). Nord’s argument for the ‘primacy of anti-domestic impulses’ in nineteenth-century women’s novels, however, strikes me as over-stated: despite conceding that the heroines long for a home in a metaphorical sense, Nord views these novels as primarily ‘antipathetic to the trappings of the domestic’ (2007: 4). In all of the novels I consider – both twentieth-century and Victorian – home as a literal, material place

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of belonging is an explicit concern for heroines, even as they refuse to be house-bound. As Emmeline tells a male friend in Bowen’s To the North, ‘If you were to marry, Julian, your wife would locate you: somewhere would become special, you’d know where you were. But no one could do that for me’ (192). Not seeking to return to the domestic location of women in the past, Emmeline nonetheless laments the personal isolation that she attributes to the mutability of modernity. Nord is correct to identify the limitations of the label ‘domestic fiction’ to describe the concerns and conflicts occupying women’s novels but the complexities of women’s struggles between home and away, past and present, are lost in insisting on the movement away from home as the primary feature of women’s writing in the nineteenth-century.13 Indeed, ambivalence is also evident in representations of women’s mobility which is not always depicted in positive or desirable terms. Mobility may be coerced or involuntary or simply the last resort but even in novels where the heroine’s mobility is not freely chosen – as in Moths or Adam Bede – a woman’s solitary journey takes on a heroic stature, often involves some claim to the right to act on her own behalf and challenges the actions of others consistent with modern understandings of autonomy. Despite the fact that the agency enacted is not unproblematic in itself – perhaps best exemplified in Emmeline’s car crash at the end of To the North – this does not diminish the strength of the association between women’s mobility and agency in these novels but allows for the exploration of what an increased capacity for action might entail. By employing the term ‘agency’, I am inevitably caught up in the ‘problem’ of agency in feminist theory where agency needs to be conceptualised in a way ‘that can accommodate both the power of social constraints and the capacity to act situatedly against them’ (Fraser 1992: 17). Understood as an individual’s capacity to act meaningfully in the world, agency has been much debated by feminist scholars in recent years, due in no small part to the influence of Judith Butler’s emphasis on agency as resignification and her critique of voluntarism (Butler 1990 and 1997).14 In seeking to examine how novelistic representations of mobility metaphorise women’s agency, I am influenced by Lois McNay’s generative concept of agency, which emphasises the ‘capacity to manage actively the often discontinuous, overlapping or conflicting relations of power’ in which the subject is situated (2000: 16). Influenced in turn by Cornelius Castoriadis’ work on the social imaginary, McNay argues for the possibility of a creative dimension of agency, understood as the ability to act in ‘unanticipated or innovative ways which may hinder, reinforce or catalyse social change’ (2000: 5).15 Such


an account of agency seems particularly relevant in understanding transformations within gender relations, taking into account as it does the relation between embodied subjectivity and contexts of structural, institutional and inter-subjective constraints (McNay 2000: 16, 22). If times of social instability generate new opportunities for agency – due to the productive possibilities arising from the dynamic relationship between instituting and instituted meaning – then narrative representations of women’s agency in contexts of social change may provide insight into the possible advances (or reversals) that modernity offered to women. This understanding of agency is both consistent with the account of modernity as non-synchronous and unevenly experienced and also draws attention to the socio-historical specificity of agency. In Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel 1880–1914, Jil Larson has described a pervasive ‘anxiety about agency’ that characterised the transition from the Victorian to the fin-de-siècle period when, in contrast to an earlier Victorian conception of freedom as ‘external’, freedom came to be understood as located in interiority (2001: 36). In New Woman writing, the problem of representing alternatives to the cultural containment of women was therefore complicated by a cultural shift away from a belief in realisable goals in an external world to a realm of inward agency (Larson 2001: 36, 138). Amanda Anderson, however, has also identified an anxiety about agency earlier in the Victorian period in her account of the (gendered) discourse of fallenness in Victorian narratives. Mobility as a metaphor for sexual fallenness, Anderson argues, may attest to a profound cultural anxiety around agency in response to the processes of modernity – such as mechanisation, urbanisation, commodification and theories of social determination – which seemed to undermine or question the agency of the individual subject (1993: 2). The ‘coercive logic’ of narratives that traced the inevitable downward path of the fallen woman therefore demonstrated the ‘attenuated agency’ of the fallen woman in reassuring ways – so that fallenness could be understood ‘in relation to a normative masculine identity seen to possess the capacity for autonomous action, enlightened rationality, and self-control’ (Anderson 1993: 9, 13). If Victorian narratives of the fallen woman reinforced assumptions about rational masculine agency, they also posited a link between freedom of movement and female sexuality that Karslake would have recognised. The dangers represented by the mobile woman, then, encoded various concerns about the possibilities for agency in an unstable, changing world: from fears about the dehumanising impact of technology to the risks of anomie resulting

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from urbanisation. Given the association between a potentially uncontrollable sexual agency and an always-already determined narrative of downward mobility, the link between social and physical mobility was a particularly fraught one for women. The flâneur may lack a fixed destination, but the fallen woman, it seems, can have only one destiny.16 The downward social mobility of the fallen woman is a reminder, then, of the recurrent association between physical mobility and social mobility and the articulation of mobility in both senses with class.17 In the traditional romance narrative, this link between women’s physical and social mobility is often seen in the heroine’s marriage: as the woman moves from her family home to the home of her husband, the possible change of status or class is also signified by the change in her name. In the novels I examine, there are instances of this kind of physical/ social mobility through marriage, but social mobility can be downwards as well as upwards, linked to the loss of patriarchal fortune or position which instigates the heroine’s mobility – as in the examples of North and South’s Margaret Hale or Red Pottage’s Rachel West. Confining my attention to women’s novels in the period 1850s–1930s means that the focus here – with a few exceptions – is primarily on white, middle-class women. Although it is usually the middle-class heroine who is depicted as engaging with the processes of modern change in these novels, access to mobility is often an occasion for the exploration of the agency associated with classed identities. In North and South, for instance, Margaret Hale may have become downwardly mobile in terms of her class status following her father’s resignation from the church but she retains the class attributes and behaviours of gentility, which she believes entitle her to freedom of movement among working-class homes in Milton even as her freedom to move around the city is contested by a range of differently classed observers. In Elizabeth Robins’s The Convert, by contrast, it is upper-class women who feel less at home in spaces not their own and who experience greater constraints on their movement, while working-class women are depicted as freer to move and more willing to embrace the liberatory aspects of modernity offered by the suffragette movement – a freedom also echoed in the breathless mobility of Clash’s working-class heroine in the 1920s, Joan Craig. Class identity may be one form of ‘drag’ that, like a hobble skirt, inhibits or slows movement through space; or it may provide a cover, enabling an easy invisibility in social spaces of familiarity or belonging. If increased physical mobility for women both reflects and enables a greater porosity of class barriers, however, novels such as Red Pottage, The Daughters of Danaus, The Convert and Clash are also attentive to the intransigence


of class divisions and identities despite increasing degrees of cross-class exchange between women. The unevennesses of mobility associated with class, then, sometimes allow the complexities of women’s agency to be depicted in unexpected ways.

The ‘emotional geographies’ of women’s modernity The contrast between the tentative venturing into public space of the upper-middle-class heroine and the energetic confidence of the workngclass suffragette in The Convert suggests that it is not only the mode but also the mood of women’s mobility that is significant. Just as the dejected wanderings of the fallen woman differ from the insouciance attributed to the flâneur, the ‘felt’ dimension of mobility is central – I would argue – to the representation of the experiential aspect of modernity and this is bound up with notions of entitlement, exclusion and participation crucial to any examination of women’s agency. From the latter half of the nineteenth century onwards, women’s writing often reflected the diverse affective experience of modernity. In both fiction and autobiographical texts, women’s expanding opportunities are represented in everything from transport, shopping and fashion to employment, education and politics in terms resonant with the pleasure and excitement fostered by such opportunities (as well as the despair, frustration and anger of course). An expanded domain of action is repeatedly associated with increased mobility – whether gained through wearing less constricting fashion, moving out of the family home, riding a bicycle or street marching – and the feelings derived from such actions figure prominently in the described self-formation of women who aspired to even greater freedoms.18 In many of the novels I discuss, there are ‘set pieces’ of journeys that describe the emotion of motion. The descriptions of both the mode and speed of the travelling undertaken by a woman contributes to the sensory and affective dimension of the journey in ways that warrant further attention. A concern with the representation of the ‘emotional geographies’ of women in the literary texts under consideration will not only provide an opportunity to consider the felt dimension of modernity but also expose some of the contradictions in women’s experience. Here I am drawing on the emerging field of ‘emotional geographies’ that studies ‘how emotional relations shape society and space’ (Anderson & Smith 2001: 9) and is not only attentive to the big emotions – love, hate, fear – but also to what Adam Phillips calls ‘all those less vehement, vaguer, often more subtle feelings and moods that

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much of our lives consist of’ (1993: 71). Such a focus may be especially relevant in tracking the literary representations of the emotional geographies of women’s lives – the spaces they move between or across, the feelings associated with inhabiting or traversing such spaces as well as the relations implied or enacted between bodies in space and in movement. Firstly, however, it is necessary to clarify the meanings of affect and emotion that I am assuming – influenced by recent scholarship focusing on the centrality of affect and emotion in social life (see, for example, Davidson, Bondi & Smith 2005, Ahmed 2004, Thrift 2004). Affect is an embodied state of intensity or sensation that emerges through relational encounter (Conradson & McKay 2007: 170) in contrast to emotions that are the conscious perception and social expression of particular affects.19 Novelistic representations of affective or emotional states, of course, are governed by stylistic and linguistic conventions (such as the convention that strong feelings cannot be adequately expressed in language), as well as the residual influence of Romantic understandings of subjectivity and nature. Nevertheless, by paying attention to the affective and emotional dimension expressed in relation to women’s mobility, I hope to show that women’s investment in processes of historical change involved complex – often ambivalent – negotiations of gendered binaries associated with modernity such as mobility/stasis, speed/slowness, innovation/tradition and autonomy/community. My attention to the experiential dimensions of modern mobility for women is also intended to amend what remains an often unexamined privileging of spectatorship as a mode of urban experience. Sometimes it is overlooked that Baudelaire’s flâneur is described as a passionate spectator, which evokes the intense affective state that accompanies mobility for subjects at home in the present (Conradson & McKay 2007: 169). The visual, with its implication of detached presence, still largely characterises discussions of flânerie and, in the process, a form of mobile, urban spectatorship tends to be represented as the dominant mode of modern life. Notable examples – such as Deborah Epstein Nord’s Walking the Victorian Streets and Deborah Parsons’ Streetwalking the Metropolis – offer persuasive critiques of the (over)usage of the concept of flânerie but still privilege observation when examining women’s urban experience.20 Mapping the discursive shift of the female subject from spectacle to spectator, however, can offer only a partial picture of shifting notions of women’s agency during a period when feminist rhetoric consistently enunciated a desire for greater participation – whether in the fields of work, politics, education, culture or even sport


(see, for example, McCrone 1988). The act of observing, after all, is often something done from the sidelines (or the Ladies’ Gallery) by those unwilling or unable to enter the field of action. The emphasis on spectatorship in accounts of the modern female subject may reflect the continued domination of masculine modes of experience captured in the foundational texts by Baudelaire, Poe, Simmel and Benjamin rather than the tropes and connotations deployed by women writers in this period.21 The women at the centre of this study do not merely want to observe modern life – however exciting and stimulating that may be – they want to participate in it more fully. This desire for participation, I will argue, is often linked to women’s freedom of movement or purposeful mobility, as opposed to aimless wandering or, as the heroine of The Daughters of Danaus puts it, ‘toiling submissively at their eternal treadmill’.22 While I do not intend to set up a simple binary opposition between observation and participation, I want to challenge the tendency to conflate the modern female subject’s agency with urban spectatorship. Instead, by emphasising women’s mobility between and across different locations, I will explore how such movement made new links between different modes of modern experience possible, and how the opportunities for or impediments to women’s agency were articulated by narratives of women ‘moving dangerously’. In Chapter 2, ‘Home and Away’, I examine two novels of the 1850s – Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855) and George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) – which chart in different contexts the possibilities and pitfalls of women’s mobility. Gaskell’s novel not only traces the dislocations of modernity and the inevitability of change but also suggests that mobility can positively enhance social experience, thereby making it possible to bridge social divisions through the opportunities for dialogue provided by new proximities. Adam Bede, by contrast, depicts an earlier time of upheaval and dislocation which offers a more problematic representation of women’s mobility through the differing fates of its two mobile heroines: one whose travels are characterised by selflessness and sympathy, the other whose mobility is a destructive and destabilising force that leads to her expulsion from the hierarchical community. Through the destinies and destinations of the heroines in both novels, however, the question of women’s place within an emerging modern society is explored by two authors who sought to intervene in public discourse that focussed on the nature of their times. Chapter 3, ‘Travelling Companions’, moves away from canonical realist writers to consider women’s mobility in novels of the 1880s by Ouida and Vernon Lee – who were both broadly associated with the

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aestheticist tradition – and to consider mobility on a larger scale across the breadth of Europe.23 In Moths (1880) and Miss Brown (1884), the heroines’ mobility is connected to and indexical of their status as aesthetic commodities; far from symbolising agency, their mobility resembles the circulation of commodities and allows both novels to critique the powerlessness of (some) women within circuits of sexual exchange. While mobility can be both coerced and traumatic in these novels, they also feature journeys in which the heroines defy patriarchal containment and claim a right to self-determination, thereby reinvoking an association between women’s mobility and agency, however short-lived. Moths and Miss Brown, then, chart an ambivalence about the possibilities for women’s agency through mobility in a modern society in which women are still largely defined by patriarchal strictures and hypocrisies. In Chapter 4, the discussion of New Woman fiction may seem an obvious inclusion in a study concerned with women’s place in modernity as well as the link between women’s increased mobility and agency in the 1890s. The question of the cultural agency of middle-class women is central to Mona Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus (1894) and Mary Cholmondeley’s Red Pottage (1899), both of which depict the heroines’ struggles to move away from home and chart the conflict between domesticity and women’s aspirations to public achievement. If both novels are typical examples of this sub-genre in their pessimistic conclusions, they nonetheless offer powerful representations of the emotional lives of heroines passionately committed to expanded lives of creativity. In these novels, the New Woman remains an ambivalent figure: she exists in a liminal space between a state of feminine confinement associated with the past and a (desired) future in which women’s lives are enriched and fulfilled. In Chapter 5, by contrast, women’s claims to inclusion in a progressive, dynamic modernity are arguably achieved through a radical political agency. In Elizabeth Robins’ The Convert (1907) and Ellen Wilkinson’s Clash (1929), the heroines are not only mobile but also mobilised: they participate in the suffragette and labour movements respectively. In both novels, women’s claims to contested political space are represented primarily by struggles over the physical spaces of metropolitan London. Although modern women are shown to be at home in the city, they are not confined to urban environments but move across heterogeneous spaces, linking them through their political agency in order to demonstrate the radical potential of women’s modern mobility. From upper-class house parties to northern mining villages, the social spaces occupied by the heroines of these novels become newly politicised through their presence, since


they are seen as harbingers of a radical, sometimes threatening, future. While shifting generically between documentary social realism and romantic melodrama, both novels also use these shifts to signal the ‘problem’ of women’s location in terms of plot possibilities, which are resolved by leaving both heroines free to keep moving towards the (political) future they desire. Chapter 6 is in many ways the culmination of the themes and ideas traced in the preceding chapters. Focusing on two novels of the early 1930s, ‘Moving Dangerously’ considers how the nonsynchronicities of modern women’s lives are conveyed in very different modes. By juxtaposing the modernism of Bowen’s To the North (1932) with Stella Gibbons’s pastoral-parody Cold Comfort Farm (1932), my aim is to show how different narrative modes offered different resolutions to the problem of women’s place in modernity by looking either to a perilous future or to a reassuring past. In both novels there is a strong association between women and the trappings of modernity – travel, fashion, career, and financial independence – even as the cultural linkages between women and the past, tradition and the home are also acknowledged. The question ‘what time are we in?’ seems particularly pertinent in Bowen’s and Gibbons’ novels, which variously engage with the instabilities of modern subjectivity – as inflected by gender, class and location. In both novels, the present as a ‘problem’ is negotiated by and through the heroine whose mobility represents an attempt to reconcile various nonsynchronicities. In the concluding chapter, I then briefly consider the mobility of several women authors in a digression – or detour – on the pleasures or otherwise that the motor car offered to women in the early twentieth century. Pritchard has rightly warned that ‘we ought not universalise our particular stories of mobility, nor overlook who is constricted by our mobility, and we must beware of romanticising dislocation’ (2000: 62). The motoring experiences of Vernon Lee, Virginia Woolf and May Sinclair are clearly accounts of privileged mobility – if a privilege not lost on these writers. The motoring ‘adventures’ of these women, however, not only describe the affective experience of driving but are also optimistic about the possibilities that the car presented for new articulations of social experience through new proximities. In marked contrast to Georg Simmel’s account of the modern adventurer as an atomistic figure ‘who lives in the present’ (1911/1997: 223), the adventures that these women describe can be means of re-connecting past and present or can offer ethical potential for connecting with others. If mobility and dislocation is romanticised in some of the novels I discuss,

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women’s mobility is never free from risk, and sometimes may be a desperate escape from home or an equally desperate desire to find a safe space. Beginning with the 1850s, when the pastoral was already a nostalgic dream for modern authors and their readers, and ending with novels of the early 1930s in which women move more freely if selfconsciously between the country and the city, this book considers what it might mean for women to feel at home in modernity, to construct a sense of belonging amid change and displacement.

2 Home and Away

The two novels discussed in this chapter present very different accounts of ‘women moving dangerously’. Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855), usually considered as an industrial novel, represents the diverse cultural experience of modernity across a range of sites through the focalisation of the heroine Margaret Hale and her movement from south to north, country to city, and back. Margaret’s mobility is both the cause of painful upheaval and a stimulating opportunity to live otherwise. Through the central figure of Margaret, moreover, modern mobility is gendered in a way which – while recuperated by the ending in which she will presumably be located as a wife/mother – also suggests wider possibilities for women, beyond the domestic sphere. In George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), women’s mobility is represented through two central characters, Dinah Morris and Hetty Sorrel, whose movements seem to constitute very different understandings of women’s place within modernity. While Dinah’s mobility derives from modern occupations such as Methodist itinerant preaching and factory work, Hetty’s is inextricably connected with her status as a fallen woman. The ‘wandering’ woman literalises sexual transgression and indicates another form of danger associated with female mobility – the danger of moving outside conventionally acceptable life trajectories, especially when linked with active sexuality. Despite the domestication of the heroines that occurs at the end of both Eliot’s and Gaskell’s novel, I will argue that the connotations associated with the fallen woman’s mobility in Victorian literature continues to ‘haunt’ subsequent representations of female mobility through the implied association between greater freedom of movement and other forms of freedom. 21

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North and South Terence Wright has rightly drawn attention to the conjunction in Gaskell’s title: it is not North or South – and thus a choice between rural or urban, past and present – but North and South (1995: 97).1 Juxtaposed and linked in this way, the two different locations, each representing different ways of life and cultural values, set characters in motion towards new possibilities and away from familiarity. All the central characters are implicated in themes of movement, migration, travel and exile, while the heroine, Margaret Hale, travels repeatedly over the course of the narrative.2 The movement in Gaskell’s novel is not uni-directional: Margaret moves from south to north, country to city, seaside to metropolis – and back again; her brother Frederick returns from exile in Spain and then goes back, renouncing his English nationality;3 her cousin Edith goes to Corfu with her husband’s regiment and then returns to England; Mr Bell moves back and forth between Milton and Oxford; and even Margaret’s father Mr Hale leaves his new home in Milton to die in Oxford. It is through this juxtaposition of locations, and the sense of dislocatedness to which it gives rise, that the novel represents the cultural experience of modernity as movement. In North and South, the mobility of the heroine offers a unique perspective from which to narrate the dislocations and possibilities of modernity for women. Margaret Hale is not merely the mediating point of social disruptions and dislocations, she lives these disruptions, represented first and foremost through her mobility: her shifting position raises the problem of the perspective from which the problems of modernity and modern social relations can be resolved. Previous critical discussion of Gaskell’s novel has tended to focus on the middle section of the novel set in the industrial city of Milton (a thinly disguised Manchester) and has emphasised Margaret’s role as mediator in the social unrest in the city (for example, Gallagher 1985: 170; Kestner 1985: 166). She is seen as a kind of still point at the centre of the novel around which events and characters turn. A different reading of North and South may emerge, however, if the mobility of the heroine is foregrounded, allowing the question of Margaret’s agency to be explored in different contexts beyond Milton rather than confining attention to women’s participation in the industrial city. From the opening chapter in North and South, it is clear that not even indolent angels in the house are immune to the compulsions of modern

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mobility: Edith, Margaret’s cousin, is about to depart for Corfu (albeit reluctantly) on her marriage to Captain Lennox: [Edith] would certainly have preferred a good house in Belgravia, to all the picturesqueness of the life which Captain Lennox described at Corfu. The very parts which made Margaret glow as she listened, Edith pretended to shiver and shudder at; … partly because anything of a gipsy or make-shift life was really distasteful to her.4 While the pressures of empire require English women like Edith to set out for foreign shores it is not merely duty which makes women mobile. As the Indian shawls, brought back by Edith’s father and now passed on as a marriage gift from mother to daughter, are displayed and admired it is clear that the domestic locatedness of the women in Belgravia is already positioned in relation to a modern world that impinges on their daily lives, a world in which leisure travel and the distances of empire are, as it were, taken in their stride (see Daly 2002). The references to travel and the commodities of empire in the opening chapters support Edward Said’s contention that novelists like Gaskell ‘accepted a globalised world view and indeed could not … ignore the vast overseas reach of British power’ (1993: 76). Wives and daughters of the middle and upper classes were already implicated in complex processes of mobility, modernity and consumption, especially in relation to empire, unsettling any simple notion of the domestic immurement of Victorian ladies. As the women’s admiration of the shawls indicates, female pleasure is also associated with mobility and the exotic locales of empire. Margaret’s delight both in the Captain’s travel stories and the cashmere prefigures her ability to adapt to the unfamiliar, despite her initial unhappiness on learning of her family’s intended departure from Helstone to Milton. Margaret’s aptitude for re-location will suggest that she is ultimately ‘at home’ in modernity, able to find a place for herself within new locations and newly configured social relations. As discussed in the opening chapter, being at home in modernity can be framed in terms of temporality – ‘what time are we in?’ – as subjects experience altered speeds and synchronicities of daily life in different spaces. In North and South, the present – what characterises it, how subjects should respond to it – is most clearly associated with the modern industrial city; in contrast to the new city of Milton, even metropolitan London seems ‘monotonous’ (329) and ‘used-up’ (163) to Margaret.5 For the city-dweller in Milton, Margaret observes, ‘the present is so living

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and hurrying and close around him’ (302); its constant change is a source of distraction and its accelerated pace demands that its inhabitants adapt and change their daily lives accordingly. The modern city requires subjects who live in the present, according to Mrs Thornton, who expresses the need for the factory-owner to focus on the moment: ‘The time and place in which he lives seem to me to require all his energy and attention. Classics may do very well for men who loiter away their lives in the country or in colleges, but Milton men ought to have their thoughts and powers absorbed in the work of today.’ (113, emphasis added) Mrs Thornton’s advocacy of this approach to life marks her identification with a (masculine) urban subjectivity and a newly energised, industrialised form of work. This relentless concern with the present associated with industrial capitalism, however, in which the masters focus on profits while the workers should be solely concerned with production, is a feature of an instrumentalist modernity that North and South exposes as unsatisfactory for subjects across all classes in the industrial city. As Margaret observes, the masters ‘would like their hands to be merely tall, large children – living in the present moment’ (119, emphasis added). Yet Milton is also represented as the site of an energetic present in terms that distinguish the potential of the new industrial city from the old(er) metropolis. In contrast to the indolence and ostentatious consumption associated with (upper-class) London – antithetical to Margaret’s values and desires – Milton/Manchester points towards the possibility of an urban agency for women that Margaret has never previously encountered (see also Nord 1991: 374 n. 27). Just as different locations represent different values in Gaskell’s novel, so too characters can be divided into those who are able to live in the present and those who cannot find a place there. The question ‘what time are we in?’ is a contentious one in North and South and Margaret participates in many debates about the superior claims of the present over the past or vice versa. In these exchanges, nostalgia emerges as a constituent theme in both the construction and contestation of the discourse of modernity (Felski 1995: 40). What is striking from the outset in North and South, however, is the degree of knowingness which often informs the tone of these conversations about past and present; the pastoral representation of the village of Helstone, for instance, is constructed out of available cultural tropes rather than through any kind of unmediated observation of regional differences (see Elliott 1994: 36). In

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the first chapter when Margaret discusses her village with Henry Lennox (an exemplary modern ‘man about town’), Helstone is depicted in literary pastoral terms, despite Margaret’s disavowals: ‘There is the church and a few houses near it on the green – cottages, rather – with roses growing all over them.’ ‘And flowering all the year round, especially at Christmas – make your picture complete,’ said he. ‘No,’ replied Margaret, somewhat annoyed, ‘I am not making a picture. I am trying to describe Helstone as it really is. You should not have said that.’ ‘I am penitent,’ he answered. ‘Only it really sounded like a village in a tale rather than in real life.’ ‘And so it is,’ replied Margaret eagerly. ‘All the other places in England that I have seen seem so hard and prosaic-looking. … Helstone is like a village in a poem – in one of Tennyson’s poems.’ (12) Despite her intention to convey the reality of Helstone, Margaret quickly resorts to literary allusion to convey her deep attachment to her home. Margaret’s idealisation of the village, however, is influenced significantly by the fact that she has spent long periods of time away from Helstone, since she grew up largely in London while living with her aunt. The meanings of home for Margaret are coloured by her experiences of ‘other places’, which seem ‘so hard and prosaic-looking’. Very early in the novel, then, an idea of home is invoked – as an assured sense of place in the modern world – which the forthcoming dramatic changes will demonstrate is a precarious notion indeed. Lennox misreads Margaret’s nostalgic attachment to Helstone as a sign of her conventional femininity, identifying her with a domestic pastoral and hence outside the processes of modernity. Margaret’s nostalgic idealisation of Helstone, however, articulates a profoundly modern response to the attachments and securities of home, rendered all the more appealing by its distance (the conversation takes place in London). The fact that Margaret does not fit the conventional representation of the domestic bourgeois woman is thus signalled by her exhibition of the symptoms of a disorder associated with change and upheaval – a response more typical of the modern masculine subject. Women were more usually the objects – not the subjects – of nostalgia (Felski 1995: 41). While Margaret feels ‘at home’ at Helstone and is devastated by her father’s proposed move to the industrial north, the course of the novel

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demonstrates Margaret’s adaptability to the changes of modernity – largely through her propensity to interrogate the new social experiences she encounters and her capacity for sympathy with others situated differently from herself. Margaret’s development as a modern subject is contrasted with characters such as her parents and her father’s friend, Mr Bell; their attachment to the past is not merely nostalgic but a refusal to acknowledge or adapt to modernity which also impedes their ability to foster new social relationships in new surroundings (see Wright 1995: 115). After the death of her parents, Margaret returns to visit Helstone with Bell, in a chapter entitled ‘Once and Then’. The village, it transpires, has undergone its own processes of modernisation. The arrival of the new evangelical clergyman, for instance, itself a sign of transition in the established church, instigates changes in housing, education and the (attempted) introduction of temperance in the village (see also Elliott 1994: 36). Bell, however, refuses to recognise such changes as historically specific, but insists they are signs of the mutability of the world and the human condition: ‘It is the first changes among familiar things that make such a mystery of time to the young,’ he tells Margaret, ‘afterwards we lose the sense of the mysterious. I take changes in all I see as a matter of course. The instability of all human things is familiar to me, to you it is new and oppressive’ (388). Like the writer of Ecclesiastes, Bell sees in every change only the eternal verities of age and experience; the fact that such transformations have occurred even in a place as close to nature as Helstone confirms for him that change is an inevitable, organic – rather than historical – process. Bell’s preference for historical continuities is soon challenged, however, through his introduction to country superstitions. Visiting the home of a young girl Margaret used to tutor, Bell at first asserts the superiority of this type of homely education over the parochial school the girl now attends, but on hearing a story from the girl’s mother concerning a country superstition of roasting cats alive, Bell reverses his judgement: ‘Anything rather than have that child brought up in such practical paganism’, he concludes (390). Interestingly, it is the education of a girl outside the home which here represents the benefits of modernisation over timeless custom: the impact of modernity on women’s lives is presented as a wholly positive force in this instance. Margaret’s response to the changes at Helstone are also characterised by ambivalence. At first, she echoes the accepting, elegiac tone of Bell: ‘There was change everywhere … the natural mutations brought by days and months and years, which carry us on imperceptibly from childhood to youth, and thence through manhood to age, whence we

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drop like fruit, fully ripe, into the quiet mother earth’ (394). Margaret then attempts resignation, wishing to escape the temporal processes that threaten to deprive her of all sense of connection and relationship: I am so tired – so tired of being whirled on through all these phases of my life, in which nothing abides by me, no creature, no place; it is like the circle in which the victims of earthly passion eddy continually. I am in the mood in which women of another religion take the veil. I seek heavenly steadfastness in earthly monotony. (400) Margaret’s desire to escape history and loss (history as loss) proves to be only temporary, however, and before leaving Helstone she is able to regain her former nostalgic regard for the village (‘The place was reinvested with the old enchanting atmosphere’, 401). Here, nostalgia is not a sign of a life-threatening disconnection from the modern world but rather an indication that Margaret sees herself as a modern subject who no longer belongs to the pastoral world of her childhood. As a result, Margaret is able to accept change by positioning herself within the flux of modern life: ‘And I, too, change perpetually – now this, now that – now disappointed and peevish because all is not exactly as I had pictured it, and now suddenly discovering that the reality is far more beautiful than I had imagined it’ (401). Margaret’s ‘healthy’ form of nostalgic affection for Helstone enables her to avoid succumbing to a rootless anomie that was feared could be the inevitable response to the dislocations of modernity (Roth 1992: 278). Lack of location – associated with an absence of sympathetic identification in modern life – is countered by Margaret’s new appreciation of her former home, an appreciation at once nostalgic but also ethical: ‘Looking out of myself, and my own painful sense of change, the progress all around me is right and necessary. I must not think so much of how circumstances affect me myself, but how they affect others … ’ (400). Rather than retreating from the challenges of a changing world into a traditional feminine selfabnegation, Margaret’s outward-looking response to traumatic upheavals is privileged as a form of modern subjectivity that balances the claims of past and present without succumbing to ethical dislocation. By contrast, Bell’s death soon after their visit to Helstone underlines his inability to feel at home in the modern present represented by the industrial city. Although born in Milton, Bell can no longer find his place there (‘I do assure you, I often lose my way [there] – aye, among the very piles of warehouses that are built upon my father’s orchard’; 381),

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and he has a low opinion of his townsmen’s obsession with modernity: ‘As for sitting still, and learning from the past, or shaping out the future by faithful work done in a prophetic spirit – Why! Pooh! I don’t believe there’s a man in Milton who knows how to sit still; and it is a great art’ (330–1). Margaret replies: ‘Milton people, I suspect, think Oxford men don’t know how to move’ (331). The associations here between immobility/tradition and mobility/modernity seem to represent irreconcilable oppositions, but Margaret suggests the solution is the right kind of mobility: if the two groups – Milton people and Oxford men – mixed more, she says, it ‘would be a very good thing’ (331). By proposing a dialogue between differently located subjects as a possible solution to changes in traditional patterns of sociality, Margaret implies that fixed adherence to place limits both sympathy and imagination. The exploration of different aspects of modernity in North and South is never simply descriptive (what is modernity like?) but ethical (what is modernity like for whom? how should subjects respond to modernity?). Part of an ethical response to modernity, North and South suggests, is to recognise that one is situated within processes of change, to recognise oneself as a historical subject, as Margaret does; to deny this – as, to some extent, does Mr Bell – is to refuse a sense of connection or engagement with other subjects affected by change. In a novel concerned with transformation, the heroine represents the modern woman’s capacity to face and adapt to change through first acknowledging her own shifting location (Schor 1992: 124–6). It is fitting, then, that Margaret is the recipient of an inheritance from Mr Bell which gives her an increased scope for agency in the modern world by benefiting from her ties with the past. While the processes of movement and change in North and South are often painful or disruptive, these are not the only experiences of mobility traced in the novel. An increased mobility associated with leisure, for instance, is also represented in ways that have not always been sufficiently acknowledged. Seaside travel recurs in the novel and was itself a modern phenomenon, as traced by Alain Corbin (1994: 70). The first seaside trip is proposed by Margaret for the sake of her mother’s health. By the end of the 1780s a pattern of seaside holiday-making had begun to develop in England and by the 1840s the railways had spread to the coast, making day trips possible from the cities for all who could afford the fare (Corbin 1994: 257, 72, 278; Urry 1990: 21; Walton 1981: 249). Coastal resorts in fact grew faster than manufacturing towns in the first half of the nineteenth century (Urry 1990: 18). City and seaside became newly linked not only by transport networks but

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also by the cultural perception that the adverse effects of city life required – and could be assuaged by – seaside leisure pursuits. Margaret’s plan to take her mother ‘to get a breath of sea air to set her up for the winter’ (51), then, was in keeping both with medical opinion of the time and with a developing pattern of leisure travel (Corbin 1994: 69–73, 87). It is, further, a sign of the precarious class status of the Hales that even as they prepare to move to Milton, where Mr Hale believes living will be more economical in their straitened circumstances, they maintain the signifiers of gentility such as an invalid’s seaside holiday at Heston – a distance of thirty miles from Milton (51) and probably modelled on the middle-class resort town of Southport, approximately the same distance from Manchester (Urry 1990: 23; see also Corbin 1994: 278). Although Margaret intends the visit to ease her mother’s transition to the north, she sees signs of ‘northern-ness’ – and, by implication, industrial capitalism – everywhere in Heston: ‘The country carts had more iron, and less wood and leather about the horse-gear; the people in the streets, although on pleasure bent, had yet a busy mind. The colours looked grayer – more enduring, not so gay and pretty’ (59). Nevertheless, the pleasures and distractions of the seaside produce a series of impressionistic sensations for Margaret, in a passage evocative of later modernist texts that record the fleeting sensory experiences of the observing subject: the unusual scenes moving before her like pictures, which she cared not in her laziness to have fully explained before they passed away … the long misty sea-line touching the tender-coloured sky; the white sail of a distant boat turning silver in some pale sunbeam: – it seemed as if she could dream her life away in such luxury of pensiveness, in which she made her present all in all, from not daring to think of the past, or wishing to contemplate the future. (59–60) Margaret’s observations bring to mind the aesthetic experience and chance encounters of Baudelaire’s flâneur (1863/1972: 399–400), but such freedom from the constraints of traditional social relationships is for the middle-class daughter only a temporary respite from duty and frugality. Only certain kinds of subjects, North and South implies, have the freedom to live for the moment, to disregard ties of affection or obligation, to delight in ‘the transient, the fleeting, the contingent’ of

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modernity (Baudelaire 1863/1972: 403). Bessy Higgins, of course, cannot attain even this temporary respite and can only dream of the countryside from a Milton slum (100). Later in the novel, when the death of her parents and the inheritance from Mr Bell have given her a greater independence, Margaret returns to the seaside. Instead of the trip to Cadiz she had hoped for, Margaret settles for Cromer: the Norfolk coast in autumn could supply the ‘bodily strengthening and bracing as well as rest’ she needs (414). This visit to the coast reflects the Romantic as well as the medical discourse of the seaside where coastal leisure activities were not simply diversionary or therapeutic, but an opportunity to seek greater self-knowledge through the contemplation of nature (Corbin 1994: 163–4): [Margaret] used to sit long hours upon the beach, gazing intently on the waves as they chafed with perpetual motion against the pebbly shore, – or she looked out upon the distant heave, and sparkle against the sky, and heard, without being conscious of hearing, the eternal psalm, which went up continually. She was soothed, without knowing how or why. Listlessly she sat there, on the ground, her hands clasped round her knees, while her aunt Shaw did small shoppings, and Edith and Captain Lennox rode far and wide on shore and inland. The nurses, sauntering on with their charges, would pass and repass her, and wonder in whispers what she could find to look at so long, day after day. (414–5) Margaret’s seaside (pre)occupation is distinguished from the leisured shopping and horse-riding of her companions. For once, Margaret seems to be positioned outside modernity – in contrast to her companions – and yet her activity is inflected by an aesthetic discourse, which is itself a response to and critique of modernity. As Lisa Tickner has argued, for the Romantic subject the beach ‘is charged with a distinctly modern (and privileged) kind of self-awareness’ (1999: 72) and it is here that Margaret seeks both to historicise her past experience and determine her future occupation: ‘But all this time for thought enabled Margaret to put events in their right places, as to origin and significance, both as regarded her past life and her future’ (415). Throughout the novel, Margaret’s agency has been constrained by the expectations of a classed femininity, whether chafing at the constraints placed on her activity in London or burdened by excessive family responsibilities in

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Milton. At Cromer, Margaret considers how her newly acquired independence may be the means of further life changes: When they returned to town, Margaret fulfilled one of her seaside resolves, and took her life into her own hands. Before they went to Cromer, she had been … docile to her aunt’s laws. … But she had learnt, in those solemn hours of thought, that she herself must one day answer for her own life, and what she had done with it; and she tried to settle that most difficult problem for women, how much was to be utterly merged in obedience to authority, and how much might be set apart for freedom in working. (416) Margaret’s desire – and her dilemma – is how to become a modern, selfgoverning subject which centres on her desire for action and occupation (see Bodenheimer 1988: 64). Back in London, Margaret announces that she ‘must make herself some [duties]’ (417) and it is implied that she takes on a role as philanthropist or slum visitor, an emerging occupation for middle-class women in the second half of the nineteenth century (Walkowitz 1992: 53–7; see also Chapter 4). Margaret’s newly claimed agency is here signalled by her mobility around London: ‘I can’t think, [said Edith] how my aunt allowed her to get into such rambling habits in Milton! I’m sure I’m always expecting to hear of her having met with something horrible among all those wretched places she pokes herself into. I should never dare to go down some of those streets without a servant. They’re not fit for ladies.’6 (427) While opportunities for an expanded realm of experience may have been developing for middle-class women, they were still not free from the social disapproval arising from nonconformity with traditional roles, and their mobility could still be read as dangerous in various ways. But just as Margaret is not the sexually compromised figure that Thornton misinterprets her Milton mobility to signify, so he is not the successfully self-determining subject he believes himself to be. Margaret does not represent the ‘attenuated agency’ of the fallen woman (Anderson 1993: 13) but rather the agency of the modern female subject who, possessed of both wider social experience and capital, can ultimately ‘save’ Thornton and return to the industrial city as her new home.

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North and South represents modernity as a process in which women participate and considers how women’s location within modernity may offer new possibilities for agency, especially through ethical intervention and dialogue in new settings or between formerly distant subjects. In the novel, modernity is depicted in contrasting terms: the modern city is by turns grand and liberating or alienating and deathly; change is presented variously as organic or historical; the speed of modern life is exciting or sickening; mobility can either broaden or narrow the mind. Through these representations, North and South captures something of what Marshall Berman has famously described as the quintessential ‘modern experience’ in which the promise of ‘adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation’ can simultaneously threaten ‘to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are’ (1983: 15). Despite the novel’s heteronormative ending – in which the heroine’s marriage assures her of a traditional social location as wife and mother – the novel situates women within processes of historical change and suggests other potential roles and activities for women that were newly available in Victorian modernity. I have concentrated here on some of the more peripheral episodes in the novel in order to argue that North and South offers a complex representation of women’s mobility that enables Gaskell to explore both the experiential and the ethical dimensions of modernity. Like the most strident celebrations of modernity, North and South equates stasis with death and presents mobility and change as inevitable in modern life. Mobility, moreover, offers new opportunities for proximity and connection, as Margaret’s suggestion for the mixing of Milton and Oxford makes explicit and as her eventual marriage to Thornton will symbolise. Both Margaret and Thornton seek to reconcile past and present and thus emerge at the novel’s conclusion not only as suitable life-partners, but also as positive representations of modern subjects.7 As Williams has argued, novels like North and South explore the ‘tension of an increasingly intricate and interlocking society: not only the changes of urbanism and industrialism but the new social mobility and the ideas and education of an extended culture’ (1973: 253). In such a context, it becomes harder to maintain the cohesion of subjectivity (Gallagher 1985: 171). At the same time, the novel also values locatedness and connection – including connection with the past and values associated with home as a place of intimacy, comfort and belonging. It is through the novel’s exploration of meanings of home and its deployment of a discourse of nostalgia that North and South seeks to find a solution to how to be at home – bodily, emotionally and ethically – in a modernity

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characterised by a mobility which can be the means of bringing people together as well as alienating them from each other.

Adam Bede At first glance, it may seem incongruous to consider the pastoral Adam Bede alongside North and South, given the latter’s emphasis on a modern England characterised by change and the industrial city. Although both were written in the 1850s, these novels seem to have derived from very different impulses, which is reflected in their central locations in rural and urban life respectively. Adam Bede, however, no less than North and South, posits a relation between women’s mobility and the processes of modernity that is both mutually imbricated and problematic. As Gillian Beer has observed of Eliot’s first novel, the representation of the organic community with its fixed social relations and natural temporal order is pried apart by a narrative that ‘all[ies] itself with movement and suffering and change, even while it celebrates and records recurrence, endurance and restoration’ (1986: 69). Crucial to the rupturing processes of change in the novel is the mobility of Dinah Morris and Hetty Sorrel, characters who varyingly move across the terrain of the novel, ‘one supported by values which provide her with pathways, one unknowingly and vagrantly’ (Beer 1986: 69). Beer’s distinction between the two women’s mobility draws attention to the ways in which the physical movement of Dinah and Hetty differs both in mode and meaning: Dinah’s mobility is responsive and purposeful, while Hetty’s is desperately self-seeking and increasingly aimless. As will be seen in other novels discussed in later chapters, the different itineraries of the two central female characters reflect their contrasting fates, allowing for the exploration of various trajectories for women in the wake of social and historical change in the nineteenth century. In the process, Eliot, like Gaskell, ‘talks back’ to her own contexts by examining the destinations of women in modernity through ‘interpreting a way of life alien to the experience of her middle-class mid-Victorian readership’ (Corbett 1988: 289). Critical discussion concerning Adam Bede has often centred on questions of the novel’s depiction of and relation to modernity. For F. R. Leavis, the central achievement of Adam Bede was its ‘mellow presentation of rustic life’, which he found ‘convincingly real’ (1948: 36). In sharp contrast, Raymond Williams critiqued Eliot’s depiction of a ‘knowable community’ as ‘deeply inauthentic’ even as he understood it as Eliot’s own historically specific response to shifts in social and economic relationships (1969: 258, 257). More recently, critics have distinguished between

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the novel’s presentation of the pastoral past and its closure, which registers a transition to a new form of social order and thus acknowledges, rather than denies, historical change.8 McDonagh, for instance, argues that in Adam Bede the world of the rural past is outside the ‘time of modernity’, occupying a different temporal order before the onset of ‘regulated and commodified time’ (2001: 43). By the end of the novel, however, Dinah’s reiteration of Lisbeth Bede’s domestic routines has been modified in one significant way: she ‘always’ uses the watch given to her by Arthur Donnithorne.9 Clock-time, associated with factory regimes Dinah would have been familiar with as a former mill-worker, has entered the newly middle-class Bede household – paradoxically – through the landed class more typically associated with pre-modern values. This subtle reminder of the nonsynchronicities within processes of change manages to simultaneously mark a significant historical transition and offer a reassuring vision of its integration into existing forms of rural life (McDonagh 2001: 44–5).10 Debates about the novel’s – and, by implication, Eliot’s – attitude towards modernity not surprisingly often pay particular attention to the personification of ‘old Leisure’ at the close of Chapter 52.11 In describing a rural past characterised by slowness and simplicity in contrast to a contemporary urban culture of speed and flux in all facets of life, this nostalgic idealisation is consistent with other examples of Victorian social criticism that deployed pastoral idyll (David 1987: 313). The evocation of an atemporal world immune to the upheavals of historical change, however, can only take on its elegiac tone because it is premised on this world as lost, gone, unrecoverable. Some have seen this passage’s deliberate foregrounding of the narrator’s modern, urban orientation as a reflexive acknowledgement of the dislocation implicit in nostalgic representations (Coundouriotis 2001: 289). Seen in this latter way, the passage becomes a means of emphasising the discontinuities of past and present, mapped onto spatial distinctions between urban and rural (artmuseums versus country lanes) and modes of transport (steam trains versus canal boats). The voice and location of the narrator seems key to the interpretation of ‘old Leisure’. As Gunn has argued, Adam Bede, in describing a world ‘far from London and middle-class experience’, relies on shared cultural markers which locate both the narrator and the reader squarely in the metropolitan culture of the modern present (1992: 369).12 That the narrator of Adam Bede – like the figure of old Leisure – is gendered masculine is also not without significance when considering the representation of modernity, especially in relation to the novel’s

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depiction of the fallen woman and the crime of infanticide, as the narrator simultaneously appraises Hetty’s charms while maintaining a man-of-the-world tone in describing her disgrace. The infanticide narrative in Adam Bede has recently been discussed by critics as crucial to the novel’s representation of historical change. While the tale of Hetty’s seduction, pregnancy and child-murder is contiguous with a literary and popular tradition of the beautiful outcast preceding Eliot’s novel ( Jones 2004: 305–6), the publication of the novel in 1859 has been seen as significant in the light of the ‘moral panic’ concerning infanticide at mid-century. Infanticide and other forms of infantile neglect and abuse (such as baby-farming) were increasingly understood as simultaneously a result of modernisation (linked to factory shift-work, dislocation of family networks through urbanisation and slum overcrowding) and as a threat to modern civilisation, endangering both social progress and the stability of the nation (McDonagh 2003: 124–8; Matus 1995: 167–8; Berry 2003: 196, 200). Hetty’s narrative thus becomes imbricated in a wider discursive construction of the so-called epidemic of child murder of the late 1850s in metropolitan culture, even as it re-locates the problem to an isolated setting in the temporal past.13 If Hetty’s transportation (like Dinah’s preaching and its curtailment) is located in a specific historical moment, however, the mythic connotations of the wandering outcast derive from a very different sense of time and the past.14 Such conflicting temporalities in Adam Bede suggest how it is possible for the novel to be read variously as an anachronistic, conservative text or as a self-reflexive historical narrative addressing itself to the concerns of the 1850s.15 More crucially, the significations of Hetty’s journeys return us to the salience of mobility for representing and negotiating women’s modernity in the novel. If Hetty and Dinah enunciate some form of desire for self-determination that corresponds with an exemplary modern subject, not only is such a desire coded feminine in Adam Bede but its deflection or denial also seems a necessary condition of the restoration of community at the end of the novel (Marck 2003: 462; Morgan 1985: 273–4). While both Dinah and Hetty are connected through family to the Poysers, they have each come to Hall Farm from outside and their presence in the neighbourhood cannot be taken for granted: Dinah retains a loyalty to her work (both spiritual and industrial) in Snowfield, and Hetty’s obvious discontent and domestic shortcomings (in the eyes of matriarchs such as Mrs Poyser and Lisbeth Bede) raise questions about her capacity to settle within the confines of Hayslope. Both women – in very different ways – set their sights beyond Hall Farm. Emphasising the commonality of the two female characters, however, is not simply a

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perversely resistant reading that ignores the many ways they are constructed as polar opposites in the novel. If both women reject the claims of Hayslope to define and contain them and endeavour to move away from the pastoral community, their mobility cannot be assigned a single, shared meaning, any more than Hetty can convincingly ‘pass’ as Dinah by dressing in her clothes. Despite the fact that the reader is introduced to Dinah in a rather ‘fixed’ tableau while she is preaching on the village green, her mobility is noted and discussed even before she first appears in the novel. The landlord of the Donnithorne Arms informs the travelling stranger that Dinah ‘comes out o’ Stonyshire, pretty nigh thirty miles off’ and he can only explain her itineracy as a form of madness derived from her Methodism (‘I’ve heard that there’s no holding these Methodisses when the maggit’s once got i’ their head: many of ‘em goes stark starin’ mad wi’ their religion’; 18). Dinah herself subsequently claims to be called to mobility, drawing on the biblical precedent of the itineracy of the Apostles in the book of Acts to justify her determination to leave Hayslope and return to Snowfield (35). Despite a sense of divine calling, however, Dinah also admits to conflicted feelings about her mobility, acknowledging the dilemma of the competing claims of duty to family and ministry, as well as her own desires and emotional connections to particular places and people. This conflict is one of the aspects of her character that distinguishes Dinah from Hetty, whose narcissism apparently precludes an authentic emotional connectedness to her family and the community.16 Dinah, ostensibly an independent single woman, is torn between a religious calling that requires mobility and her desire for roots. While this distinction between the two women represents a familiar Eliotian exploration of the claims of community versus the desire for autonomy, in this instance it may also be seen as a response to – and an instance of – specific historical circumstances such as the rise of Wesleyan Methodism and the employment of women in the textile industry. Dinah’s dilemma is a new one: it reflects the possibility of the employment of single working-class women outside rural villages in the industrial cities and towns where dissent appealed strongly to a disaffected working-class and permitted women expanded roles such as prophecy and itinerant preaching. It is Dinah’s employment and the economic autonomy it provides her, therefore, that is the real source of her independence. As the only character with a direct link to industrial modernisation, Dinah at the beginning of the novel ‘seems to exemplify certain promises of individualism and autonomy held out to young working women around the

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time of the beginning of the industrial revolution’ (Sedgwick 1985: 140; see also Homans 1993: 163). However, Dinah’s justification for breaking her ties with Loamshire – whether explaining to her aunt why she does not privilege family ties over all, or declining Seth Bede’s marriage proposal – is her religious vocation, not her employment. Economic independence would clearly not be sufficient grounds to justify Dinah’s disavowal of the domestic. As Sedgwick observes, the ‘seriousness of her vocation justifies [both] her independence from her aunt’s family and her geographical mobility’, but only on the basis that she is the instrument of a higher patriarchal power (1985: 141). Dinah’s Methodism, then, both authorises and undermines her claims to autonomy. Significantly, Seth’s marriage proposal recognises Dinah’s dual work commitment and he offers to ‘make a shift, and fend indoor and out, to give you more liberty – more than you can have now, for you’ve got to get your own living now, and I’m strong enough to work for us both’ (36). The fact that Seth’s offer represents simultaneously a middle-class model of marriage (the husband as sole breadwinner) and an unorthodox arrangement whereby Dinah could continue her religious vocation, complicates the picture of female autonomy and containment in the novel considerably.17 So to what extent can Dinah Morris be seen as a modern woman? As a mill worker and dissenting preacher she embodies occupations that are outside traditional feminine roles (notwithstanding that factory workers could of course be wives and mothers) and her freedom of movement also distinguishes her from the matriarchs of the community. Dinah’s travels may be altruistically motivated, but the image of the young woman roaming the country, as and when she judges it fitting to do so, is nonetheless resonant with a liberatory potential. When Adam first journeys to Snowfield seeking Hetty, he is not surprised to find that Dinah is away from her lodgings preaching (394) and has in fact travelled to Leeds, leaving ‘no exact address’ (426). Such freedom of movement suggests an uncustomary agency, even if it is not framed as entirely self-determined.18 As Beer points out, Dinah’s mobility is always presented in positive terms, as a traversing that makes (new) connections between people and is in marked contrast to others who remain ‘in their place’ (1986: 63). Other characters (such as Adam and Mrs Poyser) are defined by their location and occupation – Dinah by her freedom to move. Dinah’s mobility is derived from her sense of mission and is more complicated than it may at first appear. When challenged by her aunt over her apparent disregard for family ties, Dinah appeals not to a kind

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of Kantian self-determination, but rather to memories of past connections with place and people. She does not figure her mobility as unfettered roaming, but as a response to an ethical bond similar to that which Mrs Poyser advocates, although one not limited to blood relations: ‘I feel that I am called back to those amongst whom my lot was first cast: I feel drawn towards the hills where I used to be blessed in carrying the word of life to the sinful and desolate’ (476–7). Similarly, Dinah describes her preaching vocation in terms akin to a childhood home: ‘that life I have led is like a land I have trodden in blessedness since my childhood’ (511). At the same time, Dinah acknowledges the strong pull of her own emotional attachments to Hayslope: ‘Your wish for me to stay’, she tells Mrs Poyser, ‘is not a call of duty which I refuse to hearken to because it is against my own desires; it is a temptation that I must resist’ (478). While Adam’s marriage proposal – like Seth’s – accommodates Dinah’s vocation (‘you shall go where you like among the people, and teach ‘em’, he seeks to assure her, 510), Adam is conveniently saved from being the means of curtailing Dinah’s freedom of movement by the historical reality of the ban on women preaching enacted by the Methodists in 1803 (see Beer 1986: 71–2). Whatever liberating potential Dinah’s freedom of movement and claims to preaching authority might have implied is therefore revoked; motherhood is presented as the fitting fulfilment for the nurturing compassion that Dinah’s former vocation and independence allowed her to express (Marck 2003: 461). She assents to the preaching ban (and Seth is thus revealed to be the only true dissenter in the novel because he refuses to recognise the legitimacy of such a ban, 538). Dinah’s sense of her calling had always refused any acknowledgement of the role her sex or gender played (see her conversation with Irwine on this point; 92). She is in a sense blind to sexual difference until she believes she is ‘called’ to recognise it in response to Adam’s proposal (507–9). Despite the fact, then, that a character like Dinah Morris – itinerant preacher and mill-worker – only makes sense or even becomes possible in a specific moment of modernity, she never articulates a position of modern agency for women based simply on self-determination and she is easily recuperated within a traditional location and role by the end of the novel. It is Seth whose somewhat anomalous position in the reconstructed family in the final tableau is most aligned with a modern perspective: his desire to break with the Methodists in favour of a more radical group that would ‘put no bonds on Christian liberty’ (538) posits a kind of utopian, almost anarchic vision of individual autonomy and sexual equality outside the norms of community and family.

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Dinah’s Methodism, by contrast, is more easily aligned with a conservative politics of deference, as well as with her advocacy of values such as patience and obedience (Lamb 2002: 275). The link between a quietist form of religion and feminine self-renunciation is a troubling one for any portrayal of women’s agency in Adam Bede. As some critics have observed, Dinah’s self-denial hinders her development into a maturity that would enable intimate relationships on equal terms (rather than the self-renouncing servant role she adopts with those who are suffering, such as the grieving Lisbeth Bede), and her unworldliness detaches her to some extent from those around her, just as Hetty’s narcissistic fantasies do (Carroll 1992: 79–83; Levine 2003: 103). If Dinah’s capacity for self-renunciation must itself be renounced in order to render her ‘a feminine self capable of loving an erotic other’ (Levine 2003: 103), her character could be seen as a critique of a certain form of femininity, a different form of immaturity to that enacted by Hetty, but still inadequate as an ethical mode of life in Eliot’s terms. It is perhaps easy to over-estimate the extent to which Dinah operates as a feminine ideal in Adam Bede, in contrast to the much-maligned Hetty Sorrel, or indeed the various matriarchs like Mrs Poyser, Mrs Bede or Mrs Irwine who each seem to combine an unappealing propensity to speak their mind with an obsessively vicarious relationship with their offspring. Dinah – free-speaking and upwardly mobile – marks a significant development of the role of wife and mother from women like the parasitical Lisbeth Bede; as Dinah Bede she becomes a cross between a Wollstonecraftian model of wife and mother, and the middle-class ideal of womanhood of the Victorian period ( Jones 2004: 314; Homans 1993: 156).19 Like Margaret Hale, Dinah’s enhanced freedom of movement is a means to gain expanded life experience that equips her to become an exemplary modern wife and mother. A woman’s mobility, then, becomes a kind of apprenticeship for marriage and the self-governance it implied is re-deployed as a domestic management that perfectly complements the self-discipline and work ethic of her husband. Dinah’s agency may be domesticated at the end of the novel but Hetty’s death on her journey home is not only the ‘natural’ conclusion for the fallen woman but also represents the ultimate loss of agency that Anderson has argued was a feature of representations of fallenness in the nineteenth century (1993: 2, 13). Hetty’s physical mobility derives from her aspirations to social mobility – achieved on a much more modest scale by Dinah, but in both cases linked to men and marriage – which are explicitly associated with a desire for wealth and finery: a linkage commonly employed in the Victorian period to explain

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fallenness or prostitution without disrupting assumptions about feminine sexual passivity (Valverde 1989: 174–5). The agency of the fallen woman, that is, was displaced from an account of an active sexual desire to a desire to consume commodities. In this way, Hetty’s love of pretty things further alienates her from the reader’s sympathy by implying her interest in Arthur is avariciously rather than romantically motivated. Hetty is not, of course, simply a fallen woman, but an infanticide and sympathetic representations of infanticidal women in popular accounts depended on the denial of the woman’s agency (Jones 2004: 310). Sentimental renderings of seduction and abandonment could portray the woman as victim and as an object of pity despite the death of her child but Adam Bede refuses such an account (see Jones 2004: 310). The role of the narrator here – as a potential seducer rather than a potential victim – ensures a distance from any possibility of a more sympathetic perspective on Hetty. Nevertheless, there is a greater complexity in the representation of Hetty’s journey as a ‘predicament of agency’ (Anderson 1993: 1) than critics have often allowed, even if Hetty’s fate is ultimately pitiless. While Dinah’s journeys are reported through other characters rather than directly narrated, Hetty’s journey to seek Arthur Donnithorne is recounted in some detail. Readers may easily overlook the heroic aspect of Hetty’s journey – and perhaps this is revealing in itself – in the light of Hetty’s fate. First envisaged in a chapter entitled ‘The Hidden Dread’, Hetty’s plan to take control of her own destiny by travelling to Windsor to make a claim on Arthur could be seen as an admirable instance of female independence and attempted intervention in the sexual double-standard of her community.20 The fact that it is not seen in this way is due both to the narration of the journey and the presentation of Hetty leading up to her departure from Hall Farm. Following immediately after another instance of Hetty’s emotional detachment from her family – declining her uncle’s urging for Hetty to visit Dinah to persuade her to return to her aunt – and the primacy of her own self-interest (she ‘felt no longing to see Dinah’ 366), Hetty then realises Mr Poyser’s suggestion would ‘serve as a pretext for going away’ and determines on ‘this scheme’ that would not ‘raise any suspicion’ (366). Hetty’s plan becomes another instance of her duplicity and her hard-heartedness in comparison with the solicitous concerns of Martin Poyser or Adam. When Hetty cries on parting from Adam, the narrator first declares that ‘Hetty’s tears were not for Adam’ – lest the reader be tempted to impute some empathy or

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gratitude on Hetty’s part – before continuing to solemnly note the impact on both parties: But Hetty’s tears were not for Adam – not for the anguish that would come upon him when he found she was gone from him for ever. They were for the misery of her own lot, which took her away from this brave tender man who offered up his whole life to her, and threw her, a poor helpless suppliant, on the man who would think it a misfortune that she was obliged to cling to him. (367) Adam’s ‘anguish’ is presented as equivalent to Hetty’s ‘misery’ but what may seem like narratorial even-handedness, or a familiar Eliotian observation of the pernicious consequences of ill-considered acts beyond their perpetrators, is a kind of balking at the suffering that confronts Hetty. Hetty is both deserted (by Arthur) and deserter (of Adam), and therefore cannot be simply portrayed as a victim. In another narrative, the story of an unmarried pregnant woman undertaking a long solitary journey without male protection, adequate financial resources or even a clear itinerary, would make the suffering of her jilted fiancé pale in comparison. Here, the equivalence of Adam and Hetty’s suffering is stressed, except that one is an innocent sufferer, and the other is complicit in her own fate because of her self-seeking motivation.21 The inability of the narrative voice to represent Hetty’s journey as heroic can be traced back to Eliot’s ethico-political ontology, derived from Spinoza (Gatens 2002: 172). As Moira Gatens has persuasively argued, The movement towards self-understanding of Eliot’s protagonists always involves a growth in their understanding of the vast causal web in which they are situated and which determines, forms and limits their powers of action. On this deeply Spinozistic view, each of Eliot’s characters are ‘free’, and so able to act ethically, precisely to the degree that they have a reflective grasp of their part in relation to the whole. The degree of moral maturity they achieve involves an understanding of their own identities in relation to others, and the power they have to change their individual situations is shown to be a power coextensive with this understanding. (2002: 173, original emphasis) Hetty’s failure to grasp her implicatedness in the lives of others – her ‘tears were not for Adam’ – means that she is not ‘free’ to act ethically.

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Her journey, therefore, cannot be configured as heroic within the terms of the narrative, because it lacks the ethical agency that motivates truly purposeful action. Freedom to act (ethically) requires, paradoxically, acknowledgement of how one’s situated-ness both enables and constrains the power to act. This understanding of (ethical) agency is played out through the phases of Hetty’s journey from hope to despair – as the chapter titles have it – but these emotions are always inflected through Hetty’s limited ethical perspective. Her journey may begin in hope, but only in the sense that she hopes that she may mobilise another’s feeling of connectedness and obligation to her: ‘she must get to Arthur: oh, how she yearned to be again with somebody who would care for her!’ (373). Thwarted by the news of Arthur’s departure with his regiment from Windsor, however, Hetty’s journey turns to despair not only due to her realisation of the full extent of her abandonment by Arthur but also her awareness of the inescapability of her own obligations to another (her unborn child) in a context of total social isolation: ‘instead of having found a refuge she had only reached the borders of a new wilderness where no goal lay before her’ (380). Discussing Hetty’s journey as a ‘thematisation of agency’, Neil Hertz argues that her travels become the antithesis of agency, represented by drifting or wandering (2003: 109). Even her initial purpose of reaching Arthur at Windsor, moreover, could be seen more like an infantile compulsion, a drive for protection, due to the persistent attribution of childlike qualities to Hetty. ‘[E]ntirely ignorant of travelling’ (372) and lacking the ability to plan her itinerary or manage her (meagre) resources, Hetty is represented like a child from a fairy tale (‘O what a large world it was, and what hard work for her to find her way in it!’ 376).22 Lacking a purpose for her return journey, Hetty ‘yearn[s] to be back in her safe home again, cherished and cared for as she had always been’, instead of ‘a runaway whom her friends would not open their door to again’ (381). Her physical removal from the Loamshire community becomes emblematic of her moral/ethical exclusion. In this almost existential wilderness – inextricably obligated to the unborn child co-existent with herself while she is isolated from all other social connectedness – Hetty plans ‘to wander out of sight, and drown herself where her body would never be found’ (385). Even in death, she cannot envisage being reunited with her web of family and friends and sees her body as her own to act upon. To describe Hetty as ‘always’ ‘cherished and cared for’, however, seems a rather partial representation of her life at Hayslope. As in so much of this section of the novel, it is often difficult to judge if this is the voice of the narrator or a rendering of Hetty’s

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perspective in free indirect style. Does this statement represent ethical connection through place and proximity – life at Hall Farm – as equivalent to cherishing? If so, this rendering seems at odds with the lack of affection for Hetty expressed by Mrs Poyser, whose regard for her niece seems of a more proprietary nature. Or is this statement Hetty’s exaggerated memory of her past life coloured by the extreme contrast with her present state of deprivation and desperation? If the latter, the statement becomes merely another instance of Hetty’s inability to comprehend her identity in relation to others and also represents her distance – in every sense – from her connections. The analogy between (purposeful) mobility and agency is further explored in the description of Hetty’s suicidal episodes. After she has formed the plan to take her own life, the reader is told that Hetty begins to ‘walk again, and take cheap rides in carts, and get cheap meals, going on and on without distinct purpose, yet strangely, by some fascination, taking the way she had come, though she was determined not to go back to her own country’ (385). What sounds like a considered purpose (witness her husbanding of resources, both physical and economic) is instead designated as aimless (‘without distinct purpose’) and uncanny, while at the same time grounded in a determination to avoid the obvious destination (home).23 The contradictions between purpose and its lack – an aim and an aimless state – in this sentence are reflected in Hetty’s prevarications over suicide: wandering from the main road to seek a pond in which to drown herself is rendered in strangely passive terms. When she finds what she seeks, ‘it was as if the thing were come in spite of herself, instead of being the object of her search’ (387). The uncertainty of Hetty’s agency here is such that it creates a narrative impasse as she confronts the twin horrors of the achievement of her object (death) and the fate of aimlessness (Hertz 2003: 109–10). Is this purpose or lack of purpose? Can suicide be a willed objective, the ultimate exercise of agency, or is it irredeemably an unethical refusal to engage with the world of others? As Hertz notes, this is too much narrative weight for the character of Hetty to bear (2003: 110), as a representative for our deeply conflicted subjectivity: ‘such is the strange action of our souls, drawing us by a lurking desire towards the very ends we dread’ (391). Over the next couple of pages, Hetty wanders (‘on and on’; 390, 391) and there the narrator leaves her (or ‘abandons’ Hetty, in Williams’ terms; 1973: 173) with a final image of ‘Poor wandering Hetty’ (repeating Dinah’s earlier designation of her cousin), but not without reminding us of the outcast’s ‘hard unloving despairing soul’ (391).24 In

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contrast to Hetty’s ‘narrow heart’, the narrator’s heart magnanimously ‘bleeds for her’, (391) but it is an overtly gendered compassion that both fears being the instigator of suffering like Hetty’s and fails to empathise with the unloved ‘despairing soul’. As will be subsequently disclosed, Hetty’s abandonment of and subsequent return to her baby represent a conflicted and contradictory form of agency, framed as both a desperate act and ‘beyond the exercise of will’ (Matus 1995: 173). As other critics have also noted, Hetty is torn between irresolvable conflicting emotions – for personal survival and support, versus the formation of a nurturing bond with her baby – and is finally immobilised by this conflict as she waits to be found (Berry 2003: 209; Matus 1995: 174). This thwarted desire to return home (which can be seen as a glimmering of acknowledgement of her relationship to others) suggests that Hetty is not without a capacity for relationship and a connection to place but because of her failure – however momentary – to give primacy to the claims of her child she is finally placed beyond reclamation. In contrast to Hetty’s pointless journey that ultimately enacts a tragic purpose – the death of her child – Adam’s journey in search of Hetty is coded in chivalric terms as ‘The Quest’ (the title of Chapter 38). Not only is it purposeful, it is undertaken altruistically and with compassion in the interests of both Hetty and the Poysers – an example of the freedom to act ethically that results from acknowledging the claims of others. It is notable that Hetty is repeatedly the instigator of the mobility of other characters, as Manheimer has observed: ‘She is the occasion for much journeying: Adam and Bartle Massey and Martin Poyser to the court at Stoniton; Mr Irwine back and forth to Stoniton several times; Dinah, to Stoniton and then back to Hayslope; Arthur, desperate, to Stoniton and then off into the army’ (1979: 544). In this way, Hetty disrupts the static nature of life at Hayslope, enlarging the narrative frame to other places and locations, and providing opportunities for others to exercise ethical agency. Adam’s journey, though nobly undertaken, however, is doomed to failure: he does not locate Hetty but returns home to find that she is already in custody at Stoniton. Adam Bede is a character for whom mobility holds no charms; he had earlier tried to uproot himself from family and community and had left home to strike out on his own, but soon returned to acknowledge the primacy of the claims of proximity, settling down to a life of meaningful labour and its associated secure status. Furthermore, Adam is well aware of the dangers of mobility, having previously expressed a belief in the inevitability of a narrative of downward mobility associated with his father’s decline

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into alcoholism: ‘there’s no slipping up hill again, and no standing still when once you’ve begun to slip down’ (50). Mobility for Adam, then, is associated with the evasion of connection and obligation and a decline in agency as evidenced by his father’s lack of self-control and erratic presence in the home. Adam’s attachment to place is firmly linked to his sense of duty, integrity and also his social conservatism. While the narrator hastens to remind us that ‘Adam had the blood of the peasant in his veins, and … since he was in his prime half a century ago, you must expect some of his characteristics to be obsolete’ (163), Adam’s acceptance of the hierarchical social relations of his community, though tested by Arthur Donnithorne’s behaviour, remains intact, and in his later role as manager of the estate’s forests is shown to benefit both the Bedes and the community at large. Such is the firm connection between Adam and place, occupation and the network of social relations in which he is located, that his decision to leave Hayslope in search of Hetty is further enhanced as a noble undertaking because it is disruptive to him and his inclination to remain in place. Travel is a painful displacement for Adam; unlike Hetty who is physically challenged by her journey, Adam is emotionally tested by his distance from home. During the period of Hetty’s incarceration and trial in Stoniton, Adam is almost agoraphobic: he is confined to his room, while his agency is entirely diminished when outside his community and overshadowed by the powerful institution of the law. Irwine’s belief that ‘Movement, with some object before him’ would be beneficial for Adam’s suffering is unfounded (412). For the Poysers, too, mobility represents a painful uprooting, a loss of identity, but one that they see as inevitable due to Hetty’s shame, which will drive them from Hayslope, or so they believe. Adam’s pledge to accompany them again demonstrates his nobility of character, although he believes his trade will enable him to settle elsewhere: ‘A man that’s got a trade at his finger ends is at home everywhere; … We shall all be better in a new country’ (464). Adam’s reluctant – but selfless – mobility is also contrasted with the movements of Arthur Donnithorne, whose freedom of movement due to his wealth and status was an enabling factor in his seduction of Hetty. Believing himself to be a free agent, however, is Arthur’s (not to mention Hetty’s) undoing; not only is he deluded that his actions have no consequences, but as a member of the militia his movements are also not under his own control. Interestingly, the reason Hetty cannot find Arthur at Windsor (in 1800) is because the Loamshire Militia had been called to Ireland (378), where martial law had been imposed two years

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previously.25 On his return to England after his grandfather’s death, Arthur’s belief in his own power and self-sufficiency is undiminished. His journey home is described as an opportunity to imagine his future spread before him like a panorama, just like the scenery he sees outside the carriage window. The repeated references to the panorama (440, 441) – a popular visual attraction from the late eighteenth century onwards in which spectators could enjoy ‘the happy feeling that the world was organised around and by them’ (Comment 1999: 19) – underlines the extent of Arthur’s self-deluding fantasies, both of his own capacities and of the lives of others as simply figures in a landscape – his landscape. If Arthur harbours aristocratic pretensions about his capacity to intervene in a social world newly spread before him, there is nevertheless considerable prevarication about his agency in the narrative. Arthur’s dramatic ‘rescue’ of Hetty from the gallows, for instance, is rendered as a heroic intervention characterised by speed and daring and captured in present-tense narration (‘a horseman cleaving the crowd at full gallop … it is Arthur Donnithorne, carrying in his hand the hard-won release from death’; 462–3). The urgent and purposeful mobility of Arthur in this climactic scene is followed, however, by a marked diminution in his authority and agency, due to his culpability in relation to Hetty’s fate and crime. Like Hetty he is removed from the community, but unlike Hetty his removal is a choice: ‘I’m going into the army,’ Arthur tells Adam, ‘one of my reasons for going away is, that no one else may leave Hayslope – may leave their home on my account’ (467). When he finally returns to Loamshire at the close of the novel, physically weakened from prolonged fever – which could indicate his military service had taken him to a tropical outpost of empire (McDonagh 2003: 135) – Arthur is both ‘altered and yet not altered’ in Adam’s estimation (537), thereby signalling his ability to be restored to the community. The most extreme journey of the novel, however, cannot be represented within its pages: Hetty’s transportation, presumably to New South Wales – the most likely destination for female convicts. The fate implied for Hetty by this destination makes the characterisation of Arthur’s intervention as a ‘rescue’ or reprieve for Hetty questionable and may explain why she ‘drifts outside narratability’, in Gates’ apt phrase (1998: 29; see also Jones 2004: 312). Hetty’s destination both seals her fate and is symbolically equated with the horror of her crime, metonymically linking her with ‘the savage environment of the colonial peripheries [as] the place best suited to her infanticidal nature’

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(McDonagh 2003: 128). The expulsion of the criminal in Adam Bede is a reiteration of the colonising impulse that expels the barbarity of ‘home’, and then projects it onto the colonised other; this is a stark, if unintended, reminder of the costs of rendering England as civilising modernity, emerging organically from traditional rural communities (see Said 1993: 78, Freedgood 2006: 91). Despite having served as a colonising agent in Ireland and elsewhere, Arthur, it appears, is free of the taint of criminality that marks Hetty as irredeemably altered and leaves no place for her in the pastoral conclusion of the novel. Not only is Adam Bede disturbingly complicit with the imperial project of modernity in this way, but Hetty’s exile also provides another example of a punitive re-figuring of female agency. If Hetty dies while on her way back to England, as Dinah’s comment implies (537), the question remains as to how she had accumulated the money necessary to buy her passage home? The only way a female convict could buy a passage home was through prostitution as no other forms of paid work were available to women after they had served their sentence (Zedner 1991: 174–6; Summers 1975: 274; see also Brooker, Stiggant & Widdowson 1986: 77). Prostitution and other forms of sexual exploitation were the common fate of female convicts – subject to sexual predation on the voyage out, as well as in the New South Wales colony where men vastly outnumbered women (Summers 1975: 267–74). The determination implied by Hetty’s attempt to return home, then, registers a kind of indomitability that is far from the childish, dreamy nature of the young woman at Hall Farm. Threatened with starvation, solitary childbirth, execution, transportation and incarceration, Hetty seems to resist attempts to remove her from the story, like a monstrous figure who cannot be defeated until she is summarily dispatched on the final page as the frame tightens around the reconstructed Bede family. Formed and refined by their proximity to Hetty’s ordeal, but ultimately unscathed by it, the family of Adam and Dinah represent – and guarantee – the legitimacy of the community, embodied in a specific locality and concrete historical moment (Said 1993: 92). The curtailment of Dinah’s mobility and independence, and the permanent exile of Hetty, becomes the necessary conditions for the continuity of community. Even though North and South offered a complex representation of modernity as a potentially expanded domain of experience for women, in both novels the resolution of conflicts between residual and emerging forms of social and familial life requires the re-containment of women, despite (or perhaps because of) their narratives of mobility.

3 Travelling Companions

In Augustus Egg’s painting, Travelling Companions (1862), a pair of women travellers, enclosed in the domesticated space of a train compartment, are oblivious to the exotic southern landscape through which they are passing. In the two novels examined in this chapter, by contrast, the heroines who travel across the European landscape are anything but untouched by the changing locations in which they find themselves. Whereas in North and South and Adam Bede, women’s mobility was confined within the borders of England, in Moths and Miss Brown women’s journeys are on a much larger scale, travelling across the breadth of Europe, and represent the shrinking of distance from the perspective of women travellers vulnerable to exploitation by predatory men and women. While experiencing varying degrees of cultural dislocation through their mobility, the heroines are often placed in contexts where they lack a voice to articulate their own place or purpose. The shifting significations of home and movement in these novels, mapped onto the different locations of the heroines – from the rustic isolation of a Tuscan farmhouse to the salons of aesthetic London, or from the hotels of Monte Carlo to the frozen wastes of Poland – present an ambivalent conception of the modern woman’s mobility in the 1880s. Travel can provide a liberating escape from a constraining social environment or mark a nomadic existence lacking the security and connection of a settled life. Unlike Egg’s travelling companions, cocooned from the outside world despite their mobility, the authors of Moths and Miss Brown – Ouida and Vernon Lee – chose to make their own way in the world, as it were. Both authors lived most of their lives outside Britain, especially in Italy, and were no strangers to mobility. Ouida and Lee also both experienced the at-times precarious existence of the expatriate, with pitfalls ranging 48

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from social marginalisation to penury.1 In Moths and Miss Brown, the heroines’ navigation of their respective social worlds is an often isolating process, in part due to their distinctive beauty which singles them out from those around them, even as it makes them a spectacle for public scrutiny. The heroines inhabit worlds of wealth and luxury newly inflected with the practices of modern consumer culture, accelerating cycles of fashion and the commodification of art. In these novels, the heroines’ mobility also reflects the movement of commodities: like objects within market relations of exchange, they too are subject to evaluation and circulation. However highly prized, the woman as aesthetic commodity possesses only limited agency in these novels, as the heroines attempt to negotiate a position that will be secure from the vagaries of the marketplace. By placing women at the centre of the flux of modern life, these two aesthetic novels register a profound ambivalence about the opportunities for agency that increasing mobility offered to women.2

Moths Despite the often anachronistic settings and plots of her novels, Ouida has been pejoratively associated with the ‘modernised’ and the ‘suburban’, while her success has been attributed to ‘the taste and mentality of the new reading public, created by industrial development and cheap education’ (Elwin 1934: 302, 299, 311). Such ambivalence towards modernity is also evident in Ouida’s best-selling novel of 1880, Moths. Although Moths associates women with modern mobility, it is the only novel discussed here which represents this association in largely negative terms: modern (privileged) womanhood is condemned for its restless wandering from place to place in the search for new diversions, as well as for its endless pursuit of fashion and consumption. The recurring metaphor of moths, which associates processes of time and change with decay, is employed to emphasise this negative portrayal of modern women as predatory consumers. Instead of the dazzling butterflies they seem to emulate in appearance, modern women in fact embody the destructive, all-consuming moth. As the disillusioned hero, Corrèze, explains, he lives in ‘a world of moths. Half the moths are burning themselves in feverish frailty, the other half are corroding and consuming all that they touch’.3 By metaphor and metonym, then, women embody the excesses and moral decline of modern culture; foremost among the moths is Lady Dolly, the heroine’s dissolute mother. A woman attentive to the

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transitory nuances of fashion, affecting a style of dress and cosmetic enhancement that belie her age, Lady Dolly is an irredeemable figure of hypocrisy, greed and selfishness throughout the novel. She exemplifies the ‘feverish frenzy for amusement’ (98) that Corrèze sees as the chief characteristic of the women of this social set. Lady Dolly is equally at home frequenting the gaming tables in Monte Carlo or attending morning services in London in order to maintain the social visibility crucial to her continued social acceptance. The uselessness of the mobility of women like Lady Dolly is contrasted with the purposeful mobility of her financier-husband whose constant travelling is (imperfectly) understood by Dolly to be at the service of his extensive business interests: ‘he is on the sea going somewhere. He is always going somewhere; it is Java or Japan, or Jupiter; something with a J. He makes his money in that sort of way, you know. … Whenever people want money he goes, and he makes it because the people he goes to haven’t got any; isn’t it queer?’ (67) Dolly’s simplistic account of her husband’s role in the circulation of global capital unwittingly demonstrates the imbrication of the economic imperatives driving the mobility of both men and women in a world where capital, commodities and people are never fixed in one place but are constantly moving in order to sustain the wealthy lifestyles of modern, mobile subjects. The association between the speed and mobility of modern life and a rapacious capitalism is not depicted simply in order to condemn the nouveaux riches and the loss of a stable social hierarchy. In Moths, the corrupting processes of modernisation are embraced and perpetuated by the old aristocracy as well as by new money.4 Similarly, the damning depiction of women like Lady Dolly is matched by the representation of men who adopt an instrumentalist attitude to women, servants and other property. In Ouida’s novels both men and women must participate in the realm of exchange: women become complicit in their own commodification, while men control women and other commodities (Gilbert 1997: 141). The problem is not simply that women are too mobile – moving out of domestic confinement and its associated moral expectations – but that the domestic is in fact unable to confine, to protect against the intrusion of market values. As Jeff Nunokawa puts it: ‘The nineteenth-century novel never ceases remarking the reach of market forces into the parlours,


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bedrooms, and closets of a domestic realm that thus never ceases to fail in its mission to shelter its inhabitants from the clash of these armies’ (1994: 4). Unsurprisingly, then, in Moths the only (narrative) solution to the luxurious excess and promiscuous movement of wives and husbands, mothers and daughters, is a remote Alpine cabin where the hero and heroine will eventually live isolated from and unsullied by their former society. In the nexus of sexual exchange and the circulation of capital that is Lady Dolly’s world, the ‘natural’ social relations of bourgeois family life have no place. Men prey on daughters when they grow tired of their mothers, while mothers are instrumental in the procurement of their own daughters; there is no demarcation between ‘the zone of circulation and the zone of possession’ on which the Victorian domestic and familial ideal depended (Nunokawa 1994: 12). Dolly’s acquaintances have trouble believing that she ‘can ever have stooped to such a homely unartificial thing as maternity’ (55) and the unexpected arrival of her now-adult daughter, Vere, at the beginning of the novel, is an event which threatens to disrupt Dolly’s delicate social arrangements at the Normandy resort town of Trouville. Dolly’s dismay at Vere’s arrival is not simply that her veneer of youthfulness will be exposed and she will be forced to adopt a social role as maternal chaperone, but that she perceives Vere to be an ‘old-fashioned, prudish, open-air, touch-me-not Englishwoman’ (65) – the complete antithesis to her mother. From the outset, Vere is depicted as a woman out of time, ‘not suited to her century’ (222), entirely at odds with the worldly, cosmopolitan milieu of her mother and barely able to fathom its customs, let alone approve of them. Named after her clergyman father (Dolly’s improbable first husband), Vere is equally distanced both from the form of femininity practised and idealised in Dolly’s circle and from the market economy that underwrites its value. If Vere is typical of Ouida’s heroines at this time as a pure, unsophisticated and passive girl placed in a hostile environment (Schaffer 2000: 128), she is not, however, physically weak or delicate. Raised in isolation on her grandmother’s Northumbrian estate, where Vere learnt to ‘shoot, and row, and sail’, she is ‘fond of riding’ and bathing (65) and arrives in Normandy unfatigued by her travels: ‘a twelve hours’ tossing on the sea, and a day or two’s rumbling on the rail, had no power to fatigue her’ (69). Vere’s physical robustness, linked to her fondness for nature and fresh air, marks her as constitutionally opposed to the hothouse, artificial environment in which her mother flourishes. This robustness is also

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the direct cause of her fateful encounter with the hero Corrèze, Europe’s most celebrated tenor, but originally an Alpine shepherd boy (albeit of a dispossessed French aristocratic family, of course) (84–5). Rising at dawn one morning just as her mother is returning home from the casino, Vere embarks on a walk along the seashore as light, and air, and liberty of movement were necessary to her, for, in the old woods and on the rough moors of Bulmer, her grandmother had let her roam as she chose, on foot or on her pony. It had been a stern rule in other things, but as regarded air and exercise she had enjoyed the most perfect freedom. (75) Losing her way and separated by the incoming tide from both her shoes and her maid, Vere meets Corrèze who escorts her home. In their ensuing conversation, Vere is entranced by the romance of his itinerant life, which Corrèze disparages as a dislocated, uncertain existence: ‘An artist’s life is far off what you fancy it, I fear; but yet at the least it is full of colour and of change. I am in the snows of Russia one day, in the suns of Madrid another. I know the life of the palaces, I have known the life of the poor’ (84). The distinction thus drawn from the beginning of Moths between the freedom of movement associated with pure, natural spaces like the Alps or the Northumbrian moors and the alienated mobility of the cosmopolitan traveller implies that an authentic life is lived in isolation from the trappings of modernity. From this point in the novel, the desire to live an authentic life aligns these two characters as kindred spirits with a shared destiny. Unlike Vere, however, Corrèze has already experienced the pleasures of the dazzling metropolis and their encounter occurs at a time when such pleasures are beginning to pall for him. Before leaving Trouville, Corrèze exhorts Vere to keep herself ‘unspotted from the world’ (97), as if any immersion in society cannot help but be corrupting or contaminating for women (while men, it seems, can potentially be reclaimed by renouncing its temptations). The sexual double standard in the moral universe of Moths seems to leave women with the ‘choice’ between commodification or exploitation. Vere is soon trapped into an engagement with a wealthy and dissolute Russian noble, Prince Zouroff, which begins a process of increasing victimisation that will occupy most of the narrative.5 Repulsed by both the man and his lifestyle, Vere is totally passive during


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her engagement (180), a still point at the centre of feverish social activity focussed on Zouroff’s seaside chateau, Félicité: White-sailed yachts anchored in its bay; chasseurs in green and gold beat its woods; riding parties and driving parties made its avenues bright with colour and movement; groups like Watteau pictures wandered in its gardens; there was a little troupe of actors from Paris for its theatre; life went like a song. (113) As Zouroff’s fiancée, Vere is chief among the spectacles offered at Félicité, dressed in fashions and jewels befitting her new status and honoured by balls and dinners where the moths marvel at the still, pale girl who has apparently captivated the previously marriage-averse Zouroff. After the summer, Vere is confined to Paris by her anxious mother, who fears Vere’s disgust with Zouroff may cause the reluctant bride to flee before the wedding can take place: It was safest, [Dolly] fancied, for Vere to see no one. … So she shut Vere in her gilded, and silvered, and over-decorated, and over-filled, rooms in the Avenue Joséphine, and kept her there stifled and weary, like a woodland bird hung in a cage in a boudoir; and never let the girl take a breath of air save by her side in her victoria out in the Bois in the still, close evenings. (183) Vere’s suffocation by her role first as dutiful daughter and then as wife is depicted in a way bound to frustrate the modern reader through the repetition of images of confinement and sequestration, matched by Vere’s silence and passivity, which Talia Schaffer has described as ‘virtually autistic’ (2000: 129). Such (understandable) critical frustration, however, fails to take into account that, at the same time, Vere was endlessly mobile, moving with her husband and his entourage from house to hotel across the breadth of continental Europe – from Normandy to Russia. This unnerving combination of silent passivity with constant movement, echoed in Vere’s habitual pacing of her chambers with ‘the step of a thing that is chained’ (197), serves as a reminder that Vere had initially aspired to a very different form of life. Her only wish at the start of the novel had been to live with her German governess in the country and to continue her diligent study of Greek, geometry and music

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(64–5, 68) – an existence Vere associates not with confinement but with independence and a close bond with another woman seen more as an equal than as a teacher. With something of the power of Radcliffean gothic, Ouida depicts Vere’s restless movement as a displacement of her repressed anger with her mother (who had peremptorily dismissed Fräulein Schroder), her disgust with the sexual violence and humiliation she suffers at the hands of her husband and the self-loathing she feels at her new title ‘Vera, Princess Zouroff’ (197), with no occupation or purpose: The girl who had gone to bed with the sun and risen with it; who had spent her tranquil days in study and open-air exercise; … the girl who had been Vere Herbert on those dark chill Northumbrian shores was now the Princess Vera, and was for ever in the glare, the unrest, the fever, and the splendour, of a great society. (204) Vere’s emotional withdrawal is the response, then, of one who cannot physically control her environment or determine her own movements. Her one attempt to communicate her dissent is also an over-determined response to the sexual trauma of her marriage: Vere’s obsession with white clothing powerfully represents an internalised sense of contamination and corruption – a daily reminder of Corrèze’s exhortation to keep herself ‘unspotted’ and her perceived failure to do so (see also Schaffer 2000: 129).6 Vere’s dress matches her pale complexion, signifying an interiority coterminous with her appearance, an insistence on purity that is also a desire to keep a psychic, moral distance between herself and her milieu. At the same time, however, Vere’s distinctive appearance lends her a public profile through her clear distinction from the ‘moths’ around her: she ‘became the theme of artists, the adoration of dandies, the despair of women’, in short, ‘She was the event of the year’ (223). The paradox by which Vere’s mute rejection of society ensures her status as celebrity spectacle, underlines the fact that she is simultaneously public property and a unique commodity possessed by her husband, with no claim to selfhood, privacy or agency, always ‘en scène’ (223) in her frequently changing ‘prison-houses’ (216). Vere’s isolation in fashionable society is contrasted throughout Moths with her mother’s success in protecting her own social currency and mobility. Avoiding Vere and her silent reproaches, and fearing her gambling and promiscuity may have stretched the tolerance even of her own pleasure-seeking milieu, Dolly takes a house in London as the site


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best suited to her re-creation of herself as a philanthropic and pious matron: Dolly ‘liked to go everywhere, and she knew that, if people once begin to talk, you may very soon go nowhere’ (236). Consequently, Dolly adopts the practices of hospital visiting, daily church attendance and other philanthropic ventures – a somewhat limited social circuit but one that she hopes will avoid her ostracism to ‘obscure continental towns … [which are] “nowhere” in the great race’ (236). Despite such a show of respectability, however, Dolly is reprimanded by her friend Lady Stoat for succumbing to the restless mood of the times: ‘there is too much tearing about,’ Lady Stoat complains to Dolly, ‘It may be the fault of steam; it may be the fault of smoking’ (246). Unlike Dolly, Lady Stoat observes, Vere ‘somehow or other has escaped’ the zeitgeist of fashion cycles and giddy entertainments (246). Vere’s opposition to the tenor of her times, however, is not just confined to its leisure activities. Vere echoes Lady Stoat’s disapproval of the relentless expansion of industrialism and she tries to intervene in the plans of her cousin, the Duke of Mull, to sink coal mines in his ancestral Northumbrian forests ‘untouched for thirteen centuries’ (243). Interestingly, the coal mines are not the initiative of the Duke but of his new wife, the (rather unsubtly named) American heiress Fuschia Leach. The by now familiar theme of women’s greater culpability for the pace and extent of social decline is continued in this sub-plot: the only threat to the gracious values of a traditional social order greater than a modern woman, it seems, is a modern American woman ‘who knows no better because she was born so’, as Vere tells her cousin (243). The corrupting influence of American modernity on the English aristocracy and landscape alike is expressed here through a chauvinism that may alienate the modern reader from Vere’s moral stand; her protest is based on aristocratic privilege, not environmental concerns. Predictably, mother and daughter are divided on this issue; Lady Dolly urges her nephew to persist: ‘Of course [Fuschia] tells you to dig, and you do it. Good husbands always do what they’re told’ (244). The energetic and vivacious Fuschia, who entrances the vapid Zouroff circle and the austere Herberts alike, is not, however, quite the caricature of the gauche American girl she seems. Significantly, Fuschia later provokes one of the only occasions on which Vere is forced to admit that she has misjudged moral worth, which complicates the depiction of women’s relation to modernity in the novel. The eventual rapprochement of Fuschia and Vere – despite the significant differences marked by their disparate backgrounds and initial antipathy – singles them out from the other women in the novel, and their shared youth implies some hope for the

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replacement of corrupt moth(ers)s by a newer generation of women with both energy and integrity. Vere’s social and emotional withdrawal (read as ‘coldness’ by most of those around her) is intensified when the Zouroffs take up residence in Russia: if her itinerant life of dislocation was confining, it pales in comparison to the sequestration that she experiences in eastern Europe. The mapping of Vere’s emotional state onto this landscape is consonant with nineteenth-century depictions of Russia as an inhospitable space of tyranny, misery and deprivation, far from the comforts and advances of Western European culture (Cross 1985: 30). In Russia, Vere succumbs to an even greater ‘lassitude and hopelessness’ (273) and, following the stillbirth of a second child, is completely immobilised by being confined to bed for an extended period (275). Zouroff unfavourably contrasts Vere with his French mistress, Jeanne de Sonnaz – a crimson-clad whirling dervish on ice in midnight fetes on the Neva: ‘His wife, in her ermine folds, which clothed her as in snow from head to foot, and without any point of colour on her anywhere, with … her slow, silent, undulating movement, … had no charm for him’ (273). The association between the Russian landscape and Vere’s frozen demeanour and snowy appearance, however, complicates the depiction of her victimisation by Prince Zouroff. On the one hand, Zouroff is the nineteenth-century stereotype of a tyrannical and barbaric Russian ruling class (see Cross 1985: 24–44; O’Loughlin 2001: 424). In an implicit if not explicit identification with the oppressed rather than the oppressors, such literary representations usually elided Britain’s own association with repressive imperialism. Vere expresses precisely this view, when she (improbably) meets Corrèze again in the Austrian spa town of Ischl: ‘Russia is always terrible,’ said Vere, with a little shudder. ‘Nowhere on earth are there such ghastly contrasts; you live in a hothouse with your palms, and the poor are all around you in the ice; everything is like that.’ ‘And yet you are Russian;’ said Corrèze, a little cruelly. … ‘You are certainly Russian. You are no longer Vere even; you are Princess Vera.’ (344) On the other hand, as Corrèze’s bitter reminder insists, Vere is also complicit in Russian tyranny, by claiming the rank and privileges of the oppressor. To Vere, however, the tyranny of her marriage parallels the


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despotic rule of Russia, which Zouroff replicates on his Baltic estate, Svir: To her it was the symbol of despotism, of brutal power, of soulless magnificence; and the cruelties of the sport that filled all the days, and the oppression of the peasantry by the police-agents which she was impotent to redress, weighed on her with continual pain. (373) Vere’s passive – if ineffectual – resistance to her husband is compared to those dissidents who resisted the tyranny of the tsars, the Nihilists. Vere empathises with a group of suspected Nihilists (actually just impoverished, suffering peasants) that she witnesses being rounded up and despatched to Siberia and the episode prompts her to undertake a Lady Bountiful role on the estate.7 When Zouroff thwarts Vere’s philanthropic intentions, she asks to continue her work on another family estate ‘in Poland, where the people suffer more, and where I might do good’ (389). Zouroff’s response to this request is to rape Vere in her private chapel (390), an action that conflates the brutality of the state and the home: ‘I will teach you how a Russian can punish rebellion,’ he tells Vere, ‘I will beat you as my father did the serfs!’ (425). With the attempt to exercise the social agency of her rank through charitable work rebuffed, Vere can only retreat into an even more profound passivity that her husband interprets – rightly on this occasion – as silent resistance. She will not take the action of initiating divorce – despite public knowledge of Zouroff’s mistress, who is brought to live in the family home – because she fears even greater public exposure. Zouroff then exiles his wife to his Polish estate, seized during the Russian partition but seldom visited because the hostility of the Polish peasants is even greater than that of their counterparts in the Zouroffs’ homeland. Szarisla, situated in marsh land in ‘one of the most desolate parts of the country’ and formerly a fortified monastery, becomes a virtual prison to Vere, who is forbidden visitors or correspondence and who, watched over by the domestic staff as spies for Zouroff, feels that ‘living she entered a grave’ (486). Isolated, cold and deserted by her French servants so that ‘she had only Russians and Poles about her’ (487), Vere renews her attempt to engage in local charity as the only form of agency open to her, despite the suspicions of the local peasants who associate Vere’s name with oppression. The paradox by which Vere’s initial request to live alone in Poland has become an acquiescence

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in her own imprisonment creates an impasse in the narrative, leaving Vere in a state of virtual suspended animation, powerless even at this distance to evade the panoptic gaze of her husband. While the dreariness of Vere’s life in Poland is described somewhat repetitively in Moths, the narrative’s juxtaposition of Vere’s existence with the daily lives of Zouroff in Paris, Dolly in England and Corrèze’s itinerant career around metropolitan Europe effectively evokes the sense of parallel lives, separated by considerable distances, but nonetheless inexorably intertwined in what Ouida elsewhere called this ‘fast, fussy and furious age’ (1895: 1). Like a lengthy montage sequence, Moths thus powerfully conveys both the shortcomings of rootless modern existences based solely on pleasure and the life-denying immobility of Vere’s life. Vere, like the peasants of Szarisla, is ‘out of synch’ with a modernity associated with movement – trapped instead in a pre-modern, almost feudal context. As Schaffer argues, Szarisla ‘represents a kind of nightmarish version of the domestic ideal’ where the wife is contained alone in an enormous, unheated and empty space far from the over-furnished interiors often associated with Victorian domesticity (2000: 131). The gothic tableau of the submissive wife, confined to the home while her husband roams free in the world, represents an apparently irresolvable contradiction: it both ensures that Vere is ‘unspotted’ by contact with a corrupting world that life in Paris with her husband represents and it also immobilises her in an environment of sensory deprivation. Unlike the peasants who face exile or death if they express dissent, however, there is something almost perverse about Vere’s acceptance of her suffering and her self-imposed silence. Despite the independence she had shown earlier in repudiating the values of her mother, she willingly binds herself to social conventions concerning feminine duty, even if she refuses to co-habit with her husband’s mistress as he demands. In spite of the claustrophobic atmosphere of Szarisla and the hardships that any traveller, however privileged, must face to reach it, Vere in fact receives several visitors during her imprisonment – each marks an attempt to re-connect Vere with the wider social world. Her sister-inlaw Princess Nelaguine is the first arrival, who seeks to persuade Vere to accept Zouroff’s terms for a return to Paris, even as she sympathises with Vere’s position. Corrèze appears (again, improbably) to offer the kind of romantic rescue that a gothic heroine deserves (but Vere refuses). More prosaically, Fuschia Mull travels alone to Poland with a plan to rescue Vere by means of a social compromise that will allow Vere to return to Britain. Fuschia has guessed the truth of the Zouroffs’ ‘separation’ (510),


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and proposes to bring Vere back to England to live with her family at Castle Herbert. What Fuschia offers Vere is the protection of the patriarchal family name, even as she claims the right to act and speak as an independent woman and threatens to condemn Prince Zouroff publicly (510). Vere again refuses to be rescued, however, and when love letters written to Zouroff by Lady Dolly years earlier are sent to Vere by Madame de Sonnaz, Vere telegrams her husband to ‘let me live and die here’, vowing never to leave Szarlisla (514). The impasse in the narrative of Moths at this point mirrors the contradictions in Ouida’s representation of women in modernity: excoriated as exemplifying the worst excesses of modern anomie and profligacy on the one hand, women like Vere also bear the brunt of residual traditions such as masculine privilege and wifely submission on the other. Trapped at Szarisla, Vere is helpless to break the stalemate of her circumstances, her immurement as much due to her antiquated commitment to the absolute privacy of marriage as to her inhospitable environment. A scenario that in other hands might become an impassioned plea for enlightened marriage reform, however, is resolutely confined to the domain of individuals to resolve. Almost literally stifled by tradition, Vere enters into a life-threatening physical decline, and it seems that only masculine action can save her, like an enchanted princess awaiting reanimation. In Paris, Corrèze communicates to Zouroff his intention to renounce his operatic career and enter a monastery in exchange for Vere’s return from exile (528) – his silence and sequestration effectively offered as a substitute for hers. His offer rejected, the tenor confronts Zouroff publicly to defend Vere’s honour and a duel ensues in which Corrèze is shot. With the failure of Corrèze’s final rescue attempt, Vere is at last propelled into action, leaving Szarisla to seek Corrèze and initiate a divorce. Previously always the reluctant and alienated traveller detached from her surroundings, Vere undertakes a solitary and heroic journey across Europe to be reunited with the man she loves and to openly break with her husband. Vere’s claim to autonomy represented by her flight from Szarisla may threaten to associate her with the kind of transgressive feminine self-interest embodied by characters such as Lady Dolly or Jeanne de Sonnaz, but her selfless motivation re-positions Vere’s action within a context of feminine self-abnegation associated with the care of others: she is prepared to risk her reputation to assist her champion, knowing that the society of moths will (wrongly) interpret her action as confirmation of their rumoured adulterous relationship. Escaping in the dead of night, Vere travels by sled across Poland and Prussia – ‘over the

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snow plains and the frozen rivers, unaided, unaccompanied, making no pause, taking no rest either by night or day’ (539) – then by train to Paris. In Paris, however, the fairy-tale heroism of Vere’s escape is replaced by the more mundane perils of the Victorian lady: She descended into the noise and dirt of the streets; she who had never been a yard on foot, or unattended, in a city. The movement around her seemed to her ghastly and horrible. … She mingled with the crowds and was soon lost in them, she who had always gone through Paris with pomp and splendour. … (539) Vere’s journey seems to travel through time as well as space, leaving behind the feudal barbarism of Russian-occupied Poland for Paris, the ‘capital of the nineteenth century’ (Benjamin 1986). Her entry into the city is a kind of sensory assault, another potential form of contamination that her symbolic dress and demeanour cannot fend off but one that brings about a very different response. In Paris, Vere enters for the first time a world of social contact and heterogeneity which becomes associated with life rather than death: ‘The lassitude, weakness, the sickness which had weighed on her, and suffocated her youth in her, were gone’ (539). Vere’s return to embodiment from her previous state of suspended animation is also accompanied by her acknowledgement of sexual desire: Corrèze is discovered alive and through the intimacies of nursing which, in a reversal of roles allows Vere to rescue him, she is finally able to confess her feelings. If Vere’s rescue takes the traditional feminine form of devoted nursing, it is nonetheless significant that she finds the voice to speak her desire and express her independence from her husband while Corrèze has been rendered voiceless by the wound to his throat. In a conclusion reminiscent of Jane Eyre, the couple retire from the social world to a peaceful retreat where Corrèze regains the ability to speak (but not to sing). A relationship based on mutual self-sacrifice is privileged over the instrumentalist liaisons that dominate Moths, but such a relationship can only exist away from the fashionable society of resort towns or the metropolis. Despite the idyllic Alpine setting and the happy outcome for the couple, the past cannot be undone or forgotten: Vere is still ‘clothed in white’ (540), marking the memory of ‘the pollution of her marriage’, her life ‘forever defiled by those dead years’ (541). There can be no reconciliation between the nobility of character embodied by Corrèze and Vere – ‘martyr[s] of a false civilisation’ (542) – and the


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profligate ostentation of Zouroff or Lady Dolly. A retreat from modernity is the only solution imaginable in Moths, which closes with a montage of Zouroff, Jeanne de Sonnaz and Lady Dolly each indulging in conspicuous consumption, secure in their social position: ‘So the moths eat the ermine’ (543). And yet, in the description of the ‘little yellow cups’ and ‘iced syrups’ of Lady Dolly’s tea table (543), there is an attention to the trappings of the culture of excess, also evident in descriptions of dress, interiors and objects throughout the novel. The ‘sentimental extravagance’ of Ouida’s prose (Elwin 1934: 282), which lingers over Worth gowns and Riviera chateaux, is sharply at odds with the Alpine tableau and the novel’s valorisation of nature as the place where human relations are unsullied by modern society. Such a contradictory attitude towards modernity was singled out for praise by Oscar Wilde, who described Ouida as ‘florid, and fervent, and fanciful’ but able to capture the ‘tone and temper of the society of our day’ (2005: 561). By removing the heroine from circulation in such a society, Moths draws an association between women’s mobility and their sexual commodification and re-instates the domestic ideal of marriage as the only appropriate – and safe – space for a woman’s agency. If a remote cottage seems a disappointing destination for Vere’s intrepid journey through the frozen wastes of Poland, the narrowing of Corrèze’s world equally suggests that escape from the realm of circulation is never without cost. The renunciation of mobility associates stasis with authenticity and leaves no possibility for an uncompromised agency in the wider modern world.

Miss Brown she felt as might a person lost in a catacomb, and who, having got to a chink, having seen the light and breathed the air, would be condemned to wander again, to rethread for ever the black and choking corridors leading nowhere.8 Like Moths, Miss Brown links physical and social mobility in ways which problematise women’s aspirations to a life beyond the domestic realm in an increasingly commodified culture. Beginning the novel as an Italian nursery maid, the eponymous Anne Brown is ‘discovered’ by the English painter-poet Walter Hamlin who dispatches her to be educated in Germany before ensconcing her in a London home in anticipation of their marriage. Anne Brown’s travels are hence essential to the process of her class elevation to become a lady. While Anne is initially

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exhilarated by her removal from domestic service to the stimulation of her education and induction into London’s aesthetic circles, the epigraph to this section describes Anne’s growing awareness that her impending marriage would be just as limited and monotonous as the life she had escaped. Anticipating similar representations of marriage in New Woman fiction of the following decade (Zorn 2003: 123), Miss Brown presents marriage as a form of confinement through a paradoxical image of purposeless wandering, associating mobility with a loss of agency. Here, a woman’s aimless movement is ultimately no different from her immurement; the wandering woman, often synonymous with sexual impropriety in Victorian culture, is in this instance a woman trapped, entombed, suffocated by convention and gender expectations. To understand the representation of women’s mobility in Miss Brown, however, it is necessary to pay attention to the specific context that Lee is evoking in her novel of 1884: namely, the context of aestheticism in London in the early 1880s (or late Pre-Raphaelitism as it is also referred to in Miss Brown; 62, 112). The specificity of this setting was a source of controversy on the novel’s publication and Miss Brown was widely regarded as a roman à clef in which Lee’s friends and acquaintances found unflattering references to themselves (including Oscar Wilde and William Michael Rossetti) (see Ormond 1970). The two central characters, for instance, have much in common with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris, an icon of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Not only does Anne possess ‘heavy masses of dark, lustreless hair, crimped naturally like so much delicate black iron wire’ (14) but her story seems a variation on Jane Morris’s life narrative: both women were plucked from working-class drudgery to become the muse of an artistic movement and entered a social environment in which their ensuing fame and affluence ensured a degree of independence (see Marsh 1986, Ormond 1970). While Jane Morris’s social mobility was reflected in her physical movement from her birthplace in Oxford to London to her eventual travels in Europe as the wife of William Morris, Anne Brown travels a reverse trajectory: discovered in Italy, educated on the Continent and then brought to England by her artist-fiancé, where she is established as an identity on the social circuits of the aesthetes in London.9 I am not suggesting, however, that, like Lee’s contemporaries, we need to decode the veiled characterisations in order to discover the ‘true’ meaning of Miss Brown. Rather, I will argue that Lee’s narrative of a socially-mobile woman explores possible avenues of agency opened up by this mobility in the context of an artistic movement which engaged critically with


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Victorian modernity by imbricating art with commerce, fashion and politics in diverse ways. In Miss Brown the question of women’s modern mobility, then, is juxtaposed with women’s location in art, in which the static quality of the artist’s model seems to symbolise the male artist’s desire to contain and fix the woman who inspires him. It is worth recalling that Rossetti’s name for the exemplary beauties he sought as models was ‘stunners’, a term which reflects the ambiguity of the woman’s objectification in art. Ostensibly a name that depersonalises the individual woman, a ‘stunner’ is also literally one who stuns, or transfixes, the perceiver. In seeking to fix the woman’s image, the (male) artist is himself immobilised by the ‘stunner’: the slang term contains an implied threat that the power relation between male artist and female model is in fact reversed. Significantly, the first day Hamlin meets Anne at the Tuscan home of an artist friend, he is transfixed by her immobility. As ‘she sat motionless at the head of the table, … like some sort of strange statue’ (18) she embodies for Hamlin those highly desired qualities in an artist’s model, silence and stillness (Borzello 1982: 7). The woman of aestheticist art was thought to have a particular affinity with immobility: ‘Limp and languid, unable to stand up, she was draped over sofas or propped against mantelpieces … totally passive and inert’ (Anderson 2001: 442; see also Matthews 1999: 173). As maid to boisterous children, Anne Brown is far from limp and languid, but through imagery which compares her to Parian marble and the statuary of Michelangelo, she represents both a stillness and a stature that pre-figures her role as Hamlin’s model and muse: The forehead was high and narrow, the nose massive, heavy, with a slight droop … the lips thick, and of curiously bold projection and curl; the faintly hollow cheek subsided gradually into a neck round and erect like a tower, but set into the massive chest as some strong supple branch into a tree-trunk. (18) A strikingly unconventional – if monumental – figure, Anne has an immediate effect on the world-weary Hamlin. That he considers Anne a discovery – in the same sense as European explorers ‘discovered’ exotic lands – is marked by the imagery used to represent Anne’s inscrutable liminality: she possesses an intense physicality that borders on the masculine (‘her massive and yet girlish body’ with ‘bare brown arms’ 14); she

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is a children’s maid, but seems more like a ‘king-woman of Antiquity’ (54); and Hamlin is unable to decipher ‘this strange type, neither Latin nor Greek, but with something of Jewish and something of Ethiopian subdued into a statuesque but most un-Hellenic beauty’ (19). Hamlin’s desire from the outset to fix the meanings of this inexplicable hybridity into a recognised beauty who will embody his aesthetic ideals in England – ‘that is to say, in the particular pre-Raphaelite society which constituted England to him’ (62) – is a reiteration of the orientalising impulse characteristic of both English imperialism and aesthetic collecting, where the exotic object seems to exist outside modern temporalities. Hamlin is himself, however, a figure of cultural hybridisation and contradictions. Fair, aristocratic and possessed of a ‘girlish beauty’ in his youth (10), Hamlin’s wealth and social rank is derived from an unsavoury family history of plantation ownership in Jamaica characterised by slavery, violence and inter-racial sexual liaisons that leaves him with the ‘taint’ of degeneracy (174). The leading figure in the latest artistic trend, Hamlin is also torn between the brash modernity of his age and the aristocratic traditions of an earlier time. At the beginning of the novel he has come to Italy to escape the ugly commercialism of London life, but once there he immediately has an impulse to flee the primitive conditions in Tuscany for the rampant modernisation of America: ‘He thought all those big hotels, with the fifteen hundred inmates and thirteen brass bands, all that tremendous strain, telegraphtelephone vulgarity, might be refreshing’ (12). Before long, however, Hamlin has succumbed to the charms of the weather-stained Tuscan country house and is discussing Dante with Anne among the olives. But if Hamlin sees Anne as an aesthetic figure in the landscape, it is clear that she will not be so easily framed. Miss Brown is notable for Lee’s attempt to foreground the inner life of the woman who as artist’s model and muse is usually inarticulate – an object of desire rather than a centre of consciousness or self-reflexive subject. Anne’s propensity to dissent from social orthodoxies is first made apparent on a day trip to Lucca, when Hamlin is overcome by the spectacle and pageantry of Italian life. An attentive but unimpressed observer, Anne refutes Hamlin’s romanticism by expressing radically secular and republican sentiments (learnt from her Scottish dockworker father): ‘it seems to me dreadful that people should believe in priests and kings, and all sorts of lies’, she declares (48). Horrified at her ‘common modern radicalism’ (48), Hamlin wilfully persists in seeing Anne as a woman out of her own time rather than the voice of modernity.


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Anachronising Anne is equated with framing and confining her; in Lucca, Hamlin observes her repeatedly over the course of the day, framed in spaces such as the church nave or the opera box, and interprets her according to his own artistic fantasies while conveniently ignoring her servant status that literally confines her to be the caretaker of her employer’s children even on this leisurely outing. Returning to the inn after strolling freely around the town, Hamlin finds ‘Anne Brown, surly, flopping away the flies which buzzed about [the children], and reading a newspaper’ but sees only ‘one of Michelangelo’s prophetic women’ (50). Although transfixed by Anne, a restless Hamlin plans to continue his travels, with no destination in mind: he may ‘go on to Rome, Naples, Egypt, America, Japan, or return to Hammersmith. I have no notion’ (56). After some months travelling in Italy, however, he is ‘haunted by the remembrance of the … nursemaid’ (62) and returns to Florence with an audacious proposal for Anne’s future: she was the predestined instrument for the consummation of his life. Anne Brown should live for the world and for fame; and Walter Hamlin’s life should be crowned by gradually endowing with vitality, and then wooing, awakening the love of this beautiful Galatea whose soul he had moulded … (64) Hamlin’s plan to educate, endow and eventually marry Anne seems at first to represent sheer liberation for Anne, but the terms of his proposal ominously imply that freedom and marriage are incompatible options: ‘Will you let me act as if I were your guardian for the next three years, and at the end of them you shall have enough to live and marry as befits a lady, and be as free as air, or become my wife – whichever you shall choose?’ (78). The choice Hamlin presents to Anne – freedom or marriage – is for the moment conflated as Anne is rapidly whisked away from Tuscany to a progressive school in Coblenz, after a journey that leaves her dazed and confused by the myriad new impressions and experiences of travel: During those hours in the train, … Hamlin was forever jumping out and overwhelming them with coffee and stale cakes and newspapers at every station; during those days at Venice, when they … spent their days in picture-galleries and churches and gondolas, and their evenings at theatres … the poor girl was in a dazed condition – … all this journey seemed to her unreal, and all the things around her

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unsubstantial. … A couple of weeks ago she had had so strong a consciousness of identity and existence, of her own desires and hopes; now she could not well understand how she came to be where she was. (100–1) While Hamlin’s patronage instigates this dazzling mobility, he is ultimately preparing Anne for a purely ornamental role in his life. Similarly, the social mobility Anne experiences is not intended to provide her with greater independence or agency: whether as muse, model or wife, she is expected to be a fixed embodiment of his aesthetic ideals in his home. Anne’s two years at the school in Coblenz is contrasted with the restless mobility of Hamlin during this time, as he ‘travelled about in out-of-the-way countries, having fragmentary love-affairs, in a dreamy, irresponsible way, with other women’ (114). Independence remains a resolutely masculine prerogative in Hamlin’s circle, despite its flouting of conventions in other ways. From his travels, Hamlin writes Anne frequent and extensive letters describing his experiences (excluding his affairs) mediated through extracts from poetry and quotations from his favourite writers. Anne’s education is effectively constituted by Hamlin’s travel letters, which simultaneously offer her a vicarious expansion of her horizons and anchor her ever more securely to Hamlin’s world view by imbuing her ‘with the imagery and sentiment of that strange eclectic school of our days which we still call preRaphaelite’ (112). While confined at Coblenz, however, Anne still occupies a more expanded realm of action than she had previously experienced: the girls walk freely about the town, attend public lectures, socialise with young men, while their learning is self-directed and unstructured. Hamlin’s ‘wandering life’ (115) may represent an unfettered masculine independence but even the cloistered environment of Coblenz is implicated in modern mobility. Like Anne, all of the young women there are in transit in one way or another. One student has been ‘deposited in Europe by her parents, to be called for when educated, and shipped off to New Zealand’ (105) and the rest are ‘eccentrically placed young women; orphans, or girls whose parents were in the colonies, or girls who could not get on at home’ (105). The mobility of these women, then, is ambivalently represented: on the one hand, their education prioritises self-government and freedom of movement within the parameters of their gender and class; on the other, their mobility is directed by forces beyond their control, such as parental directive or the vagaries of colonial administration, all of which is associated with an undesirably


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unsettled state. When Anne leaves Coblenz, it is clear that her mobility is not under her own control. Hamlin sends a maid to accompany her and dictates both the route and mode of her travel: she is to avoid the ‘vile, vulgar, usual route’ across the Continent and approach London by boat, disembarking on the Thames wharf ‘rather than in the shed at Victoria or Charing Cross’ (118). For the first time, Anne experiences her upward social mobility – from maid to ‘lady’ – as a curtailment of her own independent movement and understands that her privilege is at the expense of other women of her class (119). As if to underline the enforced passivity of the lady traveller, Anne undertakes the journey in a disembodied, almost hallucinogenic state and upon arriving in London ‘felt herself walking as if in a dream; and as if in a dream a figure come up and take her hand’ (122). In London, Hamlin’s antipathy towards the banal modernity of the railway is also echoed in his choice of house for Anne. Envisaging the house as a retreat from the industrialised city, Hamlin seeks to frame Anne within his aesthetic version of domesticity and distance her from an intrusive modernity. As he writes to Anne prior to her arrival: What determined my choice, as I am sure it would have determined yours also, is that the house is itself more than a century and a half old, and has some fine trees in the garden. Flowers seem to grow well, as it is pretty well beyond reach of smoke. … [T]he river-side … is oldfashioned, and not yet made into a modern embankment. It is rather far from the world; but the world is hideous, and the farther away from it the better, don’t you think? (116) Hamlin’s plan to sequester Anne in Hammersmith eerily echoes the previous history of St John’s House as a priory, and his interpellation of her within his anti-modern, anti-urban perspective implies a continuity between aestheticism as a domain separate from the vulgarity of modern life and the Victorian bourgeois ideal of the angel in the house.10 To Anne, the house is at first an ‘enchanted palace’, far from the ‘noisy, and grimy, and vulgarly new’ place she had always imagined London to be (131): [the] walls were all panelled white, except where the panelling was interrupted by expanses of pale-yellow chintz. … There were blueand-white jars and pots all about, and old-fashioned china things on the dressing-table; … facsimiles of drawings by Mantegna and Boticelli, and the coloured copies of famous Italian pictures. … [In

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the drawing room] the floors [were] spread with oriental carpets and matting, which gave out a faint, drowsy, sweet scent. The curious furniture was covered with old brocade and embroidery, and in all corners, on brackets and tables and in cabinets, were all manner of wonderful glass and china, and strange ivory and inlaid Japanese toys … and majolica vases full of peacocks’ feathers … [and] drawings of strange, beautiful, emaciated, cruel-looking creatures, men or women, with wicked lips and combed-out locks. (129–31)11 Just as St. John’s House and its quintessentially aesthetic interior has been selected and arranged solely by Hamlin (and is also the site of his studio), so Anne will have no role in domestic management or social arrangements there. With neither wifely duties nor true independence, Anne inhabits a home that is solely associated with masculine creativity and productivity. While the bourgeois Victorian home was a site of social practices associated with the performance of class and cultural capital, the professional artist’s home uniquely associated domesticity with creative labour, which in turn gestured towards a wider public context of the networks of art (both cultural and commercial). Despite the presence of both Anne and her chaperone, St John’s House is effectively a site of a masculine professional domesticity and domesticated professionalism.12 The unconventional gendering of roles and spaces in the Hammersmith house, then, places Anne in a liminal space where she is neither comfortable with a traditional femininity nor able to become the modern woman that her education, radical views and financial independence may suggest. Unlike the unhappy wives found in New Woman fiction, Anne’s discontent does not arise from monotonous or onerous domestic duties, but from the absence of any duty or purpose at all. Hamlin’s desire to enclose the aesthetic domain – to keep it separate both from the banality of everyday life and the ‘impure marketplace’ (Feldman 2002: 57) – which the Hammersmith house represents, is further complicated by his ambiguous position as the leader of an artistic vanguard. This contradiction is reflected in the house itself: far from being the backwater from modernity it at first appears, the house is entirely of the moment. Everything she sees, Hamlin tells Anne, is ‘bran-new, every stick of them. Everybody has them now; nobody makes anything except imitation old-world things’ (133). Hamlin’s insouciant defence of the commodification of art, in contrast with his denunciation of ‘the clique-and-shop aestheticism with which he now associated’ on the opening page of the novel, seems breathtaking in its


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hypocrisy. Moreover, it allows Lee to position Anne as the defender of a version of modernity – and the qualities of progress, optimism and originality which are often seen as modern characteristics – informed by a proper evaluation of the past, which endows her with an obvious moral authority over the jaded decadence of Hamlin in the important exchange that follows. Advocating a form of progressivism learned from her radical Scottish father, Anne challenges Hamlin to defend his anachronism: ‘Why don’t they try and make something good and new – something out of their own heads, as the old workmen did?’ asked Anne … ‘There is nothing to nourish art nowadays,’ said Hamlin. …‘Art can’t live where life is trivial and aimless and hideous. We can only pick up the broken fragments of the past and blunderingly set them together.’ ‘But why should the life of today be trivial and aimless and hideous?’ asked Anne … ‘Can’t we prevent it?’ ‘… What is dead is dead’ [replied Hamlin] … ‘The world is getting uglier and uglier outside us; we must … build for ourselves a little world within the world, a world of beauty. …’ (133–4) The sharply-opposed positions of Anne and Walter here clearly articulate Lee’s critique of aestheticism as reactionary, socially and politically disengaged as well as patriarchal.13 Hamlin’s insistence on the profound separation between art/ist and the world and his disgust with the aesthetic craze (‘I shall have to give up London’; 143) is contradicted by his obvious enjoyment of his own lionisation. While apparently eschewing the inauthenticity of contemporary art, Walter nevertheless relies on its modern commercialisation and regularly participates in parties and events in order to keep his own ‘brand’ before the public.14 Re-making Anne into a representative of his ideals of aesthetic femininity is thus presented as an extension of this commercialisation process that threatens not only to transform Anne into public property but also to render aestheticism as merely a popular fad. Edith Spencer, wife of an aesthetic critic and daughter of a revered older artist (a Ford Madox Brown figure), warns Anne against people who ‘would have your photograph in all the shop windows at once … [and] hawk you about as a sort of professional beauty’ (158). The boundaries between the domain of the aesthetic and a potentially uncontrollable popular culture are threatened, then, by the very figure on which the former depends: the ideal

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aesthetic woman and her improper circulation. Anne is to be admired by the cognoscenti in the controlled space of the domestic artistic salon, but not indiscriminately idolised by the masses. The danger that the aesthetic ideal could become just a sexual commodity threatens to expose the link between the aesthetic and the economic realms (see Psomiades 1997: 3). Edith Spencer’s adherence to the aesthetic values of Hamlin and her father is, then, not only an attempt to resist the intrusion of market values into art but signals her own uneasiness with becoming implicated in a commodified femininity within modern consumer culture. Anne’s incipient celebrity status, as ‘the standard beauty of the most prominent artistic set, and accepted as such by the rest of society’ (158), threatens to overwhelm Anne with ‘a sort of tragic passiveness’ (159) but in fact marks the beginning of her alienation both from Hamlin and his ideals. The remainder of the novel will depict Anne’s struggle to identify and inhabit a suitable sphere of agency for a woman as ‘eccentrically placed’ as herself (105). This process is, however, strangely rendered in Miss Brown through the attribution of often-contradictory qualities to Anne. She is a modern woman (associated with secular radicalism, social mobility and burgeoning ideas of independence) but also sharply distinguished from her surroundings by her Italian heritage and its essentialist characteristics, which links her to the past or at least to a different temporality at odds with the modern milieu of metropolitan London. After consistently depicting Anne as a modern woman of radical tendencies, for instance, Lee describes Anne’s initial acceptance of her feted status in London as due to the fact that she was without the ‘winding ways of modern women’s characters. … The atoms of her character were not easily shaken into new patterns: it was coherent, and, like most coherent things, difficult to upset, slow to move, and quick to settle down’ (159). Whereas previously in the novel Anne’s class origins and the influence of her father’s political opinions had been stressed, it is her mother’s heritage which comes to more decisively distinguish Anne (for example, 159); her much-described exotic physicality becomes an index of immutable characteristics that give her the resilience to resist her temporary seduction by aestheticism. In the flux of modern metropolitan experience, only these traits, it seems, can reliably anchor her identity. On the one hand, then, Anne Brown seems to exemplify women’s modernity signalled by her transformation from nursery maid to educated, independent woman and icon of a modern artistic movement, even a celebrity in the modern sense. On the other, she remains determined by innate characteristics derived from her


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working-class background and Italian heritage, which emphasise her fundamental difference from the values of aesthetic London – making her even harder to ‘place’.15 A re-encounter with her Scottish cousin Richard Brown further underlines the importance of factors like heritage and class in locating Anne within Victorian modernity. A self-made man and radical candidate for parliament, Richard is tall and ‘burly’, with ‘bushy black hair and beard’ (85), diametrically opposed to the pale and aristocratic Hamlin. In the implacable antipathy – and rivalry for Anne’s loyalty – between the two men, their respectively classed forms of masculinity are polarised along lines of political and aesthetic allegiances (‘I hate all that democratic bosh’, the artist declares, 163). Brown hates Hamlin, ‘not merely as a fine gentleman, an idler, but as an aesthete; a hatred not merely of class, but of temperament’ (87–8), while Hamlin regards Brown as ‘the incarnation of … the aggressive lower classes’ (86). Despite these differences, Brown is not opposed to aesthetic values; rather, he is explicitly aligned with the politics of Ruskin and Morris, and his position seems a form of ‘missionary aestheticism’ (Maltz 2006) that emphasises the importance of extending ‘artistic training to the lower classes’ (163).16 If Hamlin’s artistic commitment initially seems a worthy goal in which Anne could share, her political sympathies as well as her heritage align her with her cousin. In Miss Brown, however, the choice between aestheticism and social involvement is not simply figured as a choice between two men, as Psomiades contends (1997: 170), but as a parallel choice between two women who each represent opposing images of modern mobility and feminine independence for Anne. Mary Leigh, described as a ‘demisemi-aesthete’, is an artist whose ‘ideal of happiness was to travel about, to live in Italy’ but who had ‘cheerfully sacrificed’ (164) this life in order to work with her sister Marjory in a club for working women in East London. Mary initially idolises Anne as Hamlin’s ideal (164) but is soon described as ‘in a sort of a way, in love with Anne Brown’ (213). Anne’s developing friendship with Mary is an important means for introducing her to new possibilities for women’s work, politics and connection to a more diverse social world. Mary and Marjory Leigh’s independence and social activism provide a model for Anne of an alternative to her cloistered existence in Hammersmith and under their guidance she enters the working-class districts of inner London, where she is forced to come to a new understanding of her class experience in the light of her newly acquired privilege. In marked contrast to the practical and forthright Mary Leigh, however, is Sacha Elaguine – Walter’s

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cousin and the ‘daughter of a horrible Russian creature’, according to Walter (199), who had been ‘brought up by French servants … her father’s mistresses’ (201), learning to speak ‘an awful jargon of English and French and Russian and German’ (202). When she returns to England after the death of her husband, Sacha both fascinates and repels Anne with her histrionic displays and her pronounced mood swings between timorous weakness and defiant unconventionality. Sacha’s volatile character reflects her unsettled life: ‘I have been a rolling stone so long,’ she tells Anne, ‘or rather such a feather blown hither and thither by the wind, that I can scarcely believe in settling anywhere’ (234). Critics have noted the intense physicality that characterises Anne’s relationship with Sacha and the transgressive, triangular relationship that develops between Walter and the two women (Psomiades 1997, Vicinus 2004). Anne’s fascination with Sacha has a pronounced erotic implication but she also sympathetically identifies with the Russian woman (at least at first) due to their shared cultural displacement. While Anne comes to repudiate the aesthetic ideals imposed on her, Sacha enthusiastically embraces lifestyle aestheticism and displaces Anne as the idolised beauty of Hamlin’s circle. Sacha’s adaptability to and manipulation of aestheticism exemplifies a ‘degraded’ form of modern femininity (Vicinus 2004: 155) associated with fashion, sexuality and consumerism in which identity is manipulated through display, dissembling and disguise. Sacha’s febrile mobility – fluctuating between emotional extremes, moving lodgings on a whim – is also linked to recognisably modern forms of dysfunction: she was an ‘emaciated, nervous, hysterical creature, who lived off coffee and cigarettes’ (306) who makes Anne recall recent ‘scientific books’ she had read about neurotic women (369). Whereas Anne’s ethnicity seems to serve as a guarantee of authenticity in Miss Brown, Sacha’s foreignness signifies an irredeemable inauthenticity that exacerbates the threatening sexuality of the modern woman. Like the Nihilist assassination plot against her that she invents, Sacha’s fraudulence is a danger to those around her. Sacha, it transpires, has been the cause of young men’s ruin in the past; sexually enslaved and then betrayed by Sacha, they are reduced to aimless wandering, unable to return to home and duty due to their shame and impoverishment (such as Walter’s brother, Arnold, who now ‘wanders about with a servant’; 204). When Sacha begins an affair with Walter, he too succumbs to a pattern of profligacy, emotional volatility and addictions of various kinds – eventually running off to Paris with his femme-fatale cousin. If the flighty Sacha is a warning to Anne of the consequences of an uninhibited modern femininity,


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Anne is not immune to a ‘strange restlessness … a desire … to be perpetually active in something’ (212), which coincides with her growing disillusionment with Hamlin’s aestheticism and her ambivalent fascination with Sacha. Instead, the purposeful independence of Mary Leigh becomes an increasingly attractive option for Anne who seeks to reconcile her training in aestheticism with her radical roots, while also distancing herself from the decadent and duplicitous femininity that Sacha represents. The conflict that will come to define Anne’s alienation from Walter and his brand of aestheticism – and signal her difference from Sacha – occurs as Anne is becoming ever more drawn into the East London work to which the Leigh sisters and her cousin Richard Brown are committed. The cause of this rupture, while ostensibly far removed from the city, in fact demonstrates the imbrication between country and city through linking metropolitan debates about art, class and politics with the social realities outside London. While spending the summer at Hamlin’s family estate, Wotton Hall, Anne attempts to resolve the anomalous position she occupies in Hamlin’s household (neither really a ward, nor yet officially a fiancée) by turning her role as model/muse into a more productive partnership with Hamlin. She encourages Hamlin to instigate the next revolution in literature, to move away from the ‘false, emasculate, diseased’ style of aestheticism towards a new social realism and a ‘return to nature’ (189). Under her influence, Hamlin writes ‘The Ballad of the Fens’ – a poem with a contemporary domestic setting – but the aesthetic circle, now ensconsed at Wotton Hall, is horrified with the result (‘I don’t know how any man can write a poem about people who are in love and get married’, one poet exclaims; 186). Around the same time, Anne has learned of the extreme social deprivation that exists in the village of Cold Fremley on Hamlin’s estate, where incest is rife due to the ‘degrading effect of being all huddled together,’ with ‘no more sense of right and wrong than cattle’ (244). With the failure of her attempted partnership in his literary career, Anne now tries to secure Walter’s social intervention by proposing industrialisation as the means of social melioration: ‘Of course I’m very ignorant. But I’ve heard that the river ought to be valuable for water-power, because there is no other one near; so I thought the simplest would be to try … to set up a factory there. That would give the people work, and give them ideas of decent living, and then a school would have to be opened.’ The word factory seemed to sear into Hamlin’s nerves.

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‘A factory on that river? On my property? To befoul all that pure and exquisite country with smoke and machine refuse!’ he cried indignantly. (245) Hamlin – an overdetermined figure here as both aesthetic artist and aristocratic landlord – refuses to modernise the village on aesthetic grounds. Positing a relation between city and country just as exploitative as that usually associated with industrial capitalism, Hamlin’s response both reinforces aristocratic right over the use of his land and the authority of the artist to privilege the aesthetic over all other domains: ‘It would make a splendid subject for a poem. I always felt there must be something in that country which should correspond to the tragic look of everything’ (245). Hamlin is then inspired to re-write ‘The Ballad of the Fens’ so that ‘instead of the story of married love’ (269) it describes ‘the lives and sins’ of the people of Cold Fremley (270), and secures the admiration of the aesthetes once again.17 The dispute over Cold Fremley, then, not only signals an irrevocable rupture in the relationship between Anne and Hamlin but between the modernising processes of social and political reform that Anne advocates and the rarefied aesthetic world Hamlin represents. As a result, Anne develops a new response to the modern urban landscape from which Hamlin seeks to escape. The ‘horrors’ of Cold Fremley (223) have made it impossible for Anne to retain the kind of pastoral vision of the countryside she had previously shared with Hamlin; now she re-evaluates the city as a site of aesthetic as well as social meaning: Ever since that memorable conversation about Cold Fremley, beautiful things … poetry, painting, music, romance – which had originally surrounded Hamlin with a sort of luminous emanation in Anne’s eyes – had grown loathsome to her. … She began to take a grim pleasure in that sordid ugliness which had, on her arrival in London, given her such a shock, and to which Hamlin and his friends were always shutting their eyes. The fog, the black ooze, the melancholy monotony of griminess, the hideousness of the men and women in the streets, jarred upon her much less than the beautiful pictures of Italian scenery which Hamlin hung up at Hammersmith. (251) Not only do the drab realities of the urban landscape take on a new aesthetic value for Anne, they also signify a new engagement with


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modernity through the possibilities they present for both personal and social transformation: ‘it was the world in which lay her redemption, and the redemption of Hamlin’ (231). For Anne, alienation is now associated with the (aesthetic) home, rather than the city. Out of a ‘desire to know what was going on in the striving and suffering world outside the strongholds of aestheticism’ (212), Anne forms the resolve: that she must work – work with all her might; for it seemed as if all the thoughts which the people about her refused to think, all the sympathy which they refused to feel, all the work which they refused to do, and all the sacrifices which they refused to make, must all be taken upon herself – as if she alone must bear this terrible weight of rejected responsibilities. So Anne worked. (252) Anne’s mission to ‘work’ – a thoroughly Victorian response to personal and social crisis – seeks to reconcile her working-class background and her new class location through a commitment to urban philanthropy. Her work is at first informed by an extensive programme of self-education, through books and pamphlets, as well as first-hand observation of slums and the lives of urban working people. From an initial suggestion to teach medieval literature at the women’s club (to which Marjery Leigh responds: ‘There’s too much of that sort of thing already … Everyone wants to teach literature’; 167–8), Anne then adopts an increasingly professional approach and, under the influence of Richard, studies political economy and ‘converts’ to positivism. Unlike Richard, however, whose own experience of social advancement through industrial wealth provides the basis of his claim to political agency and social activism, Anne’s commitment to social transformation raises her awareness of her lack of independence and her fervent desire for personal autonomy. Her initial belief that her dramatic experience of social mobility equips her to mediate between privilege and poverty falters in the face of her sense of confinement within gender expectations and the obligation she feels towards Hamlin: [Anne] used, in moments of weakness and weariness of heart, to go over schemes of independence, to indulge in daydreams of selfsupporting liberty. She who, a few months ago, had dreamed of raising the lower classes, of spreading higher knowledge and ideals among them, of awakening the more fortunate parts of society to

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their sense of responsibility, – she whose whole energy had been taken up in silent projects for bettering, no matter how little, the world, bettering the poor by making them think and enjoy, bettering the rich by making them feel; giving the shop-girls of the Women’s Club a glimpse into the world of imagination, and giving Hamlin a glimpse into the world of reality, – she was now thinking of how she might earn her bread, how she might live as a teacher or a governess. (298) The reduction of Anne’s grand social vision to a plan for personal employment seems to renounce the kind of ‘missionary aestheticism’ she earlier espoused and to signal a profound pessimism about the possibility of broader social transformation or the political agency of a woman in her position. Work represents Anne’s hope for escape from the relationship with Hamlin who, although now increasingly preoccupied with Sacha, still binds Anne to a future not of her choosing. Unable to instigate any decisive action, Anne instead opts for self-denial – a familiar feminine temptation, it seems, in response to a thwarted attempt at autonomy.18 Her new asceticism seems based on an implicit desire to cancel out the excesses of the increasingly decadent lifestyle of Hamlin and his friends: ‘Anne had made it a rule for the last two or three months to deprive herself of all luxuries. She did not wish to enjoy everything that she had a right to; she had also a stern pleasure in doing the things most repugnant to her’ (328). This includes a regime of walking rather than taking the carriage provided for her: ‘a walk through the London streets, in murky spring weather, was to Anne’s Italian temper, nurtured with aesthetic delicacy, one of the most disagreeable of expeditions’ (328) but it provides an opportunity for a greater proximity to the urban dispossessed. Anne’s renunciation of aestheticism for a personal asceticism seems like a gesture of defeat, a concession that the inclusive, affective politics of thinking, enjoying and feeling that she had formerly articulated (298) is not possible. In this way, Miss Brown seems to over-polarise what Maltz has argued were ‘complex entanglements between popular and philanthropic aestheticism in practice’ in this period (2006: 3). While some aspects of Richard’s project seems to articulate the joint project of social justice for the poor and the enhancement of everyday life that was a defining feature of missionary aestheticism, the demonising of Hamlin’s aestheticism/decadence insists on a sharp division between political and artistic/aesthetic projects in Miss Brown. Anne’s vision of herself as a possible mediator between art and politics was in fact a role


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undertaken by some women prominent in aesthetic circles (such as the wives of ‘the Souls’; see Maltz 2006: 22, 32). Anne’s identification with the grim realities of metropolitan life and her refusal to dishonour her obligation to Hamlin seems to lead inevitably to a diminished scope for agency in Miss Brown and subsequently sees her becoming an increasingly isolated figure. Unlike the camaraderie associated with the Leigh sisters – and also recorded in historical accounts of privileged women who lived in settlement houses in East London (see Koven 2004) – Anne’s commitment to self-education as a means to personal liberty involves a rigorous regime of private study and self-discipline as a means to gain her ‘great bliss’, ‘a life’s solitude’ (351). Having relinquished social ties (breaking with both Hamlin and Sacha, declining Richard’s marriage proposal), Anne plans to enter ‘Girton or Newnham, where she would train herself to become a teacher in a public school’ (377). By focusing all her energies on education and work, Anne’s Spartan existence does not provide a very appealing picture of feminine independence, but even this project becomes too ambitious; Anne eventually succumbs to ‘nervous prostration from overwork’ (378) and is forced to renounce her goal in order to regain her health. All the possible life narratives for Anne raised over the course of the novel have now been foreclosed: the fairy tale possibility of her marriage to Hamlin; the New Woman fantasy of forging her own way in the world; even the pragmatic solution of a partnership in radical philanthropy through marriage to her cousin. When an ill, addicted Hamlin returns alone from Paris, there seems only one option open to Anne. In a final act of self-renunciation, Anne proposes to Hamlin in order to rescue her benefactor – on the condition that they both leave England and return to Italy. Just as at the opening of the novel when Hamlin had seen Italy as an escape from the difficulties of London life, so it becomes a safe haven again for disillusioned or dissolute modern subjects. Anne’s return to Italy as a wife and nurse to an ailing husband will be, however, a return to a position of service. Thus, like Moths, Miss Brown closes with a damaged male protagonist needing reclamation and a woman whose agency is confined to the domestic realm who retreat together from the complexities of modern metropolitan life. Unlike Ouida’s romance, however, Miss Brown dooms its heroine to a misalliance based solely on duty and self-renunciation which implies the inescapability of class – and gender – roles and duties, despite the flux and upheavals of modernity and the tantalising possibilities represented by modern women such as Mary or Sacha.

4 The New Woman’s ‘Wheels of Daily Existence’

The mobile New Woman was a woman not only moving towards new destinations but also moving away from one location in particular: the home and the many meanings associated with it – as a material space, a domain of labour, a realm of experience, a network of relations and even as England itself. If, for Baudelaire, the quintessential modern subject was one for whom it was ‘an immense joy to set up house … amid the ebb and flow of movement’ (1863/1972: 399–400), there could be no such conflation between home and mobility for women in late-Victorian modernity. Rather than seeing the New Woman novel as ‘the logical heir to mid-Victorian domestic fiction’ (Langland 1995: 244), I will argue that vocation-seeking heroines in these novels mark an attempt to disrupt the association between women and domestic femininity. The contradictions and conflicts between women’s domestic location and their aspirations are, moreover, a means by which the cultural agency of the middle-class woman is opened to question and contestation in these novels. Conventional bourgeois femininity had been a means by which Victorian women could exercise agency through discursive practices centring on the home, which played a crucial role in middle-class hegemony (Langland 1995: 9), but when women sought entry into areas beyond the home, a domestic model of agency was not always applicable, with the result that their activities could be seen as out of place and illegitimate (see Poovey 1989: 78). Both The Daughters of Danaus and Red Pottage feature characters that seek a wider sphere of action in the world – whether through urban philanthropy or artistic creativity – which takes them outside conventional domesticity. In the process, the heroines encounter various forms of opposition from representatives of social institutions (such as the church) who question not only their right to inhabit such an expanded sphere, but also the veracity of the knowledge that their new 78

The New Woman’s ‘Wheels of Daily Existence’ 79

perspective makes possible. In a sense, then, these New Woman novels do not simply explore the desirability of an expanded sphere for women but ask the question: what counts as valid experience – understood as itself discursively produced (Scott 1992: 24) – for the formation of a subject who will be a full and legitimate participant in modernity? Given the discursive association between domesticity and femininity in earlier Victorian literature and culture, it is not surprising that New Woman writers like Cholmondeley and Caird opposed domesticity to women’s desire for autonomy, creativity and occupation – a desire often represented by the desire for movement.1 The new opportunities for mobility and the new spaces and locations encountered on the way meant – quite literally – that new perspectives became possible that may not have been glimpsed from the nursery or drawing-room. While the modern city may seem an obvious location for witnessing new forms of social life and narrating new stories of female subjectivity, urban experience was not the only source for such narratives. As Parsons notes, New Woman writers, ‘although themselves public urban personalities, rarely concentrated on the city as a subject for their fiction’ (2000: 83). While Parsons attributes this to a ‘continued sense of restraint in urban space’ (2000: 83), I would prefer to emphasise the possibilities that a wider range of landscapes and locations opened up for the exploration of women’s agency.2 In the two novels discussed here, the New Woman inhabits regionally diverse landscapes and moves between country and city spaces – each of which offer differing opportunities for participation or containment. The spaces that Cholmondeley and Caird’s heroines associate with greater freedoms are not ultimately found in metropolitan London but beyond England, in spaces that becomes conflated with the idea of ‘home’ in these novels.3 In examining women’s mobility in The Daughters of Danaus and Red Pottage I am interested, then, in the ‘emotional geographies’ of women’s lives (Bondi, Davidson and Smith 2005). I will consider the emotional responses to locations and spaces in these novels and the forms of affect associated with modes of mobility between spaces as well as the links or disjunctures between them. Flight from the home as a site of negative affect may be contrasted with the positive feelings attached to flight or travel itself: emotions deriving from new experiences of freedom, new types of pleasure or new forms of social relationships. As Sara Ahmed has argued, What moves us, what makes us feel, is also that which holds us in place, or gives us a dwelling place. Hence movement does not cut the

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body off from the ‘where’ of its inhabitance, but connects bodies to other bodies: attachment takes place through movement, through being moved by the proximity of others. (2004: 11) A desire to escape the home, then, is never simply a desire to be elsewhere – although it is that – but also a desire for new articulations of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. For both Caird and Cholmondeley, the New Woman’s negotiation of the possibilities of modernity – the promise of artistic expression in a public domain, or freely negotiated personal relationships, for instance – is closely associated with unfettered movement. If neither novel can offer a totally optimistic closure for the New Woman – in particular, through the failure of heroines in both novels to gain a public for their creative works – they emphasise the importance of mobility and the experiences of different locations for the formation of new forms of female subjectivity. I will argue that these novels do not simply reflect the changes in the social experience of middle-class women – charting a move from the home into a wider sphere of employment, education, politics or culture – but need to be seen as a discursive repositioning of the female subject in a context where new areas of social experience were authorising new forms of knowledge. Mobility – both social and physical – may not always be achievable by the women in these novels, but it becomes a symbol of a wider agency, as well as literally enabling women to move between and across a broader and more diverse range of social sites and spaces, while allowing them to form new proximities.

The Daughters of Danaus The weeks passed in rapid monotony, filled with detail and leaving no mark behind them, no sign of movement or progress … The details of practical life and petty duties sprouted up at every step. If they were put aside, even for a moment, the wheels of daily existence became clogged and then all opportunity was over. (190–1) The negative depiction of the middle-class woman’s home and family life in The Daughters of Danaus (1894) is consistent with Caird’s critique of marriage in her political essays for which she became well known – or notorious – in this period.4 Her phrase the ‘wheels of daily existence’ captures the monotony and drudgery of daily life in an image of


immobility: clogged wheels which don’t turn, choked by weeds that seem to spring up overnight. The image of the eternal proliferation of domestic tasks is of course also reiterated in the classical reference of the novel’s title: the daughters of Danaus were eternally doomed to draw water with sieves as punishment for murdering their husbands. This imagery, although heavy-handed, powerfully conveys the negative emotions – resentment, boredom, anger and depression – associated with the routines of home life, that are marked by a lack of feeling or connection with other bodies inhabiting the same space to whom one is nevertheless duty-bound. Disconnection of this nature invariably leads to the association of the home with alienation rather than with belonging.5 The ‘temporal regulation’ of Victorian women (Murphy 2001: 156–7) was one means of centring women’s lives on the home through the demands of daily routines of domestic labour and social responsibilities. Imagery of movement and escape fantasies are, then, an obvious way to counter such spatio-temporal limitation and explains the appeal of mobility to Caird’s heroine. The Daughters of Danaus opens in the Scottish Highlands, location of the family home of the Fullertons, which includes two improbably named daughters: Algitha and Hadria, the heroine. The latter’s name – alluding to the emperor and his wall – connotes the liminal status of Hadria, who will throughout the novel be precariously located between Scotland and England, since the two landscapes signify different notions of place (both natural and social) and evoke emotional responses varying from consolation to alienation. Hadria is much more tied to place than her sister Algitha, who early in the novel escapes the family home – and its traditional expectations of daughters – for a life in London as a philanthropic worker: ‘I don’t want to pose as a philanthropist … though I honestly do desire to be of service. I want to spread my wings. And why should I not? Nobody turns pale when Ernest [their brother] wants to spread his. How do I know what life is like, or how best to use it, if I remain satisfied with my present ignorance? … Of course, the truly nice and womanly thing to do, is to remain at home, waiting to be married. I have elected to be unwomanly.’ (31) Algitha’s equation of home with ignorance and feminine conformity is matched by Hadria’s growing awareness of the constraints of place, where formerly she had felt a strong affinity with the wild mountain

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landscape. Following the rise of Romantic tourism in the nineteenth century, places like the Scottish Highlands had been figured as ‘privileged spaces exempt from the boring routines and hampering contingencies of ordinary life’ (Dekker 2005: 3). Such new emotional geographies were derived from new mobilities: it was the passing tourist who could derive an aesthetic and sensory experience from newly seen landscapes – in contrast to the more utilitarian perspective of the local inhabitant for whom the land was deeply imbricated in socio-economic structures and relationships (Urry 2005: 81). Hadria, as the daughter of a wealthy landowner, is placed squarely in the category of the Romantic observer: she is ‘A passionate lover of Nature’, much given to ‘solitary rambles over the country’ (49) for whom the landscape is exclusively a domain of subjective, aesthetic experience. Caird’s own Anglo-Scottish background may inform the dual perspective on the imaginative geography of the Scottish landscape, which is seen not only as ‘home’, exerting a strong emotional pull on Hadria throughout the novel, but also represented in terms familiar to her predominantly English middle-class readers as a sublime setting in marked contrast to England’s ‘tamed and highly humanised landscape’ (Morgan 2001: 62).6 Such imaginative geographies are, of course, both classed and gendered: the leisure traveller did not see landscape as a domain of work, unless it too was incorporated into the aesthetic vision (Wordsworth’s solitary reaper, for instance), and a cathectic landscape could also be associated with feminine sexuality or maternity. The limitations of Hadria’s aestheticised view of the landscape of home becomes apparent as she begins to feel ‘resentment against these familiar sights and sounds, because they were the boundaries of her horizon’ (48). The surrounding mountains – often associated in Scottish travel writing with the freedom and independence attributed to a Scottish national character (Morgan, 2001: 75–6) – instead become a symbol of Hadria’s enclosure and confinement by the duties of an unmarried daughter. At this point the other significant female character in the novel is introduced: a mobile, modern woman who is similarly rambling through the Highland landscape. Valeria du Prel – a radical novelist of her day – will serve as a counterpoint to Hadria throughout the novel; at once a friend and confidante of the younger woman and noted for her unconventional views and independence, Valeria will also warn Hadria about the cost of eschewing traditional feminine duties. Valeria’s first sighting of Hadria triggers ‘a sense of dread’ as she experiences a kind of presentiment of Hadria’s fate (49), while Hadria feels an immediate enthusiastic attachment to the older woman, kindling in her


a revived desire to travel, especially to the south of Europe, which she sees as a place of relative freedom compared to her northern home (58). For Valeria, however, a life of travel and its vicissitudes has left her resigned to life’s mutabilities that she warns Hadria against: ‘Most people who live always in one place see the changes creeping on so gradually that they scarcely feel them, but with me this universal flux displays itself pitilessly, I cannot escape. Go where I will, there is something to measure the changes by. A shoal of yellow leaves whispers to me of seasons long ago, and the old past days, with their own intimate character that nothing ever repeats, flash before me again with the vividness of yesterday.’ … ‘Yours must have been a wonderful life!’ said Hadria. ‘Yes, … life has been to me a series of intense emotions, as it will be to you, I fear.’ (61) Mobility, then, is figured ambiguously as both desirable and dangerous for women from the outset of The Daughters of Danaus. While Algitha escapes the rugged isolation and constricting duties of home for an expanded sphere of action in London, the equally independent Valeria is oppressed by ‘this inexorable coming and going of people and things’, a consequence of her ‘roving life’ (60). Positioned between these options, Hadria – a gifted musician and composer – feels powerless to escape the inertia of familial expectations until a marriage proposal seems to break the impasse. Significantly, however, Hadria can only accept the marriage proposal under the influence of the movement of dance, which has already been strongly associated with her affinity with Celtic music and myth.7 Through the heightened sensory experience that dancing brings to Hadria – bordering on a trance-like state – the idea of movement becomes synonymous with passivity rather than with agency, and Hadria feels powerless to refuse Hubert’s proposal despite the subsequent advice of others (136–42). Such ambiguous responses to mobility capture something of the paradox of women’s lives in The Daughters of Danaus, as simultaneously monotonous and unchanging yet full of hectic activity: a paradox often rendered in imagery of giddy movement. When considering the lives of her female acquaintances, Hadria concludes: ‘They were all spinning round and round, in a dizzy little circle, all whirling and toiling and troubling, to no purpose’ (467). Immediately following the dance and Hubert’s proposal, there is an abrupt shift of time and space at the opening of the next chapter, as

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if Hadria has been wakened from her dream-like state and whisked into a future not of her making. Gradually the reader is made aware that five years has passed since the conclusion of the previous chapter and Hadria is now married with two sons and residing in an archetypal English village (complete with ‘grey stone church’, ‘quiet cottages’ and a ‘little ale-house’; 146), which ‘seemed as if it had forgotten to change with the rest of the country, for at least a hundred years’ (145). The incongruity of a New Woman like Hadria in such an apparently timeless setting is further emphasised by the description of her daily walk to the village graveyard. The villagers are puzzled by this habit: Why she went to the churchyard could not be imagined: one would think she had a family buried, she who was, ‘as one might say, a stranger to the place,’ and could not be supposed to have any interest in the graves, which held for her nor kith nor kin! (147) Despite the villagers’ belief that Hadria is out of place, her connection with this site is emphasised through her dress (in russet tones, in keeping with the autumn setting) and her contemplative mood (shown by her expression of ‘suffering’ and ‘longing’, and the fact that ‘she carried a book, keeping a forefinger between the pages to mark a passage’; 147). Hadria’s ‘fondness for the society of the dead’ was of course consonant with a broader cultural impulse (linked most famously with Gray), which had rendered country churchyards a ‘favoured haunt’ of ramblers (Dekker 2005: 2), but while her daily walk offers respite from the dreariness of home by recourse to an aestheticised space of retreat, it also fosters feelings of ‘homesickness’ – ‘a longing for the rougher, bleaker scenery of the North’ (172) – as the English landscape seems to mirror the monotonies of her married life: When the occasional visitors had left, life in the village settled down to its normal level, or more accurately, to its normal flatness as regarded general contours, and its petty inequalities in respect to local detail. It reminded Hadria of the landscape which stretched in quiet long lines to the low horizon, while close at hand, the ground fussed and fretted itself into minor ups and downs of no character. … The tired spirit translated the homely English country, so deeply reposeful in spirit, into an image of dull unrest.8 (172)


Moreover, Hadria associates the tamed landscape of the English countryside with a domesticated and maternal – but thoroughly patriarchal – Nature, described in perhaps the most extreme imagery in the novel: It was the estimable and domestic qualities of Nature that presented themselves: Nature in her most maternal and uninspired mood – Mother earth submissive to the dictatorship of man, permitting herself to be torn, and wounded, and furrowed, and harrowed at his pleasure … The sight had an exasperating effect upon Hadria. Its symbolism haunted her. The calm, sweet English landscape affected her at times with a sort of disgust. (172–3) Hadria’s revulsion with the domesticated English landscape signals her feeling of complicity in such essentialist conceptions of femininity. If Hadria’s village setting and Romantic penchant for graveyards renders her a somewhat ambiguous modern subject, it soon emerges that the spaces of her daily life at Red House are similarly fraught with potential contradiction.9 The village of Craddock Dene, for instance, may not be the timeless space it first appears, as we are told that Hadria’s husband ‘went every day to town to attend to his legal business, and returned by the evening train to the bosom of his family’ (146). A village linked by a regular train service to the city was one of the markers of the rise of suburbia, a significant socio-cultural development in late Victorian modernity that rendered the suburb as a liminal space between town and country. Often read as an entrenchment of the gendered separate spheres due to the absence of men on weekdays, suburban spaces could be understood as either a kind of prison or a counter-sphere by their female inhabitants.10 In The Daughters of Danaus, Craddock Dene, though clearly associated with the past through its architecture, also represents an ambiguous modernity through the mobility of (some of) its inhabitants. Significantly, in The Daughters of Danaus, the only space that can be constructed as a counter-sphere posed against patriarchal domesticity is outside the home, in the garden. Gardens later played an important role in the conceptualisation of suburbia as an enhanced mode of everyday life to be distinguished from urban living (see Cunningham 2004, Alexander 2002). In Caird’s novel, it is the garden of an unoccupied house, the Priory, which becomes marked as a space outside the conventions of ordinary life and endowed with a kind of utopian possibility.

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Significantly, the Priory belongs to Professor Fortescue – Hadria’s ethical guide and the only exemplary man in the novel – and while the Professor is a regular visitor to the neighbourhood, the Priory has stood empty since the death of his wife. The extensive grounds and position of this site between the homes of other characters make the Priory garden a desirable meeting point: It frequently happened that Hadria and Miss du Prel [also a regular visitor at Red House] came across Lady Engleton and her guests, in the Priory garden. From being accidental, the meetings had become intentional. … Lady Engleton and Mrs. Temperley [Hadria] alternately sent tea and fruit to the terrace, on the days of meeting, and there the little company would spend the afternoon serenely, surrounded by the beauties of the garden with its enticing avenues, its chaunting birds, its flushes of bloom, and its rich delicious scents. (223–4) At these summer afternoon gatherings a kind of alternative community evolves, jokingly dubbed ‘Griffin-land’ by one of the participants (226) in an allusion to the stone griffins ornamenting the gardens. At Valeria’s instigation, it is agreed that ‘All local and practical topics were to be dropped’, leaving space for free speech and intellectual kite-flying instead. For Valeria, such gatherings are a means of challenging the limited forms of sociality to which the group is usually constrained: ‘Why do we, in the nineteenth century, starve ourselves of these delicate joys?’ cried Valeria. ‘Why do we so seldom leave our stupid pre-occupations and open our souls to the sun, to the spring, to the gentle invitations of gardens, to the charm of conversation? We seem to know nothing of the serenities, the urbanities of life.’ ‘We live too fast; we are too much troubled about outward things – cooks and dressmakers, Mrs Temperley,’ said Professor Theobald. (225–6) Professor Theobald’s reference to cooks here is a deliberate jibe at Hadria, who had previously asserted her inability to be freed from domestic concerns: ‘She said that the kitchen-boiler was out of order, and yet she had to take part in these highly cultivated conversations and smile, as she complained, with that kitchen-boiler gnawing at her vitals’ (223). The contrast between Valeria’s romantic ideals and the mundane preoccupations of her housebound hostess is a reminder that


the ‘serenities’ of life depend on the invisibility of the labour that supplies them. Despite the charms of the liminal space represented by the garden, then, which will figure significantly in the novel’s conclusion, Caird never equates landscape with nature: all spaces are social spaces and as such discursively constructed by human actors immersed in networks of gender, class and other relations of power. The Priory garden, for instance, takes on some of the signification of the English country house, as a locus of history and as distinctive to the English concept of rural life (Morgan 2001: 77).11 The Priory is indeed a house with a history, but one which subtly but insistently signals the novel’s distance from a ‘Tory view of landscape’ (Everett 1994) in which the country house provided an image of harmonious and hierarchical social relations as the basis of community. The Priory, like the graveyard Hadria visits daily, is a site closely associated with the suicide of women who haunt the narrative of The Daughters of Danaus: (the unnamed) Mrs Fortescue, who had first eloped with another man, before ‘Seized with remorse, she had returned home to kill herself’ (196), and Ellen Jervis, the village schoolteacher who had borne an illegitimate daughter (as a result of a liaison with Professor Theobald, it will be subsequently revealed). Hadria is implicitly linked to these two women through her regular visits to these unfrequented spaces: not only do her daily graveyard walks become visits to Ellen’s grave but she also goes to the Priory house to play the piano in the room where Mrs Fortescue died. The deserting wife and the abandoned mother represent possible trajectories of her own life (independence and sexuality outside marriage followed by suicide), while further emphasising her increasing social isolation.12 Through Hadria, then, two sites of cultural value – the elegiac graveyard and the country house – are positioned ambiguously as sites of potential solace and escape even as they are also testimony to the fatal strictures on other women’s lives. That the everyday life of conventional femininity is a kind of living death for Hadria is repeatedly borne out in spatio-temporal imagery, which combines immurement and constriction with repetition and inertia. Hadria feels like a sapling forced to grow in an inhospitable crack between rocks: ‘I think most women have to grow in a cranny. It is generally known as their Sphere’, she says (271). Her awareness of the limitations of her position is always situated within a broader awareness of the common location of women in society: caught within a web of social obligations while they fruitlessly try to negotiate space for self. It is fitting, then, that the musical composition that

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marks Hadria’s life work is called ‘Futility’ – an avant-garde piece that her listeners find discordant. In her study of the social construction of boredom, Patricia Spacks argues that boredom was ‘an idea that became both useful and necessary only at a relatively recent historical moment’ when an emphasis on the emotional effects of experience emerged, and other categories of interpretation no longer carried the same cultural legitimacy (1995: 9–10). In the case of women, boredom was historically associated with ‘selfishness as opposed to the benevolence that engages one in meaningful action’ (Spacks 1995: x).13 Hadria’s unorthodox composition is an expression of this ‘selfishness’: a desire for agency rather than futility and an attempt to render it meaningful through its transformation into an artistic form. Denied public expression, Hadria instead plans another form of ‘meaningful action’. If women’s boredom was often a way of disguising desire (Spacks 1995: x; see also Phillips 1993: 83), one solution could be to form a desire for another place, to locate this desire elsewhere, where space for freedom, creativity and leisure seems more attainable. Hadria thus decides to escape Red House and study music in Paris. As the most common destination for intellectual exiles (Kramer 1988: 6), Paris is a fitting location for the New Woman seeking voluntary exile from home and family. Hadria’s flight to Paris by train and boat is the most frequently discussed chapter of the book, with critics drawing attention to this chapter’s disruption of conventional narrative technique, its protomodernist style, rendition of temporality and its visualisation of the landscape: The speed was glorious. Back flashed field and hill and copse. … Back flew iterative telegraph posts with Herculean swing, into the Past, looped together in rhythmic movement, marking the pulses of old Time. On, with rack and roar, into the mysterious Future. One could sit at the window and watch the machinery of Time’s foundry at work; the hammers of his forge beating, beating, the wild sparks flying, the din and chaos whirling round one’s bewildered brain; – Past becoming Present, Present melting into Future, before one’s eyes. To sit and watch the whirring wheels; to think ‘Now it is thus and thus; presently another slice of earth and sky awaits me’ – ye Gods, it is not to be realized! … Thoughts ran on rhythmically, in the steady, flashing movement through verdant England. … A rattle under a bridge, a roar through a tunnel, and on again, through Kentish orchards. A time of blossoming. Disjointed, delicious impressions followed one another


in swift succession, often superficially incoherent, but threaded deep, in the stirred consciousness, on a silver cord.14 (294–5) In this passage, modern mobility is represented as an unequivocal pleasure and the train is an agent of transformation for a New Woman: a means to a new life and different mode of experience for which Hadria relinquishes home, children and convention.15 The evocative visual and aural impressions which are recorded on a journey through diverse regional and national landscapes – as Hadria passes from English to French countryside, village to city, train to boat and train again – privilege the consciousness of the observing subject (a feature often seen as characteristic of modernity).16 However, Peter Osborne’s contention that nineteenth-century travel was undertaken in enclosures which were effectively ‘mobile homes from which the world could be observed … in detached and leisurely mastery through the frame of the window’ (2000: 61) perhaps assumes a masculine traveller because for Hadria the train journey is a heightened sensory experience dramatically different from her response to domestic space. The mobile vantage point of the rail passenger signifies for Hadria not a detached or appropriative position of privilege but a means of greater engagement and connection with the landscape through which the train passes (300–1). Through this evocation of the railway as ‘the technological sublime’ (Revill, 2004: 86), Caird presents a distinctly modern mode of experience as a new kind of engaged spectatorship for women, a means of observing everyday life from different and shifting perspectives not possible from within the confines of domestic interiors (see Parejo Vadillo 2005: 14). The intensification and multiplication of sensory responses, such as Hadria experiences on her journey, are a fitting precursor to her new life in Paris – itself the location for a new kind of urban perception Simmel (1903/1950) associated with modern life more generally in this period, due to the increase and acceleration of sensory stimulation. Such a multiplication of sensory impressions could result in an inability to process or respond to stimuli. In Hadria’s case, however, the immediacy and intensity of experience in a new context involves a heightened sense of awareness and a greater attention to detail, as even the description of her Paris apartment captures: Half of one of the long windows had been set open, and the sounds of the rolling of vehicles over the smooth asphalt, mingled with

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those of voices, were coming up, straight and importunate, into the dainty bedroom. The very sounds seemed nearer and clearer in this keen-edged land. The bed stood in one corner, canopied with white and blue; a thick carpet gave a sense of luxury and deadened the tramp of footsteps; a marble mantel-piece was surmounted by a mirror, and supported a handsome bronze clock and two bronze ornaments. The furniture was of solid mahogany. A nameless French odour pervaded the atmosphere, delicate, subtle, but unmistakeable. And out of the open window, one could see a series of other lighted windows, all of exactly the same tall graceful design, opening in the middle by the same device and the same metal handle that had to be turned in order to open or close the window. (303) Significantly, the interiors of Hadria’s home at Craddock Dene are never detailed or individualised in this way, as if the pleasurable experience of space and time for the self brings a fresh perspective to her environment, which is rendered through a multi-sensory perception of sight, sound, smell and even touch (the feel of the carpet, the turning of the window handle). Whether inside or out, as passenger or pedestrian, Hadria’s synaesthetic response to Paris represents a transformed subjectivity, as she takes on new roles and activities outside the constraints and futility of her English domestic life (see also Heilmann 2004: 231). The ‘temporal freedom’ (Murphy 2001: 172) that Hadria experiences is closely linked to the abundant urban cultural life evident on the streets and boulevards.17 Enjoying the mobility of the flâneuse, Hadria’s wanderings through Paris seem resonant of Baudelaire: Just at first, it was a sheer impossibility to do anything but bask and bathe in the sunny present, to spend the days in wandering incredulously through vernal Paris, over whose bursting freshness and brilliancy the white clouds seemed to be driven, with the same joy of life. … Sallying forth from the pension, Hadria would sometimes pause, for a moment, at the corner of the street, where it opened into the Place de la Concorde, irresolute, because of the endless variety of possible ways to turn, and places to visit. She seldom made definite plans the day before, unless it were for the pleasure of changing them. (304–5) The link between leisure and pleasure in this passage underlines the stark contrast with her life at Red House: here, solitude is not equated


with alienation but with a pleasurable self-awareness and Hadria is a fuller participant in modern life in Paris than had ever been possible in Britain. When she is unable to find a publisher for her musical compositions even in France, Hadria supports herself through writing features on Parisian life for the English press through which she is able to express the marked contrasts between living in England and the French life she is experiencing.18 Hadria’s autonomous mobility is, however, short-lived; even Paris cannot be a permanent refuge for the New Woman, it seems. Worn down by the demands of her musical training, her lack of success as a composer and consequent financial difficulties, Hadria is finally compelled to return home by the serious illness of her mother. Curiously it is ultimately not her maternal duties that force her return but her perceived failings as a daughter.19 Her sombre journey home is consistent with the sentiments of other women travellers in the nineteenth century for whom a return to England was a return to a ‘home that was no home to me’ (Fountaine qtd in Morgan 2001: 174). Back at Red House, Hadria is faced with a substantially increased web of domestic obligations due to her mother’s illness and her father’s bankruptcy. With no time for her music, she succumbs to apathy and depression. Like other New Woman novels, The Daughters of Danaus can offer no triumphal conclusion for its protagonist and the narrative inertia of the latter third of the novel seems to reflect the heroine’s increasingly depressive state. Even the melodramatic developments resulting from the temptation to have an adulterous affair with a man who is subsequently revealed to be the father of Ellen Jervis’s child cannot shake the dominant tone of futility and boredom that characterises Hadria’s narrative. While heroines like Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth will see only one possible resolution to such stultifying circumstances, Caird offers a third alternative to love or death which borders on, without quite being, acceptance. In this ambivalent resolution, the location of the Priory and the characters of Valeria and Professor Fortescue are central. After considering and then rejecting either an affair or suicide as an escape from her everyday life, Hardia resumes her habit of playing the piano in the Professor’s empty house, where she experiences a kind of epiphany one day while contemplating the garden: Hadria raised her head at last, and her eyes wandered out to the sweet old garden, decked in the miraculous hues of spring. The unutterable loveliness brought, for a second, a strange, inconsequent sense of peace; it seemed like a promise and a message from

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an unknown god. … And then, in fantastic images, Hadria seemed to see a panorama of her own life and the general life pass before her, in all their incongruity and confusion. The great mass of that life showed itself as prose, because the significance of things had not been grasped or suspected; but, here and there, the veil was pierced … and the darkness of our daily, pompous, careworn, ridiculous little existence made painfully visible. (479) This sentimental epiphany could be seen as a refusal of the collective political solutions to women’s grievances that Hadria had openly discussed throughout the novel. It is at this point, however, that the Professor returns to the Priory (to die, of course) and in the unheimliche space of the Priory Hadria, Valeria and Professor Fortescue are effectively isolated from the rest of their social world, bound together by their shared ideals of social alternatives and bonds of affection outside the narrow possibilities of conventional romance or family.20 With the Professor’s death (in a room in which the boundary between house and garden seems to dissolve), Hadria cannot escape the mundane realities of everyday life but the novel attempts to re-present the New Woman’s spatio-temporal location as ‘in-between’, occupying a liminal space between a patriarchal past and a yet-to-be realised feminist future. The conclusion of The Daughters of Danaus does not offer an optimistic closure of achievement and autonomy for the New Woman but rather implies that an emphasis on subjective experience may allow the mundane to be re-framed in more hopeful ways. Near the end of the novel, Hadria recalls a trip to Italy as a girl: ‘It was a short but vivid experience that had tinged her life, leaving a memory and a longing that never died. The movement of travel, the sense of change and richness offered to eye and mind, remained with her always’ (423). While mobility does not always bring about the escape or alternative reality for women that travel to exotic places seems to promise, it does provide the kind of vivid sensory experience that is linked to an enhanced subjectivity in the novel. The emotional geographies of women’s lives in The Daughters of Danaus figure women’s location in modernity as a complex and shifting negotiation of past, present and future in which a sense of place both grounds women’s experience and moves them towards new proximities, new connections with self, others and the future.


Red Pottage In Red Pottage, Mary Cholmondeley’s bestselling novel of 1899, the tensions between mobility, work and domesticity for the New Woman are explored through a dual narrative – each featuring a heroine positioned ambiguously in relation to bourgeois femininity. One narrative strand features the familiar New Woman motif of the woman as suffering genius: Hester Gresley, a novelist who is intellectually stifled by living in a rural parsonage with her brother and his family. The second and much more melodramatic narrative concerns the new heiress Rachel West and her doomed romance with a man who is trapped into a suicide pact as the result of a previous adulterous liaison. The lifelong friendship between the two women links these disparate narratives and is also a means by which Red Pottage explores what in another context Donna Haraway calls ‘situated knowledges’ (1991: 188) – in this case knowledge derived from women’s embodied observation and experience in new locations outside the bourgeois home. Like other New Woman novels, Red Pottage will refuse the resolution of the bourgeois marriage plot, privileging instead the relationship between the two women and ending with their departure from England on a shared journey to antipodean alternatives. By offering a critique of bourgeois domesticity as the most valued realm of experience, Red Pottage consistently represents married women in a negative light because their claims to moral and epistemological authority derive solely from their domestic experience. Two wives, for instance, are described as being conscious that, like Celia Chettam … since the birth of their first child their opinions respecting literature, politics and art had acquired additional weight and solidity, and that a wife and mother could pronounce with decision on important subjects where a spinster would do well to hold her peace. Each was fond of saying, ‘As a married woman I think this or that’.21 One partial exception is Cholmondeley’s more sympathetic portrayal of Hester’s sister-in-law Minna, which emphasises the constraints experienced by the bourgeois domestic woman (her physical decline due to repeated childbirths, the demands of childcare and her anxieties over an inadequate household budget). Minna’s conventional views and

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deference to her husband’s authority, it is implied, may be directly attributed to exhaustion and social isolation rather than to an inherent docility. The repeated failure of Hester and Minna to reach any lasting rapprochement, however, signals the wide gulf of misunderstanding which exists between married and single women in the novel, with little hope of solidarity existing between women – even of the same class – because of their disparities in perspective and experience. Other married women variously patronise, overlook or plot against one or both of the heroines who, as single women (and even despite Rachel’s wealth), are at the mercy of matrons and the social forms they impose. In this context, Cholmondeley’s comparison of these wives with Celia Chettam – one of many allusions to George Eliot’s novels throughout Red Pottage – is significant as Cholmondeley implies an Eliotian web of social networks and relationships in which the possibility of authentic connection is tenuous, and suggesting that an irretrievable rupture, even between siblings, may easily occur.22 The fixed, domestic location of wives and mothers in Red Pottage, then, is contrasted with Hester and Rachel’s position, as the two women each have a significant but distinct arena of experience that has placed them outside the parameters of middle-class family life. Hester is a published novelist while Rachel has experienced a solitary life of working poverty in East London for six years, prior to an unexpected inheritance that returned her to the wealth of her childhood. Interestingly, their domains of experience overlap, as it was Rachel’s East End life that formed the subject of Hester’s first novel, An Idyll of East London. The depiction of a middle-class woman’s perspective on life in the East End provides a means of exploring the significance of female urban mobility through middle-class philanthropy in this period. If, as discussed in Chapter 2, Margaret Hale’s London rambling goes largely un-narrated (and un-narratable?) in North and South, such experience is much more central to the narrative of Red Pottage, even as its status and legitimacy is repeatedly questioned. In one sense, this earlier phase of Rachel’s life reproduces the experience of working among the poor promoted by women such as Octavia Hill from the 1860s onwards. By the late nineteenth century, it has been estimated that at least twenty thousand salaried and half a million voluntary women were at work in East London (Walkowitz 1992: 53). Women such as Emmeline Pethick Lawrence, Margot Asquith, Margaret Nevinson and of course Beatrice Webb continued in the tradition of Hill who had coordinated female district visitors to act as rent


collectors and home inspectors (Walkowitz 1992: 54). As Judith Walkowitz has argued, ‘an army of intrepid women of the upper and middle classes … went slumming in search of adventure, selfdiscovery, and meaningful work’, and helped to generate a ‘new urban female style’ from the 1880s – a way of being at home in the city constituted by East End philanthropy as well as by West End shopping (1992: 53, 46).23 The work of these fin-de-siècle women, however, diverged significantly from Hill’s original project in that their work was professionalised rather than being an adjunct to lives defined by domestic duties (Nord 1995: 190). Beatrice Webb’s work as a rent collector at Katherine Buildings, for instance, through which she compiled case studies to analyse the structural causes of the poverty she observed, had no precedent in traditional feminine charitable activities (Nord 1995: 189). While the conditions under which such women worked and sometimes lived would have been distasteful to middle-class sensibilities, the women often described a sense of exhilaration and adventure in the greater mobility and social authority that their work afforded them, as well as the relative freedoms they enjoyed as unmarried women living away from their family homes. Margaret Nevinson, for instance, recorded that the two years she worked as a rent collector and lived in Whitechapel were ‘full of interest, change and excitement. I never remember one dull moment during the [time] we lived there’ (qtd in Walkowitz 1992: 57). Despite their own sense of departure from conventional feminine roles, however, as middle-class women their work was still complicit with a class-based paternalism, placing them in the ambiguous position of seeking to assert their right to work in the public domain even as that work necessarily invoked a discourse of (bourgeois) domesticity in their interventions into the lives of working-class families.24 As middle-class women, these slum-dwellers were also distinguished from their neighbours through signifiers of bourgeois feminine identity (such as dress, speech or posture) that would have emphasised rather than elided class differences through the very residential proximity by which these women sought to bridge the social chasm. Such distinctions similarly characterised Rachel’s East London life in Red Pottage: while not chosen as an adventure but imposed by necessity, her mode of living still clearly differentiated her from her neighbours for whom she could be either a Lady Bountiful figure or a competitor for scant employment opportunities. Living ‘by the work of her hands among

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those poor’ through earning ‘a meagre living by type-writing’ (26), Rachel is nevertheless forced to confront the fact that her labour deprived others of their livelihood: Rachel had just come in wet and tired, bringing with her a roll of manuscript to be transcribed. A woman waiting for her on the endless stone stairs had cursed her for taking the bread out of her mouth. ‘He always employed me until you came,’ she shrieked, shaking her fist at her, ‘and now he gives it all to you because you’re younger and better looking.’ (28) The dramatic shift in Rachel’s position – from wealthy childhood in Portman Square to an impoverished room in the ‘great rabbit warren’ of Museum Buildings (27) – gives her a privileged insight into the class conflict that she now recognises as the basis of society. After her encounter with the unemployed woman, Rachel reflects: ‘If any one had told me … when I was rich, that I lived on the flesh and blood of my fellow creatures, that my virtue and ease and pleasures were bought by their degradation, and toil and pain, I should not have believed it, and I should have been angry. If I had been told that the clothes I wore, the food I ate, the pen I wrote with, the ink I used, the paper I wrote on – all these, and everything I touched, from my soap to my matchbox, especially my matchbox, was the result of sweated labour, I should not have believed it, I should have laughed. But yet it is so. If I had not been rich once myself I should think as all these people do, that the rich are devils incarnate to let such things go on. They have the power to help us. We have none to help ourselves. But they never use it. The rich grind the poor for their luxuries with their eyes shut, and we grind each other for our daily bread with our eyes open.’ (28) Despite Rachel’s usage of the first-person plural to identify herself with the working class through their shared exploitation – in the process denying any agency to this section of society (‘We have [no power] to help ourselves’) – her solidarity with them is only temporary: it is as much due to a physical contiguity as a shared economic position. After her surprise inheritance restores her to her ‘rightful’ social position – and address – her advocacy of the rights and grievances of the working


class may make Rachel an uncomfortable presence at society dinner parties but she seems to revert with great ease to the occupation of London heiress (leaving the reader to speculate on the source of the clothes she wore and the food she ate). Rachel West does not belong in the East, however much insight into the realities of late Victorian capitalism she gained there. Rachel’s bifurcated experience, then, divided between two distinct geographical districts of London, does not seem to offer any possibility for re-connecting such divisions, nor does it imply any kind of future political intervention into the social conflicts she lamented. Rather, her experience is (re)figured as suffering, a quality easily recoverable into a culturally valued form of feminine identity. It is in fact Rachel’s performance of an exemplary femininity that links the two otherwise distinct phases of her life, as can be seen in the household rituals she still performs on the day she leaves Museum Buildings: on a mild April day, … Rachel brushed and folded away in the little painted chest of drawers her few threadbare clothes, and put the boots – which the cobbler whose wife she had nursed had patched for her – under the shelf which held her few cups and plates. … And she washed her seven coarse handkerchiefs, and put them in the washstand drawer. And then she raked out the fire and cleaned the grate, and set the room in order. It was quickly done. … The little room which had looked so alien when she came to it six years ago had become a home. (31) Leaving behind the possessions that marked her East End life, Rachel casts off the working-class identity imposed by occupation and location; through the social mobility her inheritance affords her, she can easily be transformed (back) into the ‘woman in a pale green gown’ with a ‘white profile’ and ‘a certain dignity of carriage’ (5) as she appears at the novel’s opening. No longer an exploited worker but a lady whose air of suffering adds to her allure, Rachel provides a marked point of contrast to Miss Barker, who is a caricature of a district visitor described as an ‘apostle of humanity’ (19). Frumpish and outspoken, Miss Barker questions the legitimacy of Rachel’s experience, mistaking Rachel’s new wealth for a lifelong social position: ‘a young lady like yourself, nursed in the lap of luxury, can hardly be expected to look at life with the same eyes as a poor waif like myself,

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who has penetrated to the very core of the city, and who has heard the stifled sigh of a vast perishing humanity.’ (21) Miss Barker’s florid but vague descriptions of her East End vocation have the effect of rendering Rachel’s experience of the slums as authentic and unmediated. ‘I did not cast in my lot with the poor,’ Rachel counters, ‘for I was one of them, and earned my bread among them’ (21). Throughout Red Pottage, Rachel’s years in the East End are represented as a significant means of self-formation, resulting in her increased capacity for sympathy and nurture, as well as the locus of new experiences of sociality and autonomy. Yet at the same time the ultimate proof of the validity of this experience – and hence the veracity of her views compared to Miss Barker’s – are the kinds of traditional womanly virtues associated with bourgeois femininity that Rachel affirms she has ‘been taught in the only way I could learn – by experience’ (80). Such lessons, however, seem only to be applied in the realm of personal relationships, rather than having any public or political dimension. The paradox by which life experience gained outside the bourgeois family home is valorised as long as it is applied to the traditionally feminine spheres of romance and friendship results in the polarised representations of women offered here: against the unfeminine stridency of Miss Barker, Rachel is softly spoken, reserved and gracious. It is not without significance that it is at the dinner party where this exchange occurs that Rachel secures the affections of Hugh Scarlett (who had been first attracted to her on the occasion of the ‘pale green gown’). Red Pottage is then left with an unresolved dilemma concerning the place of experience in the formation of female subjectivity and the consequent possibilities for an expanded agency for women: middle-class women – whose only domain of knowledge and influence is the home – are narrow and partial in their perspective, but so too are women like Miss Barker who exaggerate the scope of their agency in the public domain. The subject of Rachel’s exchange with Miss Barker, however, is not her own experience per se, but its fictionalised form in Hester Gresley’s apparently successful novel, An Idyll of East London. Through this dinner-party exchange, Red Pottage raises further questions about the relation between women’s experience, agency and forms of knowledge. Miss Barker disapproves of the book’s inaccuracy, lamenting that ‘it is a misfortune to the cause of suffering humanity – to our cause – when the books which pretend to set forth certain phases of its existence are written by persons entirely ignorant of the life they describe’ (20). A male author present


concurs: ‘The novel has of late been dwarfed to the scope of the young English girl … who writes from her imagination and not from her experience. What true art requires of us is faithful rendering of a great experience’ (20). The integrity of this author’s opinion is, however, profoundly undermined by the implication that his only book, titled Unashamed, while supposedly a ‘lurid personal reminiscence’, was in fact a complete work of fantasy (20). Through these minor characters, then, verisimilitude as the basis of fiction’s cultural authority is called into question in a way that problematises the location of Hester’s speaking position. At a time when novels of working-class life seeking political change were beginning to proliferate, it is not surprising that Hester’s status as author should be hotly contested.25 Debates on the merits or otherwise of these novels were in part centred on issues of legitimate knowledge, with direct observation through a sustained presence in the locations described often serving as a guarantee of the veracity of the claims made. Hester’s admission that her book is based on limited observation and ‘borrowed’ experience could be seen to render it as an illegitimate intervention in contemporary debates concerning social observation. A brief comparison with a woman writer who perhaps best exemplifies this sub-genre of late Victorian fiction will help to illuminate the implications and complexities of Cholmondeley’s representation of female authorship here. Beatrice Webb’s cousin, Margaret Harkness, enjoyed moderate success for her novels of working-class life in the 1880s, A City Girl (1887), Out of Work (1888) and In Darkest London (1889, originally titled Captain Lode: A Tale of the Salvation Army), which she published under the pseudonym John Law and which earned the (qualified) praise of Friedrich Engels. Drawn from her own experience of living in East London (which made her a reliable source of information according to Eleanor Marx; Kapp 1976: 221), and her involvement in the Social Democratic Federation, Harkness’s fiction placed a high value on verisimilitude for the efficacy of its socialist political agenda (Sypher 1993: 112). A City Girl, for instance, depicted the lives of tenants in Katherine Buildings where Webb was a rent collector and where the two cousins were lodgers for a while (Nord 1995: 193). While, in contrast to some other fiction of working-class life published at this time, Harkness’s work was notable for including the perspective of the middle-class woman, her adoption of a masculine pseudonym signals a residual unease about associating a feminine identity with the kind of cultural authority linked to social investigation and interventionist politics.26 Hester’s An Idyll of East London, then, by occupying an ambiguous position as a

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celebrated work of fiction by a female author drawn from another woman’s life, may be seen to ‘fictionalise’ contemporary concerns about authenticity and women’s experience. The feminising of the novel, which Mary Poovey has linked to its discursive authority in the nineteenth century (1995: 133), is in Red Pottage – as in Harkness’s pseudonym – linked to a lack of legitimate authority. This debate over the status of female authorship not only raises questions about the cultural authority but the appropriate location of the woman writer. Hester Gresley represents the liminality of the female author who usually writes from the home and may write about the domestic but through publication also occupies the public sphere and participates in public discourse. In Red Pottage, however, Hester does not write from her own home: her novel of the East End may have been inspired by her vicarious experience of Rachel’s life of urban poverty, but its author lives ‘in the depths of the country’ in Middleshire (20) – an apparent contradiction that is a source of comment and conjecture in the novel. One of Hester’s staunchest defenders, the local Bishop, believes that living away from London is vital to her authorship. If she had remained in London after the success of her first novel, he tells Rachel, ‘[Hester] would have met with so much sympathy and admiration that her next book would probably have suffered in consequence. She is so susceptible, so expansive, that repression is positively necessary to her to enable her, so to speak, to get up steam. There is no place for getting up steam like a country vicarage with an inner cordon of cows round it, and an outer one of amiable country neighbours, mildly contemptuous of originality in any form.’ (71) Hester’s very dis-location generates her art; if she was not out of place, she would lack the necessary inspiration and distance from her subject that lends it her original perspective. By the novel’s conclusion, however, it will be clear that the opposite is true: living at her brother’s vicarage ultimately costs Hester both her art and almost her life. The bishop profoundly under-estimates the tenuousness of Hester’s foothold in the public domain of authorship by failing to understand the constraints of her position of dependence as an unmarried woman. Interestingly, a very different perspective on Hester’s country location is offered by Sybell Loftus, a twice-married social hostess who likes to cultivate ‘interesting’ people at both her London residence and country


house near Warpington, and who confesses to finding a hint of hypocrisy in Hester’s behaviour: ‘I often wonder why after writing ‘The Idyll’ Hester never goes near East London. I should have gone straight off, and have cast in my lot with them if I had been in her place. … And I do know, though I would not tell Hester so for worlds, that the fact that she goes on living comfortably in the country after bringing out that book makes thoughtful people, not me, of course, but other earnest-minded people, think she is a humbug.’ (114) The choice of Sybell to voice such a pointed criticism of Hester is significant: as a discredited character – due to her naked social-climbing and general obtuseness – she may be easily rebutted, as Rachel, her interlocutor here, attempts to do. Certainly the descriptions of Hester’s cramped attic room at the parsonage – blisteringly hot in summer and offering little refuge from the sounds of boisterous family life and the smells from the kitchen below – belie Sybell’s perception of Hester’s comfortable country life (52). But the charge is a forceful one: why, unlike Margaret Harkness for instance, did Hester’s insights into the deprivations of the East End not translate into a personal response and intervention? Why did her occupation and personal conviction not lead her to live independently in rented rooms or a settlement house and thus enjoy greater autonomy and freedom of movement as well? Keeping Hester in Middleshire serves to exaggerate the New Woman’s dislocation in a way that placing her within the stimulating milieu of urban life would not. It is as if the plot of Red Pottage depicts a hypothetical narrative of what George Eliot’s fate might have been if she had never left the provinces.27 Hester’s status as a writer remains provisional, as well as provincial, always subtly undermined by the daily interruptions of domesticity and the banalities of parish social life. While Hester’s immobility is tempered to some extent by regular visitors like Rachel and the sympathetic Bishop, her brother James controls access to the outside world by placing strict budgetary limits on travel and monopolising the newspapers and mail delivered to the household (only he has the key to the family mailbag). Ultimately such strict patriarchal control generates the tragedy of Hester’s narrative: the destruction of the only manuscript of her second novel, entitled ‘Husks’. James opens Hester’s mail ‘by mistake’ (he had seen the name Gresley on the package and assumed it was his own), reads her

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manuscript, is outraged at her depiction of the clergy and the state of the church, and burns the narrative. On discovering the fate of her manuscript, Hester suffers a complete physical and mental breakdown from which she never completely recovers. By the close of Red Pottage it is clear that she will never write again, will never return to the parsonage or reconcile with her brother. In the tradition of Maggie Tulliver, Hester’s story not only shows that some losses are absolute but that suffering, rather than providing art’s raw material, may simply destroy the sufferer. The home-lessness of the New Woman in Red Pottage, then, is ambivalently figured: bourgeois domesticity may be confining but a lack of place can render a woman vulnerable and rootless, rather than constituting her as an independent agent. In this context, the conclusion of Red Pottage should not be seen as simply another example of the pessimism of New Woman novels. Rather, Cholmondeley’s novel explores the problems arising from a new discursive fluidity in the location of women, given that their centrality to the Victorian discourse of the home had offered a significant if compensatory form of agency and cultural authority (Armstrong 1987). If Red Pottage, like The Daughters of Danaus, does not fit an account of continuity in the articulation of femininity with domesticity, this is not to say that Cholmondeley’s novel marks an absolute rupture of this literary tradition either; literary history, like all history, consists of discontinuities and partial accommodations that always confound attempts at seamless accounts. Red Pottage, for instance, is entirely situated within a domestic mise-en-scène, and the heroines are immersed in family networks of sociality and heterosexual romance. However, the novel concludes with the two heroines far removed, geographically, from the English hearth: they embark on a trip to Australia and New Zealand to enable them to recover from the loss of loved ones (in Hester’s case, her novel, and in Rachel’s, her fiancé). In this narrative move, the new female subjects – no longer defined entirely within bourgeois domesticity – can thus find no place within it, or, indeed, within England itself, as ‘home’ and ‘nation’ become conflated. In a (forced) postscript (in which the narrator can only ‘catch glimpses of those other pages’ in which the story continues; 293), the reader is offered a vision of Rachel in the future surrounded by children and a loving husband in Australia but, like the conclusion of Gaskell’s Mary Barton, this gesture of recuperation is not sufficient to resolve satisfactorily the conflicts raised by the preceding narrative. Despite the fact that the heroines’ destinations are sites of early female suffrage, their permanent departure from England still reads like a form of expulsion rather than as an utopian alternative.


New Woman fiction, as it rehearsed public debates on contentious issues of gender and sexuality, work and home, offered a version of the female subject through which conflict between the domestic and public domains – and the forms of knowledge to which they gave rise – could be explored and inter-related. It should not be seen, therefore, simply as a fad of the 1890s or a literary cul-de-sac between the Victorian novel and modernism, but as a significant discursive moment in the transition from the bourgeois domestic subject to a new form of modern subjectivity traced through various forms of social and physical mobility while shaped in part – but only in part – by modern metropolitan experience. In Red Pottage, the cultural agency of the middleclass woman is still connected to the domestic – both negatively through the married women in the novel and positively through Rachel’s womanly virtues. The refusal, however, to recuperate heroines like Hester or Hadria within a Victorian ideology of domesticity gestures towards the potential for women to occupy other subject positions away from home. The possibilities for women’s cultural authority and agency if they lay claim to experience outside the domestic realm thus remained open. The following chapter will consider the legacy of the New Woman of the fin de siècle in the development of non-domestic agency for women by examining narratives of women participating in twentieth-century political movements.

5 Street Politics

‘There are more and more every day who are not content. … They pull on brown boots and bicycling skirts! They put man’s yoke of hard linen round their ivory throats, and they scramble off their jewelled thrones to mount the rostrum and the omnibus!’1 Early in Elizabeth Robins’ novel The Convert, a male character – lamenting the changes he observes in his female acquaintances – ascribes two destinations to the woman who leaves the home (the proper location, pace Ruskin, of such ‘thrones’): the speaker’s platform and public transportation. The linkage of mobility with the public sphere is an apposite one for this chapter, which examines two narratives of mobile and politically active women in the early twentieth century in order to explore how the movement of women across different spaces was linked to the mobilisation of a radical political agency. Central to both the performance of radical politics and the movement of women in these novels is the location of London. As Liz Conor has argued, ‘The entry of women into metropolitan space was shaped by representations of feminine types who were not at home in the home’ such as the suffragette, the shop girl and the leisured shopper whose presence in urban spaces not only ‘urbanised’ women but feminised modernity (2004: 49; see also Rappaport 2000: 126). In The Convert and Clash, London is not only identified with the pace and exhilaration of modernity, it is also contested political terrain and as such both enables and restricts women’s freedom of movement. As the protagonists of these novels move between private spaces and public sites in the city, their presence is a conduit for the circulation and contestation of political claims and ideas. The location of London – and its crowds – is also significant in The Convert and Clash as the bastion of the 104

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forms of power and privilege opposed by radical movements like the suffragettes and socialists as well as a synecdoche of the nation. In these novels, laying claim to the streets of the capital is a way of embodying the political claims of radical movements: the urban crowd variously represents either the guarantee of a movement’s authenticity or an irrational, potentially threatening mass against which the noble individual must defend her cause. To claim the streets and squares of London, as the suffragettes do in The Convert, prefigures a collective empowerment of women, while in Clash London represents the heart of what is envisaged as a radically transformed nation grounded in the workers’ sovereignty. While both novels posit women’s (political) agency as newly enabled in twentieth-century modernity, however, they also consider the possible tensions between a desired autonomous female subjectivity and an utopian collectivity, tensions that are often mapped onto different kinds of spaces and the heroines’ movement between, or occupation of, different social sites not confined to the city. As in the novels discussed in the previous chapter, the heroines are not wholly contained within urban spaces, but move between the city and the country, as well as between spaces coded as public and private. To locate the heroine in only one space would be to curtail her political agency, and in both novels this is precisely what heterosexual romance threatens to do. Given the conventional teleology of the romance narrative – where the woman ‘achieves’ stasis through domestic situatedness (a home of one’s own) – the heroine’s mobility is necessarily at odds with her romantic entanglements in these two novels. While a sexual relationship may compromise the heroine’s political commitment, the heightened sensory experience generated through political activism lends itself to a greater intensity of feeling in all areas of life: relationships with friends, comrades and (potential) lovers develop quickly when all are caught up in the pull of a political movement. The affect of speed, for instance, as the protagonists rush from one event to another, lends a palpable excitement to the heroines’ lives, which together with the urgency of the need for radical social transformation and the fear associated with arrest, violence and defeat, not only keep the heroines on the move for much of the time but propel the narratives so as to convey the stimulating appeal of political life over traditional domesticity. Ultimately, The Convert and Clash will refuse the romance plots they invoke, privileging instead the heroines’ public-political life and the mobility on which their activism depends.

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The Convert In 1909 Arthur Symons lamented the decline of walking in London, since human mobility seemed to have been replaced by mechanised forms of transport traversing a dehumanised city landscape: If I walk I meet no one walking, and I cannot wonder at it, for what I meet is an uproar, and a whiz, and a leap past me, and a blinding cloud of dust, and a machine on which scarecrows perch is disappearing at the end of the road. … [I]n London there will soon be no need of men, there will be nothing but machines. (1909/1918: 173–4) In the year before Symons wrote this, however, London had seen an unprecedented spectacle of walking in the streets – in the form of the march to the Great Hyde Park Meeting organised by the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in which thirty thousand women participated, watched by a crowd estimated between 250,000 and 500,000. Seven processions beginning at different points in central London marched to Hyde Park, in a spectacle of banners and marching bands – the first occasion on which the suffragette colours of purple, green and white were displayed (Pankhurst 1931/1977: 284). In the park, twenty speakers’ platforms addressed the gathering (Tickner 1988: 96). While Symons envisaged a London where machines replaced men, spectacular events such as this march make it possible to argue that men on the streets were in fact being replaced by women. The symbolism of women taking to the streets en masse in order to proclaim their right to full participation in the public sphere was striking and the theatrical potential of such events was realised in Elizabeth Robins’ play, Votes for Women! which she adapted as a novel called The Convert.2 Published in 1907 – the year before the Great Hyde Park Meeting the novel was based on detailed eyewitness descriptions of earlier suffragette gatherings in Trafalgar Square, Hyde Park and the East End. In the process of transcribing such gatherings, Robins (who had both produced and starred in the first English productions of Ibsen in the 1890s) was apparently herself transformed from a suffrage sympathiser to a committed suffragette (John 1995: 144), a process that is mirrored to some extent in the heroine of The Convert, Vida Levering, who similarly observes suffragette meetings. The narrative trajectory of The Convert follows the transformation of Vida from society ornament to suffragette: a transformation represented as a shift from spectacle/spectator to activist/speaker, and from domestic

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interiors to urban sites rendered as public, political spaces, which in turn effect a politicisation of private space as well. In this transformation, the outdoor suffragette meetings reproduced in the novel – much praised in their theatrical version – play a significant role because Vida’s political conversion is closely linked to her transformed understanding of public urban space (Squier 1989: 68; see also Neetens 1991: 125). Despite the prominence given to the verisimilitude of speeches at suffragette meetings, The Convert also places considerable emphasis on the physical act of occupying the speaker’s platform, as the suffragettes seek to embody their claims for inclusion in the public sphere by taking up public space. From the outset, this emphasis on the corporeality of women’s claims to citizenship is complicated by the notion – expressed repeatedly by antisuffragists in The Convert – that suffragettes are women who make unseemly spectacles of themselves by appearing in places where ladies should not be seen. Through the re-creation of suffragette meetings, then, The Convert explores the possibilities – or limitations – of the suffragette’s embodiment of political agency and the ways in which conflicting meanings are ascribed to women’s bodies in the visual economy of the city. In this process, the movement of the suffragettes across different districts and types of space in the city – requiring in turn Vida’s mobility in order to track their campaign – becomes a means of presenting a female political subjectivity in which class and gender are equally implicated in the coding of women’s bodies. The representation of suffragettes thus becomes a ‘site of cultural contestation’ (Poovey 1989: 9) due to the women’s refusal to be contained by the domestic sphere. As one character states, suffragettes are a ‘public demonstration of the unfitness of women for public affairs’ (56). The clinching evidence for this ‘unfitness’ is apparently the ornamentation and flimsiness of women’s clothes that are only appropriate for sheltered locations like the drawing room: ‘You see,’ said Farnborough, with gusto, ‘there’s something about women’s clothes – especially their hats, you know – they – well, they ain’t built for battle.’ ‘They ought to wear deer-stalkers,’ was Lady Sophia’s contribution to the New Movement. ‘It is quite true,’ Lady John agreed, ‘that a woman in a scrimmage can never be a heroic figure.’ ‘No, that’s just it,’ said Farnborough. ‘She’s just funny, don’t you know!’ (58)

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Clothes that would incite admiration in a drawing room seem absurd in political debate in a city square. It is this tea-table conversation at a country house that first sparks Vida’s interest in the movement, as she learns that none of the tea drinkers has in fact ever seen a suffragette, much less attended a protest. The importance of personal observation as the basis of knowledge formation thus prompts Vida’s return to London to judge for herself the women’s fitness or otherwise for public life. Much of the novel is then devoted to Vida’s spectatorship of the movement, instigating her frequent mobility as she departs from her familiar, socially prescribed sphere into alien and uncomfortable places like public squares and parks, street corners and side streets, in areas ‘off-limits’ to ladies like herself, such as the political spaces of Westminster or the working-class domain of the East End. Vida’s initially critical spectatorship of other women associates her with the (male) hecklers in the crowd, allowing Robins to problematise the urban spectator as an occupier of city space. Vida appropriates the right to the discriminating gaze of the flâneur but The Convert insists that the detached observation of the urban wanderer is not a sustainable position. In this cause, Robins implies, detachment is alwaysalready a politicised perspective; the observer is always implicated in what she observes so that Vida’s only choices are to either remain part of the (often antagonistic) crowd or join the women on the platform. The suffragettes’ demand to occupy the speaking position signified by the platform frequently prompts a response that insists on their function as visual object alone. At one meeting, for instance, when a male heckler tries to silence a suffragette speaker, she replies, ‘Now you be quiet, if you please. … These people are here to listen to me.’ ‘No, they ain’t. They come to see wot you look like.’ ‘That can’t be so,’ she said calmly, ‘because after they’ve seen us they stay.’ Then, as the interrupter began again, ‘No, it’s no use, my man’ – she shook her head gently as if almost sorry for him – ‘you can’t talk me down!’ ‘Now, ain’t that just like a woman!’ he complained to the crowd. (99) The heckler’s resort to stereotype to have the final word shows the unstable nature of meanings attached to suffragettes: his initial charge that the woman is merely a spectacle refuted, he instead charges that

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the woman is merely talkative. In either case, she is not a political subject, but is understood within stereotypical terms as either sexual object or gossip. While, unlike the men in the crowd, Vida desires to both listen and observe, she too initially fails to see beyond the mere spectacle and comprehend the women as political subjects: in the power to make history – if these people indeed had that, then indeed might they be worth watching – even if it were only after one good look to hide the eyes in dismay. That possibility of historic significance had suddenly lifted the sordid exhibition to a different plane. (86) Vida’s attempt to discern ‘history’ from a ‘sordid exhibition’ begs the question as to how women may be acknowledged in the public domain when feminine visibility in the city is always inflected through a sexed and classed identity.3 Through Vida’s desire to distinguish the ‘significant’ from the ‘sordid’, class becomes an issue of explicit concern throughout The Convert and is presented in complex if sometimes contradictory ways, in part reflecting the difficulties faced by the suffragette movement in attempting to build a cross-class alliance of women for the cause (see, for example, Liddington and Norris 1978). Although overtly sympathetic to the working class, The Convert nevertheless draws on traditionally pejorative representations of urban crowds as irrational and instinctive (Harrison 1988; Huyssen 1988) in order to endow a sense of distinction to the suffragette speakers. The suffragettes are variously represented as in touch with the crowd through their ability to win a hearing and respond to hecklers, in accord with the interests of the working class through their shared disenfranchisement, and yet ‘above’ the crowd through their personal qualities of calmness and self-control. The public presentation of the (classed) self is stressed in The Convert as vital to women’s agency, as it can either hinder or assist their mobility through increasing or decreasing their visibility in urban spaces. Vida and her sister, for instance, feel they must disguise their class identity before attending their first open-air suffragette meeting in Trafalgar Square. Attempting to look like a ‘Woman of the People’, by wearing an old dress and inelegant hat, Vida is initially surprised to find that she is not treated with the usual regard by policemen and male observers (73–5), and disappointed to observe that the suffragettes present look ‘quite like what one sees on the tops of omnibuses’, as her sister puts it (76).

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Vida’s evaluations of the speakers at this meeting are based on their rhetorical and sartorial styles: the suffragettes whose speech and dress denote them as aspirational working-class women (as opposed to ‘honest’ working-class women) through their affectations of upper-class speech and ‘cheap finery’ (76) are particularly singled out for condemnation by Vida and her sister.4 At the second open-air meeting Vida attends, this time in Hyde Park and accompanied by her maid, the suffragettes remain inscrutable according to traditional taxonomies of femininity. Their self-possession, however, is linked to a mastery of city spaces that is always opportunistic, given the vagaries of crowd behaviour, police response and the circulation of people as well as traffic through metropolitan spaces. The speakers, Vida observes, exhibited an utter absence of any flaunting of courage or the smallest show of defiance. What was this armour that looked like mere indifference? It couldn’t be that those quiet-looking young girls were indifferent to the ordeal of standing up there before a crowd of jeering rowdies whose less objectionable utterances were: ‘Where did you get that ‘at?’ (98) Vida’s scopic desire to see/know the suffragettes becomes focused on one particularly enigmatic suffragette, Ernestine Blunt.5 Ernestine’s selfpossession as much as her oratory captures Vida’s attention so much that she begins to follow Ernestine around London: Instead of being in the houses where she was supposed to be, and doing the things she was expected to be doing, [Vida] might have been seen in highly unexpected haunts prosecuting her acquaintance with cockney crowds, never learning Ernestine’s fearlessness of them, and yet in some way fascinated as much as she was repelled. (169) Trailing Ernestine from street meeting to street meeting, observing her from a hansom cab or brougham from a distance almost beyond earshot, Vida may be stimulated by what she observes (her fascination/repulsion marking the beginning of her move away from detached scrutiny) but she also repeatedly misconstrues what is in plain sight. Her class identity here is a clear impediment: it would not be seemly for her to draw closer and mingle with the crowd to hear Ernestine, which means that she cannot decipher correctly what she observes. Not only the

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conventions of the public meeting but also the idiom used by speakers and hecklers alike is often unintelligible to Vida. At one meeting, Vida and her sister are informed by a member of the crowd that the woman on the platform, Mary O’Brian, ‘is the one that’s just come out o’ quod’ (80). While Mary awaits her turn to speak, she is repeatedly heckled by the crowd: ‘Ow’d yer like the skilly?’ another shouted up at the girl. ‘Skilly?’ whispered Mrs. Fox-Moore. Vida in turn shook her head. It wasn’t in the dictionary of any language she knew. But it seemed in some way to involve dishonour, for the chairman … turned suddenly and faced the crowd. Her eyes were shining with the light of battle, but what she said in a peculiarly pleasant voice was – ‘Miss O’Brian has come here for the express purpose of telling you how she liked it.’ (80) Increasingly alarmed by the crowd’s behaviour, however, Vida and her sister leave the meeting before Mary’s speech and can only speculate that ‘skilly’ ‘sounds like it might have been what she hit the policeman with’ (87). The two ladies’ ignorance of prison slang (‘skilly’ being a slang term for prison broth) makes it easier for them to imagine Mary as the perpetrator of violence against patriarchal authority rather than its victim. Vida’s ignorance of public life is dramatised most clearly in an incident where Ernestine is engulfed by a surging crowd at the completion of a street meeting. Following Ernestine has increasingly required Vida to venture into parts of the city she would not usually frequent, where she loses her way in unfamiliar streets or districts and lacks the customary social markers that usually allow her to decode social interactions. Motivated by ‘The natural shrinking and disgust of “the sheltered woman”’ (164), Vida on this occasion rushes into the midst of the rabble in an attempt to ‘rescue’ Ernestine. When the two women are safely in Vida’s carriage, Ernestine emphatically disputes Vida’s account of ‘the attack of those hooligans on a handful of defenceless women’ (167). The two suffragettes Vida had seen running from the scene were in fact only running to catch an approaching bus. What to Vida’s eyes had been a riot is conventional behaviour to Ernestine, who assures Vida that the crowd’s behaviour was ‘all quite good-natured’ (167). Vida’s class position is thus presented as a

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liability both for her political agency and urban mobility for much of the novel. She may be able to deflate masculine vanities and enlighten female acquaintances within her own social circle but she is repeatedly flummoxed and ineffectual in her engagement with the street-wise suffragettes. Under Ernestine’s tutelage, however, Vida becomes increasingly conversant both with new districts of the city as well as the procedures and rhetoric of suffragette meetings that she later describes to a friend: ‘They select an open space at the convergence of several thoroughfares – if possible, near an omnibus centre. For these smaller meetings they don’t go to the length of hiring a lorry. … In Battersea, you go into some modest little restaurant, and you say, “Will you lend me a chair?” … When Ernestine is ready to begin she stands up on that chair, in the open street and, as if she were doing the most natural thing in the world, she begins ringing [a] dinner bell. Naturally people stop and stare and draw nearer. Ernestine tells me that Battersea has got so used now to the ding-dong and to associating it with “our meeting”, that as far off as they hear it the inhabitants say, “It’s the suffragettes! Come along!” and from one street and another the people emerge laughing and running. … Sometimes the traffic is impeded.’ (175–6) The speed with which an ordinary city space can be politicised by the suffragettes is matched by the pace with which they move from meeting to meeting in the course of a day. A day’s campaigning for Ernestine, for instance, could include addressing meetings at Battersea, Pimlico Pier and Woolwich Arsenal, as well as distributing handbills in the streets for hours (168–9). Her mobility, moreover, is infectious; when a street meeting concludes, a supportive crowd may follow Ernestine down the street, as Vida relates: ‘When she wound up, … I saw practically the whole crowd moving off after her up the street. I followed for some distance on the offside. She went calmly on her way, a tiny figure in a long grey coat between two helpers, the Lancashire cotton-spinner and the Cockney working woman, with that immense tail of boys and men (and a few women) all following after. … In a way she was still exercising her hold over her meeting.’ (176–7)

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Vida in turn is caught up in the wake of Ernestine’s movement: ‘After the crowd had melted and the helpers had vanished into the night, we went on together – all the way, from the Battersea Fire Station to Sloane Square, did Ernestine and I walk, talking reform last night’ (177). This image of two (differently classed) women walking London streets together at night refigures the city as the home of the modern woman: here, there is an almost utopian potential in the urban spaces that could throw such women into each other’s path, as it were, and make them allies in the cause of women’s emancipation. Suffragettes are thus represented as highly competent urban subjects, since they exemplify the city dweller’s ‘improvised’ use of urban space (Certeau 1984) and contribute significantly to the movement within the city, as they draw crowds, engage in street marches and train other women to emulate their inventive mobility. The association between mobility and the suffragettes, however, goes beyond their facility with street meetings and modern forms of transportation: in the vanguard of social change, the suffragettes are also associated with movement in a metaphorical sense, moving towards a future of social transformation as they move outwards from social confinement into wider, freer spaces. For example, in a conversation about women’s emancipation between Vida and her friend Lord Borrodaile, Vida says: ‘So tell me, what if it should be a question of going forward in the suffrage direction or going back?’ ‘You mean – ’ ‘ – on from latchkeys and University degrees to Parliament, or back.’ ‘Oh, back,’ he said hastily. ‘Back. Yes, back to the harem.’ (147) Vida’s association of ‘latchkeys’ – a symbol of women’s freedom to come and go from the home as they choose – with education and suffrage, situates women’s citizenship within an inevitable, progressive narrative of social change. That the urbane Lord Borrodaile would much prefer to reverse this movement – to (re)confine women within the narrow realm of the private with its connotations of sexual service to men – shocks Vida into a recognition of the true gulf that divides them, despite their social intimacy and Borrodaile’s obvious admiration for Vida. The ‘revealing word he had flung out’ – harem – ‘seemed to have struck wide some window that had been shuttered close before. The woman stood there in the glare’ (147). Confronted with her friend’s fervent wish to

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keep women contained, Vida gains a radical new perspective and her political apprenticeship for women’s cause becomes the only logical response to what she now recognises as a masculine desire to limit women’s lives. Vida’s political education through sustained observation of suffragette meetings is now supplemented by her own investigations of the position of women in working-class urban spaces – a deliberate move into the ‘glare’ of public scrutiny in an attempt to step outside the social privilege of the ‘lady’ and experience the city as an unprotected, solitary wanderer. Disguised as a working-class woman, Vida obtains confirmation of the suffragettes’ social critique through what she describes as her ‘pilgrimage … [i]nto the Underworld’ (224). As she later tells a woman of her own class, ‘You never know how many things are hidden from a woman in good clothes. The bold free look of a man at a woman he believes to be destitute – you must feel that look on you before you can understand – a good half of history’ (224). Here Robins is clearly drawing on the tradition of female urban investigators such as Mary Higgs, who disguised herself as a tramp in order to carry out her social investigations, published as Glimpses into the Abyss in 1907.6 By attempting to perform working-class femininity in this way, Vida not only signals her rejection of the conventional femininity of her class, but also seeks a presentation of self that will enable her own political agency (see Green 1997: 66). Vida’s cross(class)-dressing is only temporary, however, as a necessary stage in her political education rather than a complete disavowal of her class status. Like other suffragettes in this period, Vida asserts the primacy of gender over other causes of disenfranchisement and believes that women’s emancipation both depended on and cemented cross-class solidarity among women. With Vida’s conversion complete, the novel concludes with her performance as a suffragette speaker. The problematic aspects of the heroine’s elevated class status – formerly an impediment both to her urban agency and political commitment – are apparently resolved by claiming the identity of a suffragette and with it the right to speak within the public sphere. The contradictory significations of suffragette bodies in the public sphere – representing women’s exclusion from the ‘legitimate’ political domain and also their mastery of urban spaces as modern, mobile subjects – is thus dramatised through Vida Levering’s political apprenticeship in The Convert. From disguised observation of public meetings to open participation, Vida achieves a political agency that is presented as potentially available to all women, uniting them in shared experiences of urban performance as much as through a

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common political goal. The heterogeneous city spaces, which offer possibilities for unpredictable encounters and new perspectives across class divides, become the ‘natural’ location for the politically active and mobile woman, formerly stifled by the confines of the upper-class home and its mores. Vida’s occupation of the speaker’s platform, then, provides the logical closure of a narrative in which the heroine has moved from ‘a claustrophobic melodramatic domestic interior’ into the bracing environment of public spaces and political debates (Winkiel 2004: 578). The domestic interior, however, still plays an integral part in the novel’s conclusion, linking the public and the private domains in the portrayal of women’s politicisation. Here I would take issue with Sypher’s contention that The Convert is ‘concerned with integrating the public with the private arena’ as a means of ‘normalising’ or domesticating the novel’s radical potential (1993: 143, emphasis added). There is a crucial difference between ‘integrating’ and ‘articulating’ these domains, in the sense of articulation as ‘an active mode of making connections’ (Probyn 1993: 28). The cause The Convert promotes not only requires women’s commitment to public visibility and participation but also demands that this protest is then taken back into the private domain of the home: moving between home and street allows all the social spaces women inhabit to be seen as politicised spaces in which their suffragette identity links what can no longer be seen as discrete domains of subordination (see Parkins 2002: 97–9). In the novel’s back-story, Vida had fled an abusive home, running away with her lover and apparent protector, Geoffrey Stonor. When she became pregnant, Vida had been deserted by Stonor due to his family position and political ambitions, which left her no option but an abortion. Vida’s conversion to the suffragette movement not only offers her a new understanding of what had seemed just a personal tragedy, but also allows her to connect apparently disparate aspects of women’s position – sexual betrayal and political disenfranchisement – and to become an avenue by which other women can comprehend their own experience: ‘the time has come when a woman may look about her and say, What general significance has my secret pain? Does it ‘join on’ to anything? And I find it does. I’m no longer simply a woman who has stumbled on the way … I’m one who has got up … and said … here is a stone of stumbling to many. Let’s see if it can’t be moved out of other’s women’s way.’ (303–4, original emphasis)

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Reiterating the conventional, quasi-biblical imagery of the wandering, stumbling woman as code for sexual experience (see Chapter 2), Robins here argues that it can be used to ‘join up’ – or articulate – the public and the private experience of women in new, politically radical ways. Such possibilities are then realised in the resolution of the plot. Geoffrey Stonor’s young fiancée, Jean Dunbarton, persuaded by Vida’s rhetoric and imposing physical presence, wants to follow Vida into the suffragette movement and break her engagement with Stonor (leaving him free, she believes, to marry Vida as a gesture of restitution). Vida’s rejection of this solution is not merely a way to ensure her tragic nobility, nor is it a moralistic attempt by Robins to emphasise the social cost of Vida’s transgression. Rather, it frees Vida for a life of political activism, which is presented as a positive resolution in its own right, not a consolation prize for foregoing personal happiness. Vida’s commitment to the cause is offered as a means of connecting the personal and the political rather than forcing her to choose between them. The liberating potential of women’s mobility in The Convert is embodied in Vida’s newfound freedom of movement and association with the suffragettes, in contrast to the stifling role of social ornament at country weekends and supper parties she had previously occupied. While Vida may never quite emulate Ernestine in her nonchalant traversing of the city – The Convert never suggests that class-specific experience can be entirely erased – the possibilities for divergent aspects of women’s experience to be ‘joined up’ in new ways through the rough and tumble of suffragette politics points towards an optimistic, if not utopian, future.

Clash Ellen Wilkinson’s 1929 novel Clash shares Robins’ optimism about the possibilities that mobility afforded women as a means of linking public and private within a context of political activism. Written soon after the General Strike of 1926 and published while Wilkinson was a Labour MP, Clash is one of only a small group of novels from the interwar period which deal substantially with the General Strike and which, notably, were all written by women (Haywood 1999: 35). The breathless pace that characterised the sections of The Convert depicting suffragette rallies and the need to hasten on the cause, is more than matched in Clash in its descriptions of the nine days of the General Strike in May 1926.7 The speed and momentum of the strike – ‘we live quicker when things are happening on this scale’8 – not only symbolises the social disruption and the imminence of revolution, but is also used as a plot device in relation to the

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romance narrative in which the heroine, Joan Craig, a union organiser from the north of England, becomes involved with the London writer, Tony Dacre. Without rendering the Strike as simply colourful background for the doomed romance, however, Clash attempts to integrate the Joan/Tony relationship into the ‘present-time’ temporality of the novel, and hence to foreground the possibilities for women’s political agency in a context where ‘The strike … crashed into all their lives’ (73). The novel opens in Leeds where the reader is introduced to Joan, whose working-class origins and union work denote her as an atypical example of the career woman increasingly depicted in novels of the 20s and 30s. From the outset Joan is described as a modern, emancipated woman, but is sharply distinguished from the more sophisticated women she meets in London who are of higher class-status, possess independent wealth and are comfortable in the avant-garde culture of the metropolis. A particular point of contrast to Joan is Tony’s wife, Helen, a producer of modernist theatre and a strike-breaker: she provides financial support and other resources to the upper-class volunteers mobilised to take over the jobs of striking workers when her latest production is delayed due to the Strike.9 The class struggle represented by the General Strike is clearly embodied in the sexual rivalry between the northern girl, Joan, and the urban sophisticate, Helen.10 Joan’s characterisation, then, combines working-class authenticity with modern independence and mobility. No sooner are we introduced to Joan, than she is on the train to London to attend the Trades’ Union Congress (TUC) meeting that will institute the Strike. This is a pattern of movement repeated throughout the novel: Joan is almost constantly in motion, from the north to London and back again, while in the metropolis she moves through a whirlwind of engagements, both political and social. During the Strike, she is initially deployed to oversee transport and communication networks at campaign headquarters. It was, of course, such signifiers of modernity that the Strike not only sought to immobilise but also needed to replace in order to spread the cause to non-metropolitan regions: If Joan had stopped to think about it she would have been appalled at the task she had been given. In fourteen hours every motor-bus, every transport wagon not conveying food, would stop. … But in that brief time they had to improvise a service of news, despatchriders, conveyance of speakers and instructions, almost an alternative Government, and that in a country used to having the latest news served piping hot in the streets three times a day. (114–15)

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Joan is then despatched on a round of visits and speaking engagements to communicate the news of the General Strike and mobilise unions outside London. This mobility closely follows that of Ellen Wilkinson herself in May 1926. As an official propagandist for the TUC, Wilkinson travelled around two thousand miles through the West and North of England and back to London during the Strike, speaking at almost fifty meeting in towns and cities ( Joannou 1995: 151). Despite the fact that she is whisked off to a quick lunch in Soho by Tony on the first day she is in London, it is Joan who is characterised by speed and decisiveness throughout the novel, albeit in often muddled and unsubtle imagery. At the beginning of the novel, for instance, we are told that ‘Joan Craig always gave the impression of excessive energy. Her horse-power was too big for her body, her gear ratio too high…. She left the impression of a breeze rather than a woman’ (11). In contrast, Tony literally cannot keep up with Joan and he complains of the speed with which she moves: ‘I’ll never take Joan out again without a pair of reins. She doesn’t walk, she flies. I panted after her along the Embankment. We then took a taxi to Putney for what she called a stroll over the Common. Stroll! My father’s gods!’ (99) As will be seen again in the following chapter, the speed and mobility of women is often contrasted with the indolence or inertia of their male lovers and companions, who seem to represent an earlier, almost premodern attitude towards mobility. This masculine resistance to mobility effectively places men – rather than women – in a problematic relation to modernity so often characterised by technologies of speed and travel. In a reversal of traditional gender binaries, in Clash it is the woman who lifts the man’s life out of the ordinary patterns of existence, with Joan representing passion, politics and change for Tony: It was barely a fortnight since he had first met this girl from the North, and yet he was contemplating breaking the habits of fifteen years. … She had dragged him out of his comfortable life, given him excitement, the feel of power, of being in touch with reality. (147) Tony’s relative immobility in comparison with Joan is matched by his emotional inertia in his inability to leave a loveless marriage and his

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failure to throw himself into the labour cause with the same vigour as Joan. In this context, it is significant that Tony’s commitment to the Strike is marked by his becoming a driver and purchasing a car – much needed for both communication and transportation – which, to Joan’s delight, he christens ‘Red Joan’ (116).11 Tony’s possession of a car also enables the pair to escape the politicised space of London for afternoons of picnics and romantic strolls in Surrey, a pastoral-romantic space in which they revert to traditional gender roles, with Joan as the starryeyed girl and Tony the experienced older male. But Tony’s mobility, like his political commitment, is temporary, as much a part of the ‘blitz’ spirit which characterised the Strike as that described by upper-class strike-breakers in accounts of their adventures as bus-drivers or dockworkers in May 1926. When the Strike collapses, Tony gives the car to the cause, resumes his (sedentary) writing career and makes Joan a proposal in the form of an ultimatum that she give up her career – and her mobility – for a domestic life of love and motherhood in London. In Clash, the city – as much as the man – is a seductive force in Joan’s life. While London during the Strike is figured as the site of potential revolution – it is quite literally a contested space that opposing political positions seek to occupy and regulate through controlling the everyday apparatuses of metropolitan modernity like the buses and the newspapers – it is simultaneously a site of pleasure, culture, consumption and sexuality. London (particularly through the largesse of her wealthy friend Mary Maud) offers Joan fashionable evening gowns, luxurious chrome bathrooms, restaurants and parties, as well as a lively political milieu in which she can work as a writer for a Left weekly rather than her previously itinerant and Spartan life as a union organiser. But the appeals of metropolitan life become associated in Clash with a betrayal of core political principles and class affiliations. If, in the Clash of the 1920s, London is calling, it is a call that Joan ultimately refuses. When, later in the novel, Joan returns to the north for a lengthy stay in a mining village, she ‘recognises’ her true allegiances to the working class, which is portrayed as distinct from the socialist politics of the metropolis (Fox 1994: 88). This impasse between individual agency, class identity and political commitment is reflected by a narrative impasse: with the collapse of the General Strike, Joan’s conscription to TUC headquarters comes to an end. Importantly, Clash not only describes the frenetic events of the nine days of the General Strike, but also continues the narrative with the protracted miners’ strike – the original catalyst for the strike and still an unresolved conflict at the strike’s collapse. Joan is sent north again,

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this time to work in the mining town of Carey’s Main. The documentary realism of the Carey’s Main section of the novel – as opposed to the more dramatically enhanced account of the Strike – reflects the shift in Joan’s experience from the pace and excitement of London to the inertia and monotony of the north. In a kind of ‘temptation in the wilderness’ experience, Joan consciously weighs up the appeal of a life of privilege and variety with Tony in London against her ongoing union career – a choice thrown into stark relief by the unremitting grimness of Carey’s Main. Tony sends her colourful gifts, signifiers of this other possible life, which, to the impoverished women of the village, are exotic objects endemically linked to metropolitan affluence. One of the interesting aspects of this section of the novel is its nuanced portrayal of class and gender, unlike the earlier representations of Joan in sophisticated, semi-Bohemian London. There, Joan had epitomised the working-class woman through such traditional class signifiers as her lack of regard for personal appearance, physical robustness and capacity for gruelling work. To the women of Carey’s Main, however, Joan does not seem to be one of them: as an unmarried, educated, urban career woman, her life – like her possessions – signifies an urban modernity that is a world apart from a mining town. In Joan’s mobility, however, there is a tension between her agency, linked to her autonomy as a modern career woman, and the fact that she is moved at the behest of the movement that does not always reflect her own desires, either for rest or romance. There are frequent descriptions of Joan’s sweeping emotions at being part of a movement in the vanguard of history, a participant in overturning the ancient privileges of the minority. At the critical TUC meeting to vote on the Strike, for instance, Joan’s response to the call to strike is rendered as a kind of religious experience or calling: Her whole being contracted to one passionate, intense wish that she might be worthy. She looked at the matter-of-fact miner, smoking stolidly at her side, with a feeling of shy worship. The man from Durham would have been astonished if he had realized that the eager girl beside him was regarding him as a representative of a crucified class. (61) Joan’s idealisation of the miner and his Christ-like suffering problematises both her identification with the workers and her own independence.

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In this context, the connotations of her name – and the fact that Joan of Arc was also adopted by the suffragettes as their patron saint – not only signal the self-sacrifice required for the greater good but also indicate a conflict between the individual and the political collective. In Clash, Joan is repeatedly the projection of others’ desires. Even Joan’s closest female friend, Mary Maud, a wealthy former suffragette, admits that in Joan she sees the self-sacrificing leader she has been hoping would arise to carry on the women’s movement (94–5). Joan’s activism, then, is potentially at the expense of her autonomy. Like Tony’s red car, she can be seen at times merely as a visual symbol of a movement (as when she speaks at a political meeting dressed in red, ‘like a living red flag, the spirit of the revolution’; 80), rather than as an agent and author of change. While Joan’s commitment to working-class politics remains inviolate, however, Clash does not simply offer a nostalgic representation of a working-class radicalism untouched by modernity – as the distinctions drawn between Joan and the miners’ wives make clear. Clash moves between an idealisation of the working class and an insistence that this constituency cannot be seen as a single – or simple – entity. During her time at Carey’s Main, Joan acknowledges the gulf that exists between her experience of industrial urban life with its comparative wealth and opportunities and the mining town where gender divisions remain starkly traditional. The slow building of camaraderie with the miners’ wives and the nuanced portrayals of their lives (to the almost total exclusion of the men of Carey’s Main) is one of the achievements of Clash and the gritty realism of this section makes a romantic resolution in London an impossibility. As a symbol of her commitment, Joan ultimately renounces her affair with Tony for a pragmatic marriage that she believes will best enable her to continue her political work. Joan cannot simply be seen as a woman of the people but neither can she be assimilated into the more abstract, intellectual version of political life in the metropolis. In this way, the novel’s resolution reflects the historical specificities of the 1920s in which attempts to negotiate an authentic class consciousness and politics required an acknowledgement of the heterogeneity of both the left and its opponents (an alliance of modern capitalism and traditional privilege).12 Joan’s capacity to choose between possible futures is a recognition of the changes in circumstances which modernity has brought; she is clearly a modern radical, not simply a ‘salt of the earth’ worker, even as such workers are themselves idealised in the novel. Her eventual choice

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of marriage to a comrade rather than retirement from public life into blissful domesticity with Tony is also a symbolic resolution of the cross-class tensions that could be present in the left’s alliances. Joan’s marriage to Gerry Blain (the upper-class, wounded war hero) represents a reconciliation of the social conflicts of an earlier decade, with the radicalism fostered by trench warfare now allied with pre-war suffragette militancy in order to prefigure a socialist future of class and gender equity.13 The fact that Gerry has been left permanently incapacitated by the war – while Joan is still the physically vigorous, even ‘virile’ (76) figure at the end as she was at the beginning – clearly problematises Joan’s sexuality but effectively privileges her public, political subjectivity over a traditional feminine identity. It is this symbolic resolution, a political alliance of different threads of radicalism (feminist, working-class and socialist), that marks the marriage of Joan and Gerry as a flawed, if pragmatic, compromise which defers female sexual autonomy to another time, another future. With her marriage Joan also presumably returns to the metropolis where Gerry’s weekly political journal is based but she does not seem anchored in London; instead, her work continues to entail ‘tiring journeys, … cheap hotels, … working at top speed’ (299). In Clash, the mobility of the heroine – her movement across different kinds of spaces between the industrial north and the metropolitan south – and the focalisation of the narrative through her, allows a broader view of the political domain to emerge in which women’s political agency within a socialist politics of class struggle is foregrounded. As in The Convert, the mobility of the heroine is central to the depiction of women’s agency in specifically political contexts and allows both novels to emphasise the significance of class in any consideration of the modern woman’s agency. Such attention to class does not result in a simple equation of middle or upper-class status with privilege, since the democratisation of movement and transportation meant that mobility could be varyingly embraced by women – although it may not neatly correspond to class distinctions or affluence. In Clash, the working-class Joan rushes from meeting to meeting and lives out of a suitcase but lacks mastery in semibohemian spaces like Soho cafes or theatrical evenings in London. In The Convert, the upper middle-class woman sought shelter in her carriage while the lower-class suffragettes enthusiastically negotiated the city. As Parejo Vadillo (2003) has argued, the modernisation of movement in London had great liberatory potential for women of all classes but required openness to renegotiating female subjectivity

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alongside a re-mapping of the city. Mobility could be articulated with differing class or gender identities but increasingly becomes associated with forms of modern female subjectivity that distanced women – quite literally – from the conventional. If the price of uncompromised mobility was a compromised sexuality in these novels, The Convert and Clash instead emphasise women as active agents in a political domain no longer defined exclusively by masculine privilege.

6 Moving Dangerously

If the experience of modernity brought with it an overwhelming sense of innovation, ephemerality, and chaotic change, it simultaneously engendered multiple expressions of desire for stability and continuity. (Felski 1995: 40) Alison Light (1991) has persuasively argued for the need to look beyond the canon of literary modernism in order to capture the peculiarly British experience of modernity between the wars. In Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars, Light contends that women’s interwar fiction ‘go[es] straight to the centre of a contradictory and determining tension in English social life in the period,’ a tension she calls ‘conservative modernity: Janus-faced, it could simultaneously look backwards and forwards; it could accommodate the past in the new forms of the present’ (1991: 10). Light’s emphasis on conservative responses to the unsettling experience of modernity provides a useful starting-point to this chapter’s consideration of Elizabeth Bowen’s To the North and Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm – novels which are particularly preoccupied with the problems that the nonsynchronicities of modernity raised for the female subject.1 My choice of a serious literary novel such as Bowen’s and a humorous middlebrow one like Gibbons’ may seem like an odd combination, since they have little in common beyond their year of publication (1932).2 Despite their generic differences, however, both these novels feature heroines who are emblematic of a modernity associated with cars and planes. In each novel, the female protagonists represent the disruptions and transitions between the country and the city – and between the different kinds of social relations and social experience associated with each location – which, 124

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as Felski notes, signal the contradictory pulls between the embrace of innovation or change, and a desire for stability and continuity. If the comic structure of Cold Comfort Farm minimises and contains the threat of an unstable modernity while offering a conservative reassurance that both change and continuity can be managed, To the North presents the tragic consequences of living in an ever-changing, unstable present. In these two novels, the movement of the female protagonists between different kinds of spaces is also a movement between different senses of time associated with those locations. At the conclusion of Cold Comfort Farm when the pastoral wedding scene ends abruptly with an aeroplane landing in Ticklepenny’s Field (224), the reader may well ask, ‘what time are we in?’ – a question which Harvey has argued was urgently and repeatedly raised in response to the experience of rapid change from the nineteenth century onwards (1989: 261). Since femininity was so often equated with nature and tradition, the modern woman’s experience – whether city shopping or driving a car – was always already an experience of nonsynchronicity. While Gibbons’ heroine, Flora Poste, seems to effortlessly manage the difficult business of what Virginia Woolf in Orlando called ‘time-keeping’ (1928/1977: 191), the task is much more daunting for the heroine of To the North, a ‘step-child of her uneasy century’ (63) who not only embraces technologies of speed, but also nostalgically desires a Victorian country house – fully cognisant of the contradictions, but unable to resolve them. The varying responses of the heroines of both novels to the unevennesses of modernity – represented by their attempts to balance the claims of the past with the present – challenge a view of modernity as an oxymoronic state of permanent disruption and a decisive rupture from all that preceded it historically. These two interwar novels, then, demonstrate that Perry Anderson’s claim that modernism flourished ‘in the space between a still usable classical past, a still indeterminate technical present, and a still unpredictable political future’ (1988: 326) needs to be broadened to include literature which drew on a range of conventions, styles and modes beyond a narrowly defined modernist aesthetic.

Cold Comfort Farm [I]t is because I have in mind all those thousands of persons, not unlike myself, who work in the vulgar and meaningless bustle of offices, shops and homes, and who are not always sure whether a sentence is Literature or whether it is just sheer flapdoodle, that I have adopted

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the method perfected by the late Herr Baedeker, and firmly marked what I consider the finer passages with one, two or three stars. In such a manner did the good man deal with cathedrals, hotels and paintings by men of genius. There seems no reason why it should not be applied to passages in novels.3 In the Foreword of Cold Comfort Farm, Gibbons evokes the historical present as characterised by ‘bustle’, a messy everyday world in which the writer includes herself along with her readers ‘in offices, shops or homes’. Such a modern everyday requires no-nonsense clarity and efficiency in literature as well as other domains of life – and what could be more practical than to emulate a device created for similarly busy, nononsense travellers? By replicating the short-hand method of denoting sites of cultural value used in Baedeker’s popular travel guides, the reader is interpellated as a mobile subject, experienced in mass-market travel and the acceleration of present-day life, and also au fait with the values of the past and its achievements (such as the works of ‘men of genius’). The lightness of touch with which the narrative voice in Cold Comfort Farm moves from the slightly acerbic tone of the Foreword to the broader humour and playful parody of the narrative is a reflection of the equally assured way in which the novel juxtaposes past and present modes of life and rural and urban sensibilities. A comic novel parodying ‘typical novels of agricultural life’ (57) – those, for instance, of Mary Webb, Sheila Kaye-Smith and Constance Holme, as well as D. H. Lawrence – Cold Comfort Farm attempts to posit this relationship between the country and the city as one of mutual education and edification, in contrast to Williams’s formulation of the relationship as a ‘problem’ (1973: 3).4 Within the modernist-inflected realism of To the North, Emmeline’s conflicting desires for speed and stillness, agency and passivity, autonomy and connection, will be seen to be ultimately irresolvable. In non-realist literary modes, however, it was possible to find a different resolution to the problem of women and modernity, a resolution that marked another negotiation of time and place associated with the country and the city, but this alternative ultimately signified a kind of retreat from urban modernity to a residual form of social relations. Despite the apparent ease with which Cold Comfort Farm negotiates the bucolic and the metropolitan – represented primarily through the ease with which the heroine negotiates them – Gibbons’ novel also contains an uneasiness about time and place that warrants attention. Williams’ brief discussion of Cold Comfort Farm in The Country and the


City is a useful starting point here. Describing Gibbons’ novel as an ‘odd work’, Williams distinguishes it from ‘an indeterminate group of work by women novelists’, arguing that it should instead ‘be read side-by-side with, say, Wuthering Heights, Adam Bede, Tess of the d’Urbervilles’ (1973: 253). Like these canonical novels, Cold Comfort Farm traces the ‘loss of a credible common world’, exploring ‘the tension of an increasingly intricate and interlocking society: not only the changes of urbanism and industrialism, but the new social mobility and the ideas and education of an extending culture’ (Williams 1973: 253). In other words, even as Cold Comfort Farm relies for its humour on a sharp distinction between the rural and the urban, it recognises their mutual imbrication, not least through the mobility of its heroine, Flora Poste, who moves effortlessly between these locations. Additionally, this character’s name signifies a natural deity (if not a domestic goddess) joined with the varying resonances of ‘Poste’ as the speed of the express rider, the fixity of a gatepost or the guidance of a signpost. And indeed Flora does point the way to the inhabitants of Cold Comfort Farm, enabling them to move as freely from location to location as she does: Seth Starkadder leaves the farm to become a Hollywood matinee idol; his father, Amos, travels to America as an itinerant preacher; his mother, Judith, enters a chic sanatorium in London; and Aunt Ada Doom, who has not left the farmhouse for over twenty years, flies off to Paris clad in ‘the smartest flying kit of black leather’ at the novel’s conclusion (220).5 From the time of Flora’s arrival in rural Sussex there is a constant to-ing and fro-ing, as people move in and out of the farmhouse, travel to and from London, while unlikely visitors – such as Bloomsbury intellectuals and Hollywood producers – appear at the farm. The force of the parody in Cold Comfort Farm lies in its awareness that representations of the ‘unspoiled’ countryside found in regional novels were simply a deliberate exclusion of new social relations and practices that bound the country and the city; an exclusion, that is, of changes that were already historically entrenched by the 1930s. It may be Flora’s machinations that bring a film producer to the farm to ‘discover’ Seth but Seth is a devoted fan of the cinema long before Flora’s arrival. Similarly, Flora may induct Elfine into the fashion of the day but Elfine is already a creature of fashion, albeit an earlier aesthetic style, which Flora simply updates (thus enabling Elfine to marry the heir of the aptly named Hautcouture Hall). For all its rural dialect and primitive bathing facilities, Cold Comfort Farm inhabits a twentieth-century world. And yet history and temporality are somewhat awkwardly handled, strangely at odds with the assured parody of country life throughout much of the novel.

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While references to shingled hair and dresses cut on the bias evoke the 1930s, the novel begins with a ‘Note’: ‘The action of the story takes place in the near future’. Thereafter, references to an imaginary future are interspersed in the narrative, such as ‘the Anglo-Nicaraguan wars of ‘46’ (161), ‘television dials’ on telephones (129) and even ‘harassed vicaress[es]’ (123). These intermittent futuristic references, often somewhat forced, are most effective, however, in relation to modes of transport. A lengthy horse and buggy ride is still the only means of travelling from Cold Comfort Farm to the nearest railway station – a recurring cause of inconvenience for the Starkadders after the arrival of Flora – but the railway has itself become outmoded by improved road and air networks so that trains are now associated with slow travel in contrast to an accelerated modernity. Struggling with the transport vagaries of her initial journey to Sussex, Flora discovers that: since the aerial routes and the well-organised road routes had appropriated three-quarters of the passengers who used to make their journeys by train, the remaining railway companies had fallen into a settled melancholy; an idle and repining despair invaded their literature, and its influence was noticeable even in their timetables. (30) Gibbons’ prescience here in observing the declining fortunes of rail travel is one occasion when the future setting of the novel ingeniously conveys the nonsynchronicities of the modern. Interestingly, one of Flora’s only limitations in relation to the management of modern life is train timetables: she ‘had never been able to understand how [they] worked’ (27). She is perfectly at ease, however, in arranging flights, ordering chaffeur-driven cars to the apparently remote farm and escorting various Starkadders to London – or ‘Town’, as it is known – to introduce them to the sites and services of modernity such as nightclubs and fashion houses. These temporal disruptions of the novel’s diegesis bring us back to the problematic relationship between different locations like the country and the city, which both Williams (1973) and Ross (1995) identify as a problem of temporality. But, as the reference to Baedeker in the Foreword reminds us, it is not the rural past which is idealised here but the easy mobility of the modern subject who can absorb or consume an experience of the past from the comforts of the present: Cold Comfort Farm as a kind of heritage tourism. The fantasy of Gibbons’ novel lies in the fact that unlike heritage sites where tourists can only observe, but not intervene, Flora can step through the frame


as it were and bring the Starkadders, like time travellers, into the modern everyday she inhabits and to which they are already attracted. As Flora observes, ‘things seemed to go wrong in the country more easily and much more frequently, somehow, than they did in Town’ (22). In an amusing reversal of the usual connotations of the city and the country, urban modernity is here associated not only with pleasure and consumption but with efficiency and convenience: the simple life, in short. As will also be seen in To the North, the problem of the present, of ‘modernity now’, is negotiated through and around the figure of the woman, whose mobility across these various sites signals an attempt to reconcile various nonsynchronicities. Like Emmeline Summers, Flora Poste embodies modernity through her facility with technology, travel, fashion and metropolitan life but – unlike Emmeline – Flora determinedly refuses the role of the modern, working woman. When she loses her parents at nineteen, Flora eschews a career and a flat of her own. Instead she plans to live with relatives until she marries – a very Austenian narrative. Indeed, Flora affirms, ‘I think I have much in common with Miss Austen. She liked everything to be tidy and pleasant and comfortable about her, and so do I. You see Mary … unless everything is tidy and pleasant and comfortable all about one, people cannot even begin to enjoy life. I cannot endure messes.’ (20) The narrative of the woman as domestic manager has been seen as central to the formation of modern bourgeois subjectivity in the nineteenth century. As both Elizabeth Langland and Nancy Armstrong have argued, middle-class authority ‘rested in large part upon the authority that novels attributed to women and in this way designated as specifically female’ through an association with domestic practices (Armstrong 1987: 4; Langland 1995: 9). Flora’s plans to ‘tidy up’ other people’s lives – that particularly bourgeois fantasy of domestic control observable from Austen’s Emma to E. F. Benson’s Queen Lucia – foregrounds a discourse of class in the novel in which female agency simultaneously deploys and conceals middle-class authority. In representing the modern woman as agent, then, Cold Comfort Farm relies on a female subject drawn from the past even as it enacts a progressive narrative about the triumph of modern practicalities over anachronistic inefficiencies. Not only does this knowing invocation of a nineteenth-century model of femininity by a modern woman of the ‘near future’ depend on a

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historical – and historically loaded – sense of women’s agency but it also returns us to the question of women’s modernity: what time are these women in? The past represented by the country house? Or the future represented by the car and the aeroplane? It is not simply that Flora represents a conservative modernity that stressed historical continuities; at times, she espouses views consistent with early twentieth-century feminism, such as her instructions on birth control and women’s sexual agency to the haplessly fertile Meriam (see Hammill 2001). Her struggle with Aunt Ada Doom, moreover, squarely pits Flora’s modern practicalities against an older form of matriarchal power that must eventually give way to the new. Flora’s triumph through the trappings of modern consumer culture is not the triumph of youth over experience but signals the appeals of modernity to women of all ages. Her weapons in the routing of her aunt are a brochure for the Hotel Miramar in Paris and the latest issue of Vogue, which are ‘dropped neatly into the great field’ by the ‘air-postman’ (208) and delivered by Flora to Aunt Ada on her meal tray. Ada, it transpires, was not of rural origins, but ‘really loved the country and wore artistic hats [and] ended by marrying a Sussex farmer’, leading to her lifelong estrangement from her more urbane sister, Flora’s mother (26). Seduced by the myth of rural authenticity and beauty, Ada has subsequently adopted the role befitting ‘the Dominant Grandmother Theme’ common in agricultural novels (57), in which she combines rigid matriarchal control with (feigned) madness and close scrutiny of the farm’s accounts. Even before Flora’s intervention, there are indications that Ada is not as anachronistic as she first appears: she is devoted to journals such as the Milk Producers’ Weekly Bulletin and Cowkeepers’ Guide (172), signs of a modernised agriculture totally at odds with the daily life at Cold Comfort Farm. Flora’s departure from Cold Comfort Farm at the end of the novel – whisked away by her fiancé’s plane (named ‘Speed Cop II’) after her aunt has left in an earlier plane for Paris – is a fitting image of the contradictions of women’s modernity in this novel: the angel in the house was never meant to fly this way. Although in many ways the epitome of modern civilisation, then, Flora Poste, like her aunt, is not entirely a woman of her times. Despite Flora’s mobility between the country and the city throughout the novel and her return to ‘Town’ with Charles at its conclusion, her envisaged future residence in Hertfordshire underlines the nostalgia of Cold Comfort Farm for a society in which signifiers of class (dress, etiquette and domestic arrangements) had allowed middle-class women to secure a certain stability in their social location and identity (see Langland 1995: 31–49). Hertfordshire, however, is not an absolute escape from


twentieth-century modernity: as Light argues, ‘it is not just the metropolis that can signify displaced and anonymous humanity; by the 1930s it is possible to imagine the “Home” Counties … as the reverse of the homely’ (1991: 92). Flora’s new home, it may be imagined, will be homely in the sense of upper middle-class comforts and replicate the order she had imposed in rural Sussex (where she was much given to preparing China tea and bread and butter) but will probably constitute a similar movement between country and city – the negotiation of modernity and the past – signalled by her flying ‘embryo parson’ fiancé (19). Flora’s capacity to combine modern domestic efficiencies with a traditional marriage offers a version of the home as a reconciliation of modernity and femininity to which bourgeois housewifery, at least until the 1960s, aspired (Light 1991, Johnson 1996). Flora’s plans for the future include not only marriage but also authorship: ‘when I am fiftythree or so I would like to write a novel as good as Persuasion, but with a modern setting, of course. For the next thirty years or so I shall be collecting material for it’ (20–1). In this way, Flora also seems to be at home in a nineteenth-century version of country life in which the country consisted of country houses and the rest, as Williams says, was ‘weather or a place for walks’ (1973: 166).6 The novel’s final scene at a now almost deserted Cold Comfort Farm – as a solitary Flora awaits the arrival of Charles’ plane on an idyllic mid-summer evening – lacks the quality of parody that had characterised the descriptive passages throughout (marked, as promised, with Baedeker-like stars): with its attention to may blossoms, blackbirds and ‘the soft blue vault’ of the cloudless sky (233), the bucolic landscape has become a simple reflection of the heroine’s sunny disposition. If Gibbons ultimately seeks refuge in a nostalgic place outside the modern city where the female subject may exercise agency and survive the shock of the present, this refuge is perhaps an indication of the particular anxieties modernity provokes for female subjectivity, anxieties not wholly contained by the perimeters of the city but temporarily assuaged by comic conventions like country wedding scenes.

To the North The great agent of change, and from our point of view, destruction, has of course been the machine – applied power. The machine has brought us many advantages, but it has destroyed the old ways of life, the old forms, and by reason of the continual rapid change it involves, prevented the growth of new. (Leavis & Thompson 1942: 3)

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Leavis and Thompson’s rage against the machine as the source of the destructive changes of modern life is sharply opposed to the frequent celebration of the machine’s power, speed and efficiency in modernist art. The repetition of images of the car and the aeroplane in Futurism, for instance, not only testified to a cultural preoccupation with new forms of transport and their varying significations but also seemed to be an embodiment of Baudelaire’s earlier association of modernity with ‘the transient, the fleeting, the contingent’ (1863/1972: 403). In particular, speeding in a car could be seen as the quintessential modern experience. From within the moving car, scenery, broken up into fragments, is barely glimpsed before being replaced by new scenes, new images and new impressions, enhanced by the exhilaration of speed. The fragmentation and mobility of perspective for the car traveller was for Virginia Woolf, like many other modernists, emblematic of modern subjectivity.7 Kristin Ross has argued that the car represented a new form of subjectivity ‘whose circumference, unlike that of domestic subjectivity, is nowhere and everywhere’, and the speeding car, symbolic of freedom from social restraint, seemed to guarantee the singularity of the driving subject (1995: 22). Some modernist representations effectively sought to link the automobile with masculinity (see Hulten 1986) but modern femininity was also increasingly associated with mobility and travel: the ‘Flapper’, for instance, was represented as ‘constantly in movement’ and ‘required cars, trains and planes at her disposal’ (Pumphrey 1987: 186). The relation between women and these new vehicles of modernity was not, however, always an easy one. From Isadora Duncan to Princess Diana, cultural narratives of a woman’s fatal encounter with this symbol of modernity abound. In To the North – a novel that ends with a similarly fatal confluence of woman and automobile – speed and travel are central to representations of modern subjectivity and, specifically, to the representation of modern female subjectivity.8 Emmeline Summers, the travel agent, ‘who had sent so many clients flying that her Bloosmbury offices seemed to radiate speed’ (144), owns her own car and drives everywhere. Her widowed sister-in-law, Cecilia Summers, with whom she shares a house, does not drive but is fond of travel. Cecilia, says her aunt Lady Waters, ‘never seems to be happy when she is not in a train – unless, of course, she is motoring. … She goes where she likes: it’s neurosis’ (15). When not travelling, both Emmeline and Cecilia share a propensity to pace (5, 135) and seem to incite each other’s mobility (Lady Waters believes that ‘Cecilia’s perpetual rushing abroad and then home’ is ‘disturbing’ for Emmeline, 15). The two


women also share an uncanny sense of the other’s movements when they are apart: meeting Cecilia’s friend Julian at a party the night before her sister-in-law’s return from Italy, Emmeline imagines ‘The map of Europe … crowds rushing from platform to platform under the great lit arches, Cecilia’s face sleeping against cushions as the Anglo-Italian express tore into France from Switzerland on the return journey’ (26) and Cecilia is subsequently fascinated to learn that Emmeline had met Julian ‘while one was asleep in the train’ (27).9 The mobility of Emmeline and Cecilia, then, is symptomatic of a modern subjectivity which, if not strictly ‘neurotic’ in the sense ascribed by the amateur psychoanalysis of Lady Waters, is manifested variously as accelerated senses ‘running ahead from the speed of the journey’ in Cecilia’s case (19) or ‘straying faculties’ in Emmeline’s (125). Not all women in To The North are, however, characterised in this way. Others lack the will or the desire to embrace travel and movement with the same enthusiasm as Emmeline and Cecilia: Lady Waters defines herself as a ‘born islander’ and considers others ‘too anxious to leave England’ (171); the unhappily married Gerda Bligh laments having ‘no energy’ to ‘run away with somebody else’ (54); and Pauline, Julian’s adolescent niece, undertakes a solitary bus journey in London with great trepidation (40). Yet despite their protestations, mobility remains an inevitable feature of these characters’ daily lives through the actions of modern femininity such as shopping and socialising. Julian’s sister Bertha, for instance, although unfavourably contrasted with Emmeline for her ‘slow movements’ (113), expresses her desire to make the most of her limited time in London on the afternoon of her return from abroad: at half-past two exactly she wished to go shopping. She wanted a massage after her journey, a fitting at her corsetière’s, a new silver saucepan to boil milk in her bedroom, a chat with her specialist and one of those mackintosh coats she had just seen advertised for her dog. (114) Indeed, all the female characters in Bowen’s novel enact somewhat contradictory attitudes towards modern mobility. Even Emmeline’s fondness for driving is at one point represented as passé – an attitude of a time already past. Having foregone a Sunday drive – to see ruins of a Roman villa – Emmeline remains at Lady Waters’ country home Farraways to attend church and have tea with the vicar who, lamenting

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that ‘Modern life [has become] increasingly complex’, harks back to a time when ‘motoring was itself a pleasure’ and he ‘wore a dust coat and goggles; the ladies were heavily veiled. I am still surprised by the speed at which things fly past. But nowadays the whole incentive to motoring seems an anxiety to be elsewhere.’ ‘I know,’ agreed Emmeline. ‘Do you share this indifference?’ inquired the Vicar anxious. ‘No, I like driving my car.’ (64) The apparent anachronism of Emmeline’s expression of pleasure in driving is then followed by the only description of Emmeline as a passenger, driven back to London by an ineffectual young man (but under her strict instructions; 65) through a transformed landscape in which the natural and the industrial are interspersed in jarring, unexpected ways: Small new shops stood distracted among the buttercups; in the distance aerial glassy white factories were beginning to grow up among forlorn may trees, branch lines and rusty girders: here and there one was starting to build Jerusalem. Emmeline smiled at London … (65) The personification of the commercial, the grouping of may trees and rusty girders, the unexpected contrast between a forlorn nature and ethereal factories, are here focalised through Emmeline whose smile seems to suggest some kind of appreciation of an industrialised landscape despite her affection for the countryside. Emmeline’s apparently uncritical acceptance of change (‘Mutability seemed to Emmeline natural’; 22) indicates her adaptability to the disjunctures and detritus of daily life. Passivity or surrender to the flux is one response to modernity’s unevenness but Emmeline fluctuates between surrender and purposeful energy throughout the narrative. As this episode indicates, however, Emmeline’s love of speed, travel, and mobility is often juxtaposed with male characters in the novel in a way which accentuates her agency over theirs: her partner in the travel agency, Peter Lewis, never travels because he suffers from acute motion sickness (‘My partner can’t move, he gets sea-sick and air-sick and quite often train-sick’; 24), while her lover, Mark Linkwater, does not drive and reluctantly flies for the first time when he accompanies Emmeline to Paris. This differential relation to mobility along gender lines problematises


the male characters’ claims both to agency and modernity.10 Given the strong cultural association between masculinity and mastery over nature through machinery, the alienation between men and machinery in To the North attributes a limited agency to them in a world increasingly defined by technological artefacts such as cars and planes. Markie’s lack of interest in driving (‘machinery bored him’) is also attributed to his ‘principle that it is a mistake to do anything anyone else can do for one’ (202–3), which here connotes not so much aristocratic pretension as a diminished capacity to act meaningfully in the world. The prevailing assumption that driving was an inherently masculine skill was being challenged due to the increasing number of women drivers and a perceived ‘feminisation of the car’ (O’Connell 1998: 44, 53). Seen in this light, Markie’s refusal to drive suggests that one of the ‘old ways of life’ under threat from the applied power of the machine was the indexical relation between power and masculinity.11 The conflicting ascriptions of agency and passivity to men and women in the novel in relation to modes of mobility is further complicated in the description of the flight to Paris, one of the set-piece descriptions of journeys in To the North, the others being the journeys north that begin and end the novel (Cecilia’s from Milan by train and Emmeline’s by car from St John’s Wood to Baldock). Brassard has argued that the flight to Paris is ‘the literal and metaphorical centre of the novel’ (2007: 292), marking as it does the turning point in Emmeline and Markie’s relationship. Certainly Emmeline’s delight in the ‘exalting idea of speed’ (135) – in contrast to her partner’s studied detachment – prefigures the discordant intensities that will characterise their sexual relationship, doomed from the outset. Emmeline’s heightened sensory response to flying, however, also distinguishes between two forms of modernity that are implicitly gendered in this account. One form of modernity, identified with ‘standardisation, reliability, predictability’ (Schnapp 1999: 34) is represented by Markie and the other male passengers who turn to their briefcases and newspapers after take-off so that ‘an immense sense of ordinariness established itself in the car’, despite the intense noise and vibration that characterised early air travel and made it a possibly daunting experience that among other things precluded conversation (135). Emmeline, by contrast, glowing with ‘childish delight’ (136), cannot take her eyes from the window or read her Tatler as Markie urges: ‘No noise, no glass, no upholstery boxed her up from the extraordinary’ (136). By refusing the banalisation of air travel, Emmeline’s response instead represents a modernity identified with novelty, danger and unpredictability (Schnapp 1999: 34).

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Emmeline’s response to flying differs markedly, then, from the kind of disembodied visual mastery which Michel de Certeau has famously associated with the view from above (‘the totalising eye’), in contrast to the experience ‘down below’ at ground level which is characterised by tactile apprehension and creative encounters with place (1984: 92, 93). De Certeau’s influential account of the spatial practices of the modern city valorises one form of mobility – walking – as an affective, improvised and connective practice distinct from other forms of mobility (such as the train or the plane) which remove and disconnect subjects from their environment while offering them the illusion of a panoptic perspective and ‘the fiction of knowledge’ (1984: 92). For Emmeline, however, the flight to Paris is an affective experience in which bodily sensation is crucial (the noise and vibration of the plane is stressed) and her vision from the plane is not a reassuring ‘imaginary totalisation’ of distance, but precisely the kind of estranging of the everyday as the ‘extraordinary’ (in the fields and houses glimpsed below) which de Certeau associates with a connected engagement with place that – paradoxically – ensures that ‘it remains daily and indefinitely other’ (1984: 93). By contrast, Markie’s disengagement from the altered perspective that flight offers and his insistence on maintaining ‘appearances’ among the audience of his peers on the plane is a kind of blindness to experience that is not a refusal of totalising vision in favour of tactile sensory responses but an attempt to insulate himself from any experience that would disturb his equilibrium. The complexity of Emmeline’s response – alienated from a consumer modernity represented by the glamorous images of fashion and celebrity she cursorily looks over in Tatler while captivated by the thrills of speed and altitude – is continued throughout her Paris sojourn and marks her ambivalent location in ‘this distended present’ (144). Markie has planned a weekend in the ‘indoor intimate Paris’ he knew well (149), while Emmeline, whose purpose in Paris was primarily business-related (meeting with two Serbians to open a branch of the travel agency there), prefers to walk the streets and parks by day and night. Markie’s discomfort with ‘The forests humming with pleasure’ in St Cloud is matched by his horror on the roads of Paris: a near-miss in a skidding taxi leaves Markie cursing while Emmeline is ‘placid’ and laughing (149). Despite her ease in Paris, that metropolis of modernity, however, Emmeline still longs for the tranquillity she associates with the countryside at Farraways: She longed suddenly to be fixed, to enjoy an apparent stillness, to watch even an hour complete round one object its little changes of light, to see out the little and greater cycles of day and season in


one place, beloved, familiar, to watch shadows move round one garden, to know the same trees in spring and autumn and in their winter forms. (144) This is not to say that Emmeline longs for the ‘organic community’ so lamented by Leavis and Thompson (1942: 87) for, as Williams argues, the country house itself implies mobility, the rural retreat available to an affluent metropolitan social set (1973: 248–9, 290). Emmeline’s desire for stillness and continuity needs to be understood not as a rejection of modernity but as the representation of a ‘conflict of impulses’ (Williams 1973: 297): as a negotiation of different modes of experience, sociality and subject positions offered by modernity. While Cecilia does not share Emmeline’s nostalgic attachment to Farraways – describing it as ‘a morgue’ (161) – she expresses a similar desire for a distant location that embodies an idealised past. On her return from Italy, she ‘resumed home life at high pressure’ but ‘melancholy invaded her. She thought how at sunset the little hills lapped like waves round Urbino. … “I wish,” she thought once or twice, “I were still in Italy”’ (27). The nostalgia of both women attests to the discursive dis-location of the female subject in the early twentieth century: the passing of the nineteenth-century ideal of womanhood that in John Ruskin’s terms, ‘home is yet wherever she is’ (1893: 138), effectively rendered modern women like Emmeline home-less and aware of the instability of their location in the social world. Modern men, by contrast, seem to Emmeline to have the best of both worlds and both times. A wife, Emmeline believes, ‘locates’ a man; but ‘no one could do that for me’ (192). The unevenness by which a woman seems to guarantee a fixed, stable location for a man in spite of the fact that a woman can never escape the flux of modern life is perhaps most poignantly evoked in descriptions of the women’s shared home in St Johns Wood. If in To the North, ‘Houses shared with women are built on sand’ (208), they are nonetheless powerfully cathected locations. On separate occasions both Emmeline and Cecilia experience their home as simultaneously a place of comfort and shared belonging and also as an unheimliche space associated with ghosts and catastrophe.12 Cecilia, wandering the house alone after guests have left, tries to reassure herself of the companionable domesticity she shares with Emmeline, but the ‘tempting picture of intimacy’ she conjures is only ‘a fiction in which she did not believe; for she lived with nobody’ (133). The relics of her dead husband reinforce

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Cecilia’s alienation from her home, despite its comforts: ‘Propped up in a frame on a mantelpiece against which he had never leaned … look[ing] across at a bed in which he had never slept’, ‘he had not known when he died that this house existed and that a shadowy part of his life would continue here’ (133). Uncannily, Emmeline too feels that Cecilia lives with nobody, describing herself as a ghostly presence in a house she equates with Cecilia: ‘This house is Cecilia: when I come in I see her, whether she’s in or out. Nothing feels part of me, yet I live here too. I feel I leave nothing but steam in the bath’, she tells Julian (192). While de Certeau contends that ‘Haunted places are the only ones people can live in’ (1984: 108), the shadowy lives both women associate with their cohabitation imply a desire for an intimacy and wholeness both imaginary and always-already lost. Learning of Cecilia’s engagement, Emmeline has a vision of the house falling apart, ‘Timber by timber’, and ‘saw the door open on emptiness: blanched walls as though after a fire’ (207–8). An image of homelessness, it is also a vision of the destruction or disintegration of Cecilia herself, given Emmeline’s earlier conflation of the house and the woman. Whether this image is a latent revenge fantasy for Cecilia’s decision to renounce the ‘fiction’ of intimacy with Emmeline for the more acceptable fiction of marriage, or a symbolic rendering of a divided, conflicted self choosing conventional stasis over the ‘enticing alternatives’ of other possible destinations (187), it forcefully exposes the extent of Emmeline’s sense of devastation and desertion by Cecilia. The elusiveness of a place of belonging is also seen in Emmeline’s disastrous attempt at rural retreat with Markie. Weekending alone with Markie in a friend’s Wiltshire cottage, Emmeline’s pervasive sense of displacement seems temporarily assuaged by country life and the quiddity of the cottage, complete with cornflowers and hollyhocks – in sharp contrast with the metropolitan settings of much of the novel. But while Emmeline delights in rustic domesticity, it is Markie on this occasion who embodies a modern restlessness: Markie let Emmeline have her own way. To play at house with her for two days would not be uncharming; there was also no doubt her first round with a Primus would reduce Emmeline to entire and rare dependence on male capacity. Two days undisturbed possession of her, clear of Paris or London, had a sweetness hard to resist. Markie had measured the map with his thumb-nail before starting: Devizes, he always reflected, was quite close by. (200)


The association drawn here between Emmeline’s agency and the metropolis underlines the fact that Emmeline herself remains a modern urban woman, and indeed her version of rustic domesticity is entirely a product of urban modernity: ‘had she not spent the morning shopping at Fortnum’s, determined all should be of the very best? No sardines, no cheese from the village shop should offend Markie’ (199). While Emmeline had sought a sense of connection and authenticity in the country, this weekend in fact marks the end of her relationship with Mark: the cottage, ‘too small for them both’, reveals their insuperable differences and disconnection (210). ‘You and I’, says Emmeline, ‘wherever we go there is something to keep us separate’ (211). For Emmeline, then, Farraways seems home and home always seems far away. The sense of alienation and dislocation that Emmeline discovers in the countryside reiterates the fear that, according to Light, ‘must haunt many a refugee from the city: far from being the ideal refuge from the city, secure and unchanging, the country might turn out to be no different at all’ (1991: 93). You can take the woman out of the city, it seems, but you cannot take the city out of the woman, as Markie’s final taunt to Emmeline cruelly emphasises: ‘It’s a pity you can’t be natural’ (212). Markie is himself, however, haunted by an earlier visit to the ‘impure’ country, a place at once uncivilised (dark, cold and damp) and overly cultured (‘where London’s genteelest finger-tip touches the beechwoods’; 56). Markie’s splenetic account of a dreary weekend with a married friend in Buckinghamshire evokes a gothic landscape of liminal spaces where the boundaries between day and night, inside and outside are permeable, and where houses are anthropomorphised as ‘bloated’ ‘carcases’ (56). In this nightmare version of the gentrification of the countryside, there is no sense that nature may offer respite or sanctuary from the ‘great gabled carcases, villas aping the manor, [and] belfried garages’ (56). In the woods, ‘No birds sang: it had been worse than that day in Keats. Leaves, rotting and rusty, deadened his steps; the afternoon had been sodden and quite toneless’ (56). Emmeline, puzzled by both the intent of Markie’s story and the venom with which he has narrated it, asks: ‘Is it a ghost story?’ (57). On reflection, she remained unclear ‘whether he meant people should not marry, or should not live in Buckinghamshire’ (57) – an observation that would not be out of place in the musings of Cold Comfort Farm’s Flora Poste. The combination of Keatsian imagery and jaundiced contempt in Markie’s story makes this an odd interlude indeed. Juxtaposed with Emmeline’s idyllic experience at Farraways (she recalls the story while walking to church with Sir Robert), it is another jarring example of the inherent

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incompatibility of Emmeline and Markie expressed through a contrasting response to place. Suburban domesticity as a kind of memento mori for Markie is perhaps too starkly contrasted with Emmeline’s delight in the trappings of privileged country life but such neat contrasts are never sustained in To the North. Emmeline’s contented walk across the fields at Farraways, for instance, soon gives way to her solitary aimless walks through London, the urban anonymity both a refuge and reflection of her disenchantment with life: if anyone looked at her in the streets it was to wonder from what she was running away … Walking the streets blindly she did not know that she thought, till a knuckle grazed on a wall, a shout as she stepped off into the traffic recalled her from depths whose darkness she had not measured. (225) Markie’s bleak response to Buckinghamshire is more than matched by Emmeline’s mood here and her compulsive walking symbolises the restless, even affectless, detachment to which she succumbs after her affair with Markie ends. Neither a country retreat, nor marriage, can offer a safe haven to either Emmeline or Markie. In All That is Solid Melts into Air, Marshall Berman argued that to be truly modern, both men and women must ‘delight in mobility’ and ‘learn not to long nostalgically for the “fixed, fast-frozen relationships” of the real or fantasised past’, equating stability with death (1983: 96). Bowen, however, shows that the decentredness of modern mobility – and modern relationships – has its own dangers. From the first meeting between Cecilia and Markie on the Anglo-Italian express, when a sudden lurch of the train sends Markie into a vacant seat at her dining table – while on the same evening Emmeline and Julian drift into conversation at a dull party – to the final dinner party when, through a misunderstanding, Emmeline confronts Markie again, men and women bump into each other, meet by chance or drift apart: all seem to lack the means or the desire to secure relationships. De Certeau has posited the modern city as ‘an immense social experience of lacking a place’ – an experience broken up into countless displacements, ‘compensated for by the relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric’ (1984: 103) – and the unstable, shifting relationships at the centre of To the North embody various responses to ‘lacking a place’ which are neither entirely a nostalgic longing for fixed relationships nor a simple delight in the promiscuous transience of


modern sociality. When the office stenographer, Miss Tripp, who has fallen for Emmeline, confronts her employer – insisting ‘I am human’ (120) but ‘What you want is an automaton’ (122) – the clash between instrumental relationships and intense affective bonds seems irreconcilable. Even Cecilia’s eventual engagement to Julian seems to result from exhaustion or inertia rather than to represent a heartfelt commitment to intimacy in a context where, as Emmeline puts it, married people ‘have passports everywhere’ (211). Not surprisingly, marriage seems to represent for Cecilia some kind of reconciliation between her conflicting desires for location and travel. For Berman, mobility is a symbol of the possibility of unbounded selfdevelopment within modernity, moving into an open future; for Bowen, it also means a woman at the wheel of a car, hurtling towards a multiple fatality with her faithless lover at her side. ‘I can’t live at top gear’, Markie had prophetically complained to Emmeline during an earlier disagreement (183). If Emmeline’s control of her car metaphorically represents the agency of the modern woman, it is also a means of problematising that agency as well. In the extended description of the final drive north, it remains unclear whether the crash is deliberate or not, whether agency resides in Emmeline or the car: Field and woods vanished unknown before the headlights. Speed, mounting through her nerves with the consciousness of direction, began to possess Emmeline – who sat fixed, immovable with excitement – and shocked back [Mark’s] numbing faculties into alarm. ‘Not so fast,’ he said again … … He looked sideways, trying to fix himself by an idea of fixity: three cars, standing empty, nosed into the jaded glare of an all-night café. Lit banks and low dark running skyline plaited their alternation over his brain; beside him she sat in frozen singleness, drinking speed. … Nervously shaking her hair back, gripping the wheel beside Markie, Emmeline, who said nothing, drove, as though away from the ashy destruction of everything, not looking back. Running dark under their wheels the miles mounted by tens: she felt nothing – Like a shout from the top of a bank, like a loud chord struck on the dark, she saw: ‘TO THE NORTH’ written black on white, with a long black immovably flying arrow. Something gave way. An immense idea of departure – expresses getting up steam and crashing from termini, liners clearing the docks, the shadows of planes rising, caravans winding out into the first dip of the desert – possessed

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her spirit, now launched like the long arrow. … She was lost to her own identity, a confining husk. Calmly, exaltedly rising and balancing in this ignorance she looked at her hands on the wheel, the silver hem of her dress and asked herself who she was. … … His fingers an inch from the wheel, wondering if he dared stun her, he said hopelessly, ‘Emmeline … ’ with the last calm of impotence. As though hearing her name on his lips for the first time, dazzled, she turned to smile. Head-on, magnetized up the heart of the fan of approaching brightness, the little car, strung on speed, held unswerving way. Someone, shrieking, wrenched at a brake ahead: the great car, bounding, swerved on its impetus. Markie dragged their wheel left: like gnats the two hung in the glare with unmoving faces. Shocked back by the moment, Emmeline saw what was past averting. She said: ‘Sorry,’ shutting her eyes. (242–5, original emphasis) Emmeline, agent of speed, is ultimately possessed by speed: from being a new sensation through which women could experience an enhanced sense of self, speed becomes the death of the individual, quite literally. To the North does not, then, uncritically embrace modernity and celebrate its liberating potential for women. As a novel, it does not simply invert cultural stereotypes and align women with modernity and men with the past. This is most clearly evident in the unstable significations of the car in the novel. What begins as a metaphor (the car stands for agency) becomes the thing itself (the car, not the driver, is the agent) at the expense of the female driving subject. Emmeline may be linked with speed, travel and mobility in the novel, but this is a chain of signifiers that leads to death. Unlike Lot’s wife fleeing the corrupting city, Emmeline does not look back, but her flight is doomed nonetheless. Emmeline’s association with conflicting desires for speed and locatedness is symptomatic of the stage of modernity in which she is situated: in which the machine ‘is the great agent of change’, but has not entirely ‘destroyed the old ways of life’, in Leavis and Thompson’s terms – whatever and whenever they were, Raymond Williams might add. Previous senses of time and place have not been utterly obliterated; modern subjects like Emmeline still inhabit a world in which it is possible either to fly to Paris or to drive down to a country house and have tea with the vicar. Precisely what Bowen represents so clearly in To the North is the self-consciousness with which Emmeline experiences these events as possible alternatives – the subject’s


awareness, that is, of the nonsynchronicities of everyday life. The disruption of modernity lies not in the continual rapid change of everyday life, but in the uneven rates of change and the persistence of certain experiences, events and places that represent a desired sense of ‘pastness’ or non-metropolitan life. The contradictory meanings that circulate around mobility, location, agency and gender culminate in the conclusion of To the North where the contrasting fates of the two central characters – Cecilia’s engagement, Emmeline’s fatal car accident – represent on one level a repetition of the nineteenth-century heroine’s limited options: marriage or death. The closing line of the novel – ‘Stay with me till she comes home’ (247), Cecilia asks Julian – implies both the impossibility of women’s homecoming in modernity and the contingency of heterosexual romance as a stopgap until such times when/if a home shared by women could be an imaginable conclusion. To the North, which explores the nonsynchronicities of modernity in a manner both poignant and arresting, marks a persistence of the question ‘what time are we in?’ as Cecilia’s fate seems to represent the past and Emmeline’s the future – leaving the present undefined. In the novels discussed in this chapter, life beyond the metropolis signals not simply a retreat from modernity but a nuanced response to the social complexity resulting from uneven rates of change, an unevenness due to gender and class as well as to spatio-temporal location. The nonrealist mode of Cold Comfort Farm may be able to evade the consequences of nonsynchronicity through fantasies of country life but To the North does not attempt to reconcile the unevenness of modernity. Emmeline’s death at the steering wheel in a liminal landscape between the country and the city seemed to portray the only appropriate closure. Ross has argued that the realist mode is best able to give an account of ‘the fatigue and exhilaration of moments when people find themselves living two lives at once’ (1995: 13) and in the figure of Emmeline, longing for the English countryside while strolling through Paris, To the North captures the nonsynchronicity of the modern woman and exposes the vacuity of modernisation’s promise to bring about a ‘perfect reconciliation of past and future in an endless present’ (Ross 1995: 11).13 Women’s mobility in these novels is an important means through which the reconfigurations of the modern female subject are textually represented: modern women may ‘move dangerously’ but their journeys situate women at the heart of modernity and remind us, as Bloch wrote, that ‘one has one’s time according to where one stands corporeally’ (1977: 22).

7 Destinations of the Modern Woman

For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side and the future on another.1 (Virginia Woolf) [A]s to the future, it is either empty or filled only with the cast shadows of ourselves and our various machineries.2 (Vernon Lee) In the preceding chapters, I have considered how the unevenness of women’s experience of modernity were represented through narratives of mobility in novels in a range of modes, from pastoral to parody, realist to modernist. Here, I want to depart from an exclusive focus on the novel form for two main reasons. Firstly, while my methodology has privileged textual analysis over biographical explanations in the novels I have discussed, it is not without significance that the women writers featured in this study were themselves modern mobile subjects, with first-hand experience of the nonsynchronicities of modernity. Rather than providing historical accounts of the mobility of each author I have featured, however, I will draw on selective examples of mobile authors in order to further contextualise my discussion of women’s modernity.3 Secondly, by examining instances of women’s mobility in non-fictional modes, I hope to signal further directions in which the study of women’s modernity could proceed. The inclusion of May Sinclair’s A Journal of Impressions in Belgium, for instance, allows me to address women’s mobility in relation to one of the defining 144

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experiences of twentieth-century modernity, namely the First World War. As a cataclysmic event that, on the one hand, mobilised and dislocated millions around the world and, on the other, relied on women’s (discursive and physical) location on the ‘home front’, World War I warrants consideration in the context of examining the place and agency of women in modernity. In beginning this final chapter with epigraphs from Virginia Woolf and Vernon Lee, I turn firstly to two authors well known for their interest in mobility and temporality. Within the field of literary criticism, it has become a commonplace to observe that mobility and modern modes of transport feature throughout Woolf’s writing.4 Woolf’s persistent interest in the temporality of modernity and her attempts to address the question ‘what time are we in?’ also suggest many points of connection with ideas explored in this study. It was the ubiquity of mobility and temporality in Woolf’s work that first prompted my interest in connecting women’s modernity and mobility, even as it also encouraged me to look beyond Woolf to a wider range of authors. In this context, it is fitting to return to Vernon Lee, who published travel writing as well as works on art history and aesthetics with a particular focus on Italy, and was also known by contemporaries for her emancipated habits of bicycling round Rome and travelling unchaperoned (Maxwell 2003: 211; see also Fraser 2001: 178). Reflecting on her oftennomadic existence, Lee joked that her friends ‘imagine me to have been born and brought up in a gypsy-cart, at any rate metaphorically’ (qtd. in Gunn 1964: 25). For Virginia Woolf and Vernon Lee, living in the present always implies a mobility of perspective that has an eye to both the future and the past. Towards the close of Orlando, Woolf represents the shock of the present moment tempered by being enclosed, or poised, between past and future, the former associated with a reassuring sense of connectedness and place (represented by Orlando’s destination, her ancestral home) and the latter with an unknown, unfolding potential for change and creativity. That this is a precarious and possibly perilous undertaking is expressed through the description of Orlando’s final drive out of London, in which the experience of driving corresponds to – and provokes – a ‘disassembl[ing]’ of identity (192): the disconnected, disjointed and incomplete encounters that characterise perception while driving at speed leave the over-stimulated driving subject feeling equally fragmented. The perceptual experience of ‘chopping up’ space that driving entails is also an experience of nonsynchronicity, which here is presented as a threat to the continuity and coherence of subjectivity even

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as it is also unavoidable in modern existence. To live successfully in modernity, Woolf claims in Orlando, it is necessary to ‘somehow contrive to synchronise the sixty or seventy different times which beat simultaneously in every normal human system so that … the present is neither a violent disruption nor completely forgotten in the past’ (191). For Orlando, synchronicity and the ‘illusion’ of a re-assembled self can only be achieved through the ‘continuity’ of the rural landscape which eventually unfolds before her in a coherent scene of green fields, with ‘a cottage, a farmyard and four cows, all precisely life-size’ (192). What finally anchors Orlando in place, however, is not simply a rural landscape, but her arrival at the aristocratic home that has become the embodiment of ‘history’ (199): as the site that intertwines personal memory with history on a grand scale, Orlando’s home is a reassuring destination after the flux and banality of Oxford Street. As Orlando revisits the rooms that bear the trace of diverse life experiences over the centuries, she becomes – paradoxically – ‘one and entire, and presented … a larger surface to the shock of time’ (200). Orlando’s accommodation with the nonsynchronicities of modern life, however, is one dependent on the privilege derived from an ancestral country seat and the accrual of centuries of life experience; it is far from an everyday solution to the ‘art of life’ for ordinary modern women (like Woolf’s Mrs Brown, for instance). Vernon Lee’s accommodation to living in the present in her essay ‘In Praise of Old Houses’ (from which the epigraph is taken) is, like Orlando’s, derived from a connection with a place evocative of the past. Whereas for Orlando this is a place – and a past – that is linked by possession and personal history to the modern observing subject, Lee describes an emotional response to a house fleetingly visited and presumes the privilege of modern mobility to enable access to such places. The old houses that Lee praises are merely passed through, the scene of an encounter for a subject who has come from, and is going, elsewhere: ‘There is in it no possession of any definite portion of bygone times; but a yearning expectancy, a sense of the near presence, as it were, of the past; or, rather, of a sudden capacity in ourselves of apprehending the past which looms all round’ (35). This transient encounter with place makes it all the more remarkable that the modern subject can gain an almost visceral connection with the past through a ‘sudden capacity’, a kind of ethical awareness that apprehends the prior existence of others. By describing the ‘sense of being companioned by the past, of being in a place warmed for our living by the lives of others’ (30), Lee suggests that to feel at home in modernity, one must feel at home with the past. The emphasis on feeling and sensation here is not, however, derived


from a romanticising of the past: there is no more reason to think, Lee insists, ‘that former life should have been more interesting than that these people … buried at my feet, should have had bigger or better made souls or bodies than I or my friends’ (39). Lee does not see history as a refuge from the present but an inescapable dimension of it. Modern everyday life, then, according to Lee, can be either enhanced or diminished according to one’s awareness of the co-existence of different times in different places. This coexistence of the past in the present which mobility makes apparent is not a disruptive nonsynchronicity, as in Woolf’s account, but lends a charm to the present it would not otherwise possess: The past is the unreal and the yet visible; it has the fascination of the distant hills, the valleys seen from above; the unreal, but the unreal whose unreality, unlike that of the present, can never be forced on us. There is more behind; there may be anything. This sense which makes us in love with all the intricacies of things and feelings, roads which turn, views behind views, trees behind trees, makes the past so rich in possibilities. … (40, original emphasis and ellipsis) Paradoxically, it is the past more than the future that evokes the unknown; Lee’s sense of the future as ‘empty’ is in sharp contrast with the possibilities that may be opened up by contemplating the past. The richly emotive terms that Lee uses here – the sense of being ‘in love with all the intricacies of things and feelings’ – suggest that the affective investment associated with ‘old houses’ has an immediacy which enriches present experience: it makes the present habitable. Living in the present is not something that can be taken for granted but for Lee, as also for Woolf, it involves an awareness of the emotional imbrication of places, objects and other subjects, and their connection to both the past and the future. Mobile subjects, that is, are ‘moved’ by contact with places and things that place them in new contexts and offer new perspectives. These emotional geographies associated with modern mobility are central to the essays on motoring by Lee and Woolf that I will now discuss.

Encountering others: Vernon Lee and Virginia Woolf In Lee’s ‘The Motor Car and the Genius of Places’ and Woolf’s ‘Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car’, there is an implied ethical dimension to car travel that is directly linked to an enhanced agency that

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freedom of movement is thought to provide. In Lee’s essay, the ethical potential attributed to car travel is contrasted with the constraints of the railway. ‘A drive like this one’, Lee states, makes one understand, if not the imaginative value, at all events the moral mission, of the motor-car in the future; in the future, of course, when it will be a thing of honourable utility, not swagger, and within the reach of many. For instead of travelling, like irresponsible outlaws, imprisoned between fences and embankments, it takes us into the streets and on to the roads where people are moving about naturally; it makes us slacken and deflect for wagons and go-carts, nay, stop short, decently, for children and dogs, feeling the claims of other life than ours, and suggesting that remote districts and foreign lands are not our tea-gardens and racecourses; for I fear that railways have merely diminished the sense of enlarged brotherhood which should come from reasonable travel.5 Beginning with an acknowledgement of the existing exclusions and privilege associated with driving due to the expense of cars – as well as an implied gendering of car ownership which the word ‘swagger’ may imply – Lee then posits an imagined future in which car travel will become democratised. Linked to this is the hope that a greater degree of social connectedness will result from the new proximities brought about by the car: unlike the railway track, the car may go ‘where people are moving about naturally’, able to adapt its speed and trajectory in response to others.6 Reiterating Ruskin’s famous analogy of train travellers and parcels – the railway, Ruskin believed, ‘transmute[d] a man from a traveller into a living parcel’ (qtd. in Schivelbusch 1986: 121) – Lee contends that ‘the motor-car will remove the degradation of being conveyed like cattle or luggage, irresponsible and unresponsive’ (97). For Ruskin, the problem with train travel was that it provided a diminished sensory and aesthetic experience but Lee’s concern is with the compromised ethical engagement that may result from an impoverished sensory experience: the rail passenger becomes both ‘irresponsible and unresponsive’.7 Lee argues that the greater autonomy offered to the driving subject made possible an enhanced ethical agency through the immediacy and spontaneity of experience she associated with driving. Lee’s ideal of ‘reasonable travel’, then, rejects the kind of colonising or instrumentalist impulse that can result from the speed and convenience of modern forms of mobility, while still praising the potential for an enriched sensory experience that can allow the traveller to appreciate the ‘genius of place’ that her travel writing repeatedly explored.8


The kind of aesthetic, imaginative response to place that Lee privileged did not demonise modern modes of travel per se but required travellers to adopt an embodied mode of perception to their environment. And this is precisely where Lee detected a limitation in the capacity of the car: while it had the potential to take the traveller to places where difference could be encountered, the response to difference was still constrained by the dominance of the visual while driving. ‘In motoring things remain ocular’, Lee states, ‘mere visions, unaccompanied by the sympathising measuring of our muscles and will. They lack the tangible joy, working deep into our nerves, of the massive real’ (99). Distinguishing between the traces left in the ‘mind’s eye’ (99) and the ‘corroborating evidence of my limbs’ (100), Lee implies a preference for the physicality of locomotion through walking or bicycling over more detached forms of observation. A journey by car through the landscape outside Rome leaves a feeling of ‘vague dissatisfaction’ because ‘such effortless seeing and knowing’ ‘had made little difference to me’ (100, original emphasis). Unresponsive to the exhilaration of speed – she ‘neither feel[s] nor regret[s] not feeling’ ‘the rapture of mere swift movement’ (97) – Lee implies that without a more corporeal experience of movement and the encounters with the new it brings, the mobile subject is left unchanged, despite the aesthetic perception. Mobility should have an impact on subjectivity; it should move us in ways both physical and emotional. In contrast to this essay, Lee’s The Spirit of Rome: Leaves from a Diary offers a more varied account of the freedoms of movement and their consequences for the mobile subject. A sequence of edited diary entries from 1895 to 1905, The Spirit of Rome describes encounters with place in and around Rome that are made possible through walking, bicycling or driving: it is an account of a Roman flânerie, seeking to know a city that is simultaneously inscrutable and already-known. These reminiscences rely both on the freedom to move around the city and countryside as well as on an attention to detail that is only available to a stationary observing subject. Detailed vignettes of architecture, landscape and people are juxtaposed with descriptions of the body in movement – walking on cobbled streets, resting after cycling up a steep ascent, driving over the brow of a hill to reveal a view of the sea below. If mobility in The Spirit of Rome is often diverting, however, it is also consolatory, motivated by a desire to recall absent others through revisiting places associated with a loved companion, intertwining personal and public history.9 The Spirit of Rome charts an emotional, imaginative response to the specificity of place and the continuities of history that at the same time evokes a strong sense of a restlessly mobile subject,

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always seeking a new encounter with place, a sensory response that will reveal the new or make new the already-familiar. Lee’s vacillations concerning motor travel, then, may reflect an attentiveness to the diverse contexts of mobility. In ‘The Motor Car and the Genius of Places’ Lee concludes that ‘we want both kinds of locomotion – the limited and the limitless and effortless, by which I mean the motor-car, in answer to different kinds and phases of our feeling, and to the different quality of place and hour’ (101). Lee then goes on to describes a specific car journey into Paris on a summer’s evening through a series of impressionistic images that valorises a particular kind of subjective, aesthetic response: No other mode of travel has ever given me so fantastic a sense of the real unreality of things, of their becoming only because we happen to see them … Avenues and wide places opening out of the darkness, and great ponds shining under the crescent moon; and, starting out of thickets, statues – tall, white, close at hand, gone as soon again. (102–3, original ellipsis) Lee’s somewhat contradictory responses to motor travel in this essay derive from the fact that she does not assign a singular meaning to any form of mobility, or assume a particular subjective response as inevitable; response will depend on context – the emotions, motives, destination and company of the traveller, as well as her mode of travel. Whatever the form of mobility, the embodied subject is imbricated in the temporal experience of travel as well as its spatial dimension: a journey through space is also a journey through time for Lee. As Lee suggested in ‘In Praise of Old Houses’, some places evoke the past in particularly affective ways, and moving from one place to another may force us to confront the past’s imbrication in the present. The past, as an imaginative experience, is always bound up with a bodily inhabiting of place that provokes or inspires the imagination to respond.10 A new encounter with the scenes of everyday life that orient the mobile subject to the past and the present in new ways is also described in Virginia Woolf’s 1927 essay on driving, ‘Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car’. Like Lee, Woolf describes the capacity of the car to expand and enhance sensory experience through a new perception of space and time that almost echoes Lee: Gone, gone; over, over; past and done with, past and done with. I feel life left behind even as the road is left behind. We have been over that


stretch, and are already forgotten. There, windows were lit by our lamps for a second; the light is out now. Others come behind us. (1927/1993: 83) While Woolf, in a brief, earlier piece saw the motor car as further proof of an undesirable acceleration of modern life and decried its ‘ruin of the country road’ and destruction of the pleasures of walking (1924/1988: 440), here she emphasises the uniquely privileged perspective of driving. The repetition of phrases captures the transience of experience in which presence becomes absence, the next visual impression swiftly replacing the previous and yet the observing consciousness is also able to retain an awareness of the road left behind: to imagine the perspective of others for whom the car and its occupants are ‘already forgotten’. The multiple perspectives of past, present and future which Woolf attributes to the motoring subject is far removed from the cliché of a driver speeding heedlessly through his surroundings, a modern fantasy of complete autonomy. Like Lee, Woolf implies an ethical dimension in the new perspective opened up by the car: the fleeting, transient experience creates an awareness of ‘others’ who come behind, recalling Lee’s attention to ‘feeling the claims of other life than ours’ (97). While this evening drive is rendered as a heightened sensory experience, through evocative imagery like ‘cliffs standing out to sea; marbled fields; mottled fields; red feathered skies’ (84), it also presages a kind of obliteration of self, in the sense of an ego-self that is preoccupied with subjective interiority. In its depiction of the insistent immediacy and speed of perception that paradoxically inspires ‘Reflections’, this essay offers an exemplary rendering of the unevenness associated with modern mobility and its impact on subjectivity. It is tempting to speculate that Woolf’s change of perspective on driving was due to the Woolfs’ acquisition of a car in July 1927. After this time, Woolf seems to persistently associate the car with liberation and adventure, rather than limitation and destruction: ‘This is a great opening up in our lives. One may … expand that curious thing, the map of the world in ones [sic] mind. It will I think demolish loneliness, & may of course imperil complete privacy’ (1980: 147). Woolf’s proviso on the possible threat to privacy notwithstanding, the overwhelming sense in her diary entries following the purchase of this car was of a world opening up, offering new experiences through the freedom of the road over other, older forms of travel such as the train.11 For Virginia (as for Vernon Lee), the pleasures of the motor car were not associated exclusively with driving; unlike Leonard and her sister Vanessa, she did not

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become a regular driver, despite taking lessons and assiduously ‘writ[ing] down instructions for starting cars’ on scraps of paper (1980: 147). She nevertheless became fully absorbed by automobility – a subject ‘which has filled our thoughts. … We talk of nothing but cars’ (1980: 146) – to the extent that her diary includes motorised metaphors of self-presentation: ‘All images are now tinged with driving a motor. Here I think of letting my engine work, with my clutch out’ (1980: 149). Woolf’s deployment of such images of mechanisation conveys an enhanced sense of social agency, rather than a diminished or alienated self, to the extent that automobility constitutes ‘an additional life’: Yes, the motor is turning out the joy of our lives, an additional life, free & mobile & airy to live alongside our usual stationary industry. We spin off to Falmer, ride over the Downs, drop into Rottingdean, then sweep over to Seaford … all as light & easy as a hawk in the air. Soon we shall look back at our pre-motor days as we do now at our days in the caves. (151) The imagery of spinning, sweeping and flying associated with this new life, in contrast to the sedentary nature of writing, seems to imply a privileging of speed over immobility but as Woolf had earlier noted the two are in fact causally linked: ‘The world gave me this [the car] for writing The Lighthouse, I reflect … ’ (1980: 147). In a very real sense, the expanded world offered by the car was made possible through the agency of Woolf’s writing. As ‘Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car’ implies, the ephemerality, spontaneity and unpredictability of car travel was a source of inspiration: a freedom of imagination as well as movement that inextricably linked driving and writing for Woolf.12 The serendipity of ‘lighting accidentally … upon scenes that would have gone on, have always gone on, unrecorded, save for this chance glimpse’ (1980: 153, emphasis added) suggests how modern forms of mobility challenged writers like Woolf to capture a moment in time – or register the ‘real unreality of things’ in Lee’s terms – as uniquely modern experiences. From a twenty-first century context of global warming and ‘peak oil’, such utopian responses to the motorcar may seem hopelessly naïve. For both Woolf and Lee, however, driving was not a solipsistic experience of speed, but could be a means of ‘moving’ the subject, in the sense that Ahmed describes as both an affective and ethical experience in which ‘attachment takes place through movement, through being moved by


the proximity of others’ (2004: 11). While Woolf described a subject profoundly altered by the experience of driving and Lee charted a more ambivalent response to the potentials of driving, for both writers automobility was a relational experience. If Lee’s criticism is that it is not relational enough – it does not move her towards others in the way it seems to promise – for both writers mobility is a means of connecting (or re-connecting) to places encountered before but now able to be perceived in a profoundly different way by creating possibilities for (re)connecting with other subjects in new ways too.

Surprised by joy(riding): May Sinclair The capacity of the car to move the subject towards others in a very literal sense was, of course, vital in the deployment of cars as ambulances in the First World War. The involvement of women in this task was the subject of memoirs and other literature by nurses (see Doan 2006), but May Sinclair’s A Journal of Impressions in Belgium is rather different. Sinclair’s stay in Belgium in 1914 was brief (less than three weeks) and her journal mostly recounts her frustration at inaction, as her age (51) and lack of training largely reduced her to a spectator role in the ambulance unit. A privately financed, volunteer venture – comprised of five women and nine men – the ambulance unit was one of the first in Belgium in September 1914; it departed at a time when the issue of women’s participation in a war zone was still highly contentious.13 Sinclair’s presence may indicate that she had personally provided considerable financial support to the undertaking (she was by this time independently wealthy due to her writing success); certainly, she had no qualifications that would suit her to this kind of fieldwork and, by her own admission, her ‘duties’ seemed rather cursory.14 While Sinclair’s representation of the war as a decisive rupture from all that preceded it is far from unique, her narrative is an unsettling one. Firstly, as an ardent supporter of the war from its outbreak, Sinclair’s glowing representation of the First World War as a ‘joyous adventure’ (152, see also 15), or ‘divine danger’ (97), in which she passionately desires to participate is rendered both as an intense personal experience and as a justification for complete submission to authority: ‘my irrelevant former self, with all that it has desired or done, must henceforth cease (perhaps irrevocably) to exist. I contemplate its extinction with equanimity’ (24). This ambivalence about personal agency, as the war paradoxically represents an opportunity for vivid experience through a surrender of autonomy, is reflected in a narrative in which Sinclair’s efforts to participate actively

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are constantly rejected. The one opportunity she is given to nurse a critical patient overnight is represented as a failure: unskilled as a nurse, Sinclair cannot even adequately observe the patient as her persistent cough disturbs his rest throughout the night. Sinclair’s main goal in Belgium, however, was to accompany the ambulances to collect wounded soldiers, which foregrounds the desire for mobility as a form of agency in striking – and often disturbing – ways. Tellingly, Rebecca West, reviewing A Journal of Impressions in Belgium, declared that Sinclair wrote as if she were ‘a little girl sitting on a tin trunk in a railway station and watching the people go by’ (qtd in Raitt 2000: 164). West’s image, which combines spectatorship with immobility, not only captures the sometimes child-like impotence that characterises Sinclair’s account but draws attention to the tendency in the Journal to associate a lack of agency with restricted movement. By contrast, automobility connotes uninhibited access to a more authentic domain of life and provokes a form of intensely embodied affect that is difficult not to read as sexual excitement. For example, describing the unit’s first drive from Ostend to Ghent on their arrival in Belgium before the unit commenced with its service, Sinclair records a sensory response to merely observing the first visible signs of the war: A curious excitement comes to you. I suppose it is excitement, though it doesn’t feel like it. You have been drunk, very slightly drunk with the speed of the car. But now you are sober. Your heart beats quietly, steadily, but with a little creeping, mounting thrill in the beat. The sensation is distinctly pleasurable. You say to yourself, ‘It is coming. Now – or the next minute – perhaps at the end of the road.’ You have one moment of regret … But the thrill, mounting steadily, overtakes the regret. It is only a little thrill so far (for you don’t really believe there is any danger), but you can imagine the thing growing, growing steadily, till it becomes ecstasy … At the moment you are no longer an observing, reflecting being; you have ceased to be aware of yourself; you exist only in that quiet, steady thrill that is so unlike any excitement that you have ever known. (12–3) The second-person narrative, a pervasive feature in the Journal, combined with the use of present tense, gives the description an immediacy that repudiates reflection in favour of sensation. Raitt has argued that Sinclair’s usage of the second-person is a way of disavowing the sensations that the narrative describes (1997: 77) but it also reduces the


subject to a mere sensorium which registers thrills, intoxication, pleasure and even ecstasy. As a passive receptacle of heightened sensory experience, ‘you’ have already experienced the loss of autonomy that Sinclair claims that war service demanded. If driving through Belgium can produce this kind of sensory response, the reader can only speculate how Sinclair will respond to a closer proximity to warfare. Indeed, later in the Journal, when after her repeated attempts to accompany the ambulances, Sinclair is finally able to go, she records: ‘I thought something must happen to prevent my taking that ambulance car out. I thought my heart would leave off beating and I should die before we started (I believe people feel like this sometimes before their wedding night)’ (184, original emphasis). Sinclair’s excitement here comes after a long period of ‘unspeakable inactivity’ (100), due in part to the reluctance of the ambulance drivers in the unit to allow women, even the trained nurses, to accompany them. Prior to one abortive trip, Sinclair imagines the feelings of the male driver: I know the dreadful, blasphemous and abominable thing that Tom is probably thinking about me as I climb on to his car. He is visibly disgusted with his orders. That he, a Red Cross Field Ambulance chaffeur should be told to drive [five] women to look at the massing of the French troops at Courtrai! … It’s a bloomin’ joy-ride, with about as much Red Cross in it as there is in my hat. (99) This association between automobility and masculinity means that all the women, not just Sinclair, have to struggle to assert the legitimacy of their participation in the war effort. The trained nurses are able to eventually win over the drivers by their professionalism and displays of bravery but Sinclair remains a superfluous woman whose presence is even rejected by the other nurses. On one occasion, Sinclair is physically removed from an ambulance by a nurse: Mrs Torrence, having the advantage of me in weight, height, muscle and position, got up and tried to push me off the step [of the vehicle]. As she did this she said: ‘You can’t come. You’ll take up the place of a wounded man.’ And I found myself standing in the village street, while the car rushed out of it.15 (214)

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This was not the only time Sinclair was bodily prevented from becoming a mobile participant. Later, when the unit has been evacuated from Ghent, Sinclair tries to accompany a nurse who wants to return to the hospital. When the two women board a train, the unit’s chaplain, ‘who [was] abominably strong, put his arms round my waist and pulled me off’, leaving the nurse to continue her journey alone (260). While this melodramatic version of events at Ecloo railway station was later disputed by the other woman (see Raitt 1997: 76), Sinclair’s subsequent image of herself as ‘a large and useless parcel’ on the Belgian expedition (281) effectively conveys her lack of agency as she is perpetually sidelined, ignored, or taken care of by those around her. On the final journey by car from Ghent to Ecloo, Sinclair describes the speed of the journey, previously exhilarating, as now a form of physical torture representing the betrayal and ignominy of retreat that removes Sinclair from any further possibility for more active participation: this speed of the motor over the flat roads, this speed that cuts the air, driving its furrow so fast that the wind rushes by you like strong water, this speed that so inspired and exalted you when it brought you into Flanders, … this vehement and frightful and relentless speed is the thing that beats you down and tortures you. (249) The contrast between the speed of retreat and the slow pace of the retreating Belgian army and refugees associates slowness with vulnerability but it is Sinclair who feels powerless: a victim of her own privileged mobility that gives her the capacity to escape while others are trapped.16 The contradictions throughout Sinclair’s Journal between the privileges and dangers of mobility match the ambivalences surrounding her agency in this context. As a volunteer who chose to travel to the scene of war, Sinclair exemplifies a kind of modern female agency (grounded in an independence, both financial and temperamental) but once in Belgium she experiences constant frustration and inactivity. She is a woman out of place, an encumbrance to those engaged in more important labour. At the same time, Sinclair relentlessly insists on the ‘clean and fiery passion and the contagious ecstasy of war’ (157) that provokes intensely pleasurable sensations of excitement and an enhanced sense of self, even as she insists on the need for self-abnegation in response to ‘Military Authority’ (22) and records that she is ‘enamoured of this Power [always capitalised in the Journal] and utterly submissive’ (23).


Raitt has argued that Sinclair’s war journal is centrally concerned with ‘how to develop an authentically feminine agency’ and she reads Sinclair’s thwarted attempts to develop such an agency in the context of war as an enlightening depiction of ‘one of the most occluded and repressed experiences of our own society: women’s shame at their own superfluity’ (1997: 82). Sinclair’s account of her ineptitude and petty frustrations in a context where millions were mobilised and displaced by war remains, however, a somewhat disturbing narrative of an attempt to actively seek out the dangers of mobility from a position of privilege. Sinclair was, of course, not the only one to see the First World War as an ‘adventure’ and her Journal deserves to be read in its historical context as a product of the early stages of the war. In an essay written a few years prior to the start of the war, Georg Simmel had conceptualised adventure as a definitively masculine experience in a way that may suggest why independent women in the early twentieth century would seek experiences like war or other dangerous forms of mobility as a means of enacting their agency as modern subjects. As an experience outside ‘the continuity of life’ (1911/1997: 223), but not to be confused with a ‘sheer, abrupt event’ (1911/1997: 225), the adventure, according to Simmel, lacks that reciprocal interpenetration with adjacent parts of life which constitutes life-as-a-whole. It is like an island in life which determines its beginning and end according to its own formative powers and not … according to those of adjacent territories. (1911/1997: 223) For women, whose lives were often defined by the routines and continuities associated with domestic life, such ‘islands’ of experience may not have been easily attained. Moreover, for Simmel, the adventure requires a synthesis of activity and passivity, a difficult balance to achieve between ‘forcibly pull[ing] the world into ourselves’ and ‘abandon[ing] ourselves to the world with fewer defences and reserves than in any other relation’ (1911/1997: 225–6) that already assumes a gendering of force and abandon.17 Because the ‘poles of conquest and grace’ are ‘decisively separated’ in men – unlike women, in whom the tendency towards passivity is pronounced (1911/1997: 229) – the challenge, and the accomplishment, of adventure is greater for men (1911/1997: 228). Sinclair’s ‘adventure’, however, bears interesting parallels to the type of experience Simmel describes: possessing a clearly defined beginning

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and end marked by her arrival and departure from Belgium, it remained an ‘incomparable experience’ (Simmel 1911/1997: 225) against which she would measure all other experience and events in her life.18 While Sinclair’s Journal records her relative inactivity, it is her desire for adventure which drives the account, implying that the singularity that Simmel ascribed to adventure was also an ideal for Sinclair. Her insistence that the war provided the ultimate opportunity for agency suggests that only a transcendence of everyday experience can truly constitute living in the present. Lee and Woolf’s mobile adventures, by contrast, problematise Simmel’s account of the adventure as a kind of ‘super-life’ (Simmel 1911/1997: 225). For Simmel the adventurer is the ‘extreme example of the ahistorical individual, of the man who lives in the present’, while the adventure itself is an experience of ‘absolute presentness’ (1911/1997: 223, 230). The mobility of motoring as described in specific journeys by Lee and Woolf, however, enabled an attention to the co-existence of the past and the future within an intense sensory experience in the present. This embedding of temporal and spatial dimensions in mobility gives it a kind of ethical potential for Lee and Woolf by opening up the possibility of a new connection to different subjects, different places. Whereas in Simmel’s account the heightened experience of adventure paradoxically reaffirms an always-already known difference (his example par excellence is the heterosexual ‘love affair’ which, he says, is an adventure ‘only for men’; 1911/1997: 229, 227), an adventure is described by Lee and Woolf as a possibly unsettling encounter with alterity.

The long trip home Think of the long trip home. Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? Where should we be today? (Bishop 1983: 93) The experiences of modern mobility discussed in this book would seem to refute Simmel’s gendering of adventure as a masculine domain, even as they also attest to the fact that women’s desires for an expanded realm of experience were not always realised. In focusing on women’s mobility, I am not implying that men were not also interested in, or responsive to, the relation between mobility, modernity and agency: at times here I have contrasted the gendering of mobility and agency in order to highlight some of the disparities of modern experience. I would


contend, however, that women ‘move dangerously’ in these texts not only in extreme or adventurous situations, but also whenever their mobility troubles the comfortable association between femininity and domesticity. Similarly, women’s mobility carries connotations of danger in relation to other forms of freedom – especially that associated with an unfettered sexuality. The trope of the wandering, fallen woman, for instance, warns of the perils of leaving the security of the conventional feminine location of the home and all of the novels discussed here are troubled by the problem of where an independent, mobile woman may truly belong. As I observed in the opening chapter, the association between female sexuality and mobility may be a conventional one but it is striking how many of the novels I have discussed depict women who are ‘moved’ by other women. Miss Brown, Moths, The Daughters of Danaus, Red Pottage, The Convert and To the North all depict close bonds between two women which are represented in the narrative by either travelling, living or working together and which set them apart, to varying degrees, from more conventional feminine roles or relationships. In Between Women, Sharon Marcus examined Victorian novels in which ‘Female friendship functions as a narrative matrix that generates closure without being shattered by the storms and stresses of plot’ (2007: 3). In the novels I discuss, by contrast, relationships between women tend to be fractured by the relentless events of the narrative, which disconnect them from attachments of choice and return them to more fixed locations.19 As a result, a desire for mobility is often inextricably connected to a desire to escape to another place where, it is imagined, other possibilities for lifenarratives may exist. While the potential for two women to feel at home in modernity together is not realised in any of the narratives examined here, the persistence of strong same-sex attachments suggests an ongoing desire to find a destination in modernity beyond the traditional locations of femininity. If the predominant location of modern femininity is usually assumed to be the city, I have been interested here to investigate what other locations may offer the modern woman. Distancing this study from others that have concentrated on urban settings for modern femininity, I have looked at narratives of women in villages and suburbs as well as cities at home or abroad, and have stressed the significance of women moving between these locations. Emotional responses to movement can symbolise women’s investment in a desire to be elsewhere, the stimulating feeling associated with escape from a confining location or the hope invested in another place beyond the known. While Schivelbusch

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contends that the railway ‘put an end to … [the] intensity of travel’ (1986: 53), accounts of women’s journeys between locations tell quite a different story. Women’s movement from place to place, such as the journeys depicted in The Daughters of Danaus or To the North, is often an intensely sensory experience that can be associated with danger or pleasure. The sensory experience of movement, however, does not preclude an affective investment in place and the conflicting claims between home and away generates much of the narrative impetus in the novels I have discussed. In the period from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, women’s novels depict women in motion in ways that emphatically place women within the processes and experiences of modernity. New forms of mobility such as the train or the car provided new opportunities for new modes of perception and accounts of women’s mobility discussed here have demonstrated an attention to these new perspectives opened up by movement. But, as I have stressed throughout, the story of women’s modernity does not end with spectatorship; if anything, observation is merely a prelude to greater participation, an enhanced agency that a mobile perspective seems to make possible. If mobility at times seems endowed with an utopian potential in narratives of women ‘moving dangerously’, it serves as a reminder that women could identify with an accelerating modernity as presaging the imminent arrival of desired social change. That modernity frequently turned out to be an uneven process involving both progressions and reversals did not detract from the fact that it also seemed to offer a new range of sensations and affects for women that differed from past experience. It is not possible – or even desirable – to synthesise the experience of women’s mobility across all the novels in this study into a singular conclusion about women’s modernity. My attention to women’s mobility in this context is consistent with what has been called the ‘mobility turn’, a new scholarly attention to understandings and representations of mobilities past and present that resists reductive or totalising accounts of modernity (Sheller and Urry 2006: 210). In the diverse representations of women’s mobility I have discussed – from Hetty Sorrel’s pathetic roaming to Flora Poste’s triumphant flight – women on the move have been crucial to the way modernity is presented and provided a means for authors to consider the place of women in the ‘undefined present’ (Williams 1973: 297). Recently, Judith Butler (2008) re-stated the question ‘what time are we in?’ arguing for the political importance of attending to how notions of progress, secularism or gender/sexual rights are inextricably connected to a particular version


of modernity now. Butler’s question ‘who has arrived in modernity and who has not?’ (2008: 1) is a reminder of the ongoing relevance of examining women’s place in modernity. The persistent association between mobility and entitlement, participation or liberation that I have traced here – as well as that between immobility and confinement or exclusion – shows that the question of women’s arrival in modernity was often explored through representing their freedom to depart from the domestic sphere as the sole location of women’s agency. Mobility, that is, becomes a kind of test case for the positive potential of modernity: the extent to which women feel ‘at home’ in modernity may depend, paradoxically, on the extent to which they can move in – and be moved by – a space or a time that embodies the ‘new and the now’, envisaged as a site of enhanced or expanded agency. The danger of this mobility, however, was that in taking subjects away from familiar locations into a possibly ‘interruptive scene of multiple temporalities’ (Butler 2008: 20) the result would be simply a lack of place, a dislocation of subjectivity or a diminished agency. The ‘long trip home’ for women in modernity, it seems, remains an open question, if not always an open road.

Notes 1 Modernity, Mobility and Women’s Agency 1. Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, Series 3, 1830–91: 831. All subsequent references will be to this publication. 2. For debates about women’s time and place in modernity in another context, see Burstein’s examination of the proliferation of women’s history in the nineteenth century: ‘feminist and anti-feminist women’s history’, Burstein argues, ‘defined modernity as the age of the historical woman par excellence’ (2004: 181). 3. Elizabeth Bowen (1932/1945), To the North, London: Penguin, 23. All subsequent references will be to this edition. 4. For an important discussion of both the pervasiveness and complexities of the figure of the flâneur, see Gluck (2003). In the context of mid-nineteenth century Paris, Gluck identifies two distinct accounts of the flâneur: the ‘popular flâneur’ represented in the mass-circulation press in the 1840s; and the ‘avant-garde flâneur’ depicted by Baudelaire as an artist defined against a ‘narrowly scientific conception of modernity’ from the late 1850s (2003: 54, 74). While both versions, Gluck argues, delineated an heroic role for the flâneur and affirmed ‘the idea of modernity as epic experience’ (2003: 74), the Baudelairean flâneur drew attention to the city as ‘the site of aesthetic experience’ (2003: 78). My discussion centres on the Baudelairean figure as having the greatest resonance in recent considerations of modernity as an experience that is unsettling and fragmented, but also seductive and affective. 5. See, for example, Young (1997), Blunt and Varley (2004), Giles (2004) and Hollows (2006). 6. In both novels, however, rural settings are also desirable places for the heroines’ expanding experience. In emphasising modern metropolitan experience at this point I am signalling some continuity between women’s fiction and the fantasy of urban experience presented by Baudelaire. 7. More recently still, Zygmunt Bauman has coined the evocative term ‘liquid modernity’ to describe the state of flux, fluidity and speed which typifies social relations, a process he sees as even more intensified today than when Marx first described the ‘melting of solids’ in the mid-nineteenth century (2000: 2). 8. See also Harvey (1989: 205) and Venn and Featherstone (2006: 457–8). 9. See for example May & Thrift (2001), Gilroy (1993), Ross (1995), Appadurai (1996), Felski (2000), Friedman (2006) and Venn & Featherstone (2006). I should also note that I am using ‘experience’ throughout not in the sense of unmediated, pre-reflexive sensation that constitutes direct, incontestable evidence and the origin of knowledge, but as itself discursively produced (Scott 1992: 24). 10. Of course accounts by Harvey (1989) and Kern (1983) also stressed the mutual imbrication of space and time in the experience of modernity, but 162

Notes 163

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

this recent emphasis on ‘timespace’ (May and Thrift 2001) to draw attention to the nonsynchronicities of modern experience serves to underwrite more complex accounts of modernity as a negotiation of binaries such as fast/slow, mobility/stasis, metropole/margin, masculine/feminine. While Wolff has also been critical of a narrow focus on city life in accounts of modernity, the novels by women that I discuss here indicate that I differ from her assumption that ‘The literature of modernity describes the experience of men’ (1990: 34). Thacker (2000) has noted the importance of the countryside in literary representations of the experience of modernity but his focus also differs from mine in that he is not specifically interested in the country/city relation for women’s modernity. Thacker’s subsequent attention to the ‘movements between and across multiple sorts of space’ (2003: 8) is much closer to my concerns here but his study is confined to modernist literature while mine traces these movements through women’s literature from the mid-nineteenth century onwards in order to offer a more inclusive picture of women’s modernity. Giles (2004: 141–2). See also Bowlby (1995), Young (1997), Pritchard (2000), Johnson and Lloyd (2004) and Hollows (2006). Shiach’s observation of a ‘need for a form of interiority that was not domestic’ in writers such as Woolf and Richardson in the modernist period (2005: 258) also serves as a reminder that liberation cannot be simply equated with a move away from the home. For discussion of the complexities of women’s agency in feminist theory, see, for example, Kegan Gardiner (ed.) (1995), McNay (2000 and 2004), Parkins (2000) and Lovell (2003). For Castoriadis (1987), agency and autonomy are possible due to the nature of the social imaginary, which he argues is characterised by a productive dynamic between processes of instituted (always-already given) meaning and instituting meaning (a capacity to generate new responses). See McNay (2000: 23–5, 29). The connotation of sexual wandering has a policing effect on the mobility of women in novels such as North and South and The Convert, while Adam Bede is particularly concerned with the dangers posed to the community by the wandering fallen woman. Even in Bowen’s To the North, the association between freedom of mobility and an unconstrained sexuality persists in the description of the flight to Paris prior to the beginning of the sexual relationship between Emmeline and Mark: ‘She was embarked, they were embarked together, no stop was possible; she could now turn back only by some unforeseen and violent deflection … from their set course’ (138). The perhaps un-subtle connotations of mobility and sexuality are also, however, humorously undercut by Bowen in the scene where, in response to the adolescent Pauline’s exclamation ‘How I dream of flying!’ the psychoanalytically inclined Lady Waters responds pointedly: ‘That may have nothing to do with flying’ (154). I am using articulation here in the sense that Probyn (drawing from Stuart Hall) describes as ‘an active mode of making connections’ (1993: 28). One example may be found in Emmeline Pethick Lawrence’s autobiography, My Part in a Changing World. Having described her growing sense of restlessness as a young woman as she became aware of the limitations of

164

19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

Notes late-Victorian middle-class femininity (with much emphasis on feelings, desires and stirrings), Pethick Lawrence then recounts the sense of liberation she experienced on taking up residence in Katherine House and working at the Girls’ Club: ‘It was a wonderful thing at that period to be young among young comrades … We … felt that all life lay before us to be changed and moulded by our vision and desire’ (1938: 88). See Conradson & McKay (2007: 170), Probyn (2005: 25) and Massumi (2002: 28). In this context, I should stress that I do not see affects as random or autonomous in the ways described by Sedgwick (2003) or Massumi (1996 and 2002). Rather, affective patterns are constituted through processes of repetition and interplay with the body and emotion over time, which ‘influence the individual’s capacity to act in the world’ (Hemmings 2005: 564). Munt has also noted the limitations of privileging the visual over the tactile in accounts of the flâneur, arguing that ‘the conventional line’ of analysis assumes he ‘roams the streets untouched’ (1995: 117, original emphasis). See also Dillon’s (2001) more general discussion of the dominance of visuality in literary and cultural criticism. Key texts here are Baudelaire (1863), ‘The Painter of Modern Life’; Simmel (1903), ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, Poe (1912), ‘The Man in the Crowd’, and Benjamin (1939/1983), Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Examples of the centrality of these texts in recent examinations of urban modernity include Donald (1999) and Highmore (2005). Feminist scholars have consistently critiqued a romantic reading of modern mobility even as they have returned to earlier writers like Baudelaire, Simmel and Benjamin to examine the construction of modern subjectivity. The early discussions by Wolff (1990 and 1994), Pollock (1988) and Wilson (1992) set the terrain for much of the subsequent flâneur/flâneuse debate and still figure importantly in Nord (1995) and Parsons (2000). It is also worth noting the dominance of Paris – and the related occlusion of London – in many accounts of European visuality and flânerie which Dillon argues may lead to a problematic and partial representation of Victorian modernity (2001: 87–8). Mona Caird (1894–1989/1894), The Daughters of Danaus, New York: The Feminist Press, 207. All subsequent references will be to this edition. While Ouida is often associated with the aesthetic tradition, Lee’s position here may be considered as more problematic, given that Miss Brown has been described as an ‘anti-aestheticist novel’ (for example by Schaffer and Psomiades 1999: 4). I would see Lee, however, as one of a number of women writers who engaged critically with aestheticism (see Maltz 1999, Ledger 2007) and I agree with Evangelista that ‘Aestheticism gave [Lee] a language to explore gender difference and play with ideas of androgyny and sexual perversion’ (2006: 92).

2 Home and Away 1. An important distinction between Wright’s argument and my own, however, is that Wright sees this juxtaposition in terms of the human condition of mutability, whereas I am arguing that the processes of change described in North and South are historically specific.

Notes 165 2. In the novel, Margaret moves from Helstone to London to Helstone to Heston to Milton to London to Oxford to Helstone to Cromer to London (and then presumably back to Milton following her acceptance of Thornton’s proposal). 3. Space precludes a larger discussion of Frederick Hale, a character who has figured more significantly in recent criticism of North and South. Markovits reads Frederick as representing the past: ‘his rebellion is the stuff of romance’ and his conversion to Catholicism in Spain represents a historical anachronism – in contrast to Margaret’s implication in the present through her participation in ‘the modern world of the strike’ (2005: 480; see also David 1981: 14). Lee, however, reads Frederick’s plot in terms of the looming crisis between the ‘cotton-producing American South and the cottonmanufacturing British North’ and explicitly rejects Markovits’ argument: ‘If anything, Frederick’s resistance is entirely modern, evoking the contemporaneous plight of American fugitive slaves’ (2007: 464 n. 36). In both cases, however, the ‘problem’ of Frederick’s mobility is read as a question of his place in relation to modernity: in Gaskell’s novel there is no simple equation of women with the past and men with modernity. 4. Elizabeth Gaskell (1855/1982), North and South, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 7. All subsequent references will be to this edition. 5. This distinction between new and old cities is, however, complicated later in the novel. When Margaret returns from Milton to her aunt’s Harley Street house, metropolitan social life is described in terms that link industry and domesticity: ‘The wheels of the machinery of daily life were well oiled and went along with delicious smoothness’ (372). 6. In Milton, however, Margaret’s ‘rambling habits’ had also been seen as improper when, for instance, Thornton observed her at a distance from home at dusk with an unknown male companion (her brother Frederick). What Thornton had interpreted as a traditional – if unsanctioned – form of social behaviour (a courting couple walking at dusk) was in fact a much more mundane modern practice (waiting for a train). 7. Thornton’s transformation into such a subject was prefigured by his selfconfessed need for education. ‘To be sure’, Mr Hale tells Margaret, ‘he needs some of the knowledge of the past, which gives the truest basis for conjecture as to the future, but he knows this need, – he perceives it, and that is something’ (167). As Bodenheimer notes, however, Thornton’s change of tutors in the course of the novel – from Hale to Higgins – demonstrates his stronger commitment to the present (1988: 59). 8. See, for example, Beer (1986), Corbett (1988), Homans (1993), Gates (1998) and McDonagh (2001). 9. George Eliot (1859/1980), Adam Bede, London: Penguin, 538. All subsequent references will be to this edition. 10. This resolution is sometimes seen as evidence of Eliot’s conservatism. McDonagh, for instance, argues that Eliot understood social change ‘in a Burkean way’ as resulting from gradual evolution rather than dramatic upheaval (2003: 128); Jones finds in Adam Bede evidence of a ‘beleaguered conservatism’, similar to that of Sir Walter Scott (2004: 306, 307–8); and Lamb argues that the novel’s ending ‘elides a history of political conflict’ (2002: 264). For further discussion of the complexities of Eliot’s conservatism, see also Horowitz (2006).

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11. See, for example, Coundouritis (2001: 290), David (1987: 212) and Williams (1969: 265, 266). 12. Gunn (1992) is explicitly discussing the analogy between realism and Dutch painting in Adam Bede, but his point seems equally applicable here. On the significance of this passage as an attempt to interpret the complex and disruptive historical processes by which modern England emerged from traditional rural communities, see also Coundouritis (2001: 303), McDonagh (2003: 129) and Homans (1993: 160). 13. As is well known, the origins of Hetty’s story lay in a specific historical instance: the case of Mary Voce executed for infanticide in 1802 – as told to George Eliot by her Methodist aunt – shifted to 1800 in Adam Bede. McDonagh goes so far as to contend that child murder is crucial to defining and demarcating modern civilisation in Eliot’s novel: ‘the entire narrative of social progress is underpinned by the traditional associations between child murder and barbarity on the one hand, and child loving and civilisation on the other’ (2003: 128). 14. The archetypal status of Hetty’s story is further suggested through the quasibiblical language that describes her as the ‘poor wandering lamb’ (in Dinah’s words, 36). However, it should be noted that ‘wandering’ in the metaphorical sense is initially not solely associated with feminine sexual transgression, but is also used to refer to another character who is at odds with the community of Hayslope and whose physical mobility has tragic consequences: Thias Bede. Seth prays for his ‘poor wandering father’ (48) on the very night that Thias dies by drowning after having wandered from the path while drunk. 15. Eliot’s careful dating of Hetty’s crime and its legal consequences accurately corresponds to the time of the novel’s setting, as does the chronology of calendar dates and seasons in the novel (McDonagh 2003: 129, 133–4; see also Rose 1986: 70, 76). 16. See Marck (2003: 461). For a different view, see Matus who argues that Hetty is not as ‘rootless’ as she is often charged, citing her stated longing to return home after the birth of her baby (1995: 174). 17. Not least because this proposal has no attraction for Dinah and her eventual marriage to Adam represents precisely the middle-class norm of the domestic wife and mother. Seth’s proposal also includes the offer to follow Dinah to Snowfield whereas the novel’s idyllic conclusion returns Dinah to the centre of the Hayslope community. 18. Dinah had foreshadowed her journey to Leeds in an earlier letter to Seth, saying she would respond to a request from ‘the brethren and sisters’ there, if she has ‘a door opened [to] me again to leave Snowfield’ (330). 19. For an account of Mary Wollstonecraft’s ideas on women’s self-governance in relation to their domestic role, see Mackenzie (1993: 47–51). 20. It is a mistake to read Hetty’s pursuit of Arthur simply as another instance of her romantic fantasies. Hetty’s claim on Arthur is a rational contractual one, based on his paternity and his implicit declaration in his letter to make amends. Significantly, the chapter concludes in Hetty’s indirect discourse: ‘If [Arthur] did not mind about her as he used to do, he had promised to be good to her’ (367). 21. On this understanding, Adam’s regard for Hetty is constructed as implicitly selfless, which seems to belie the importance of the sexual attraction he

Notes 167

22.

23.

24.

25.

clearly feels towards her. The difficulty of representing erotic desire for the other in this ethical model is also shown by the strange terms of Adam and Dinah’s courtship and betrothal, in which sexual attraction is simultaneously registered in corporeal signifiers (e.g. Dinah’s blush; see Homans 1993) and sublimated within a discourse of mutual service and divine calling. Hetty’s ignorance is emphatically distinguished from innocence by the narrator who is at pains to sympathise with the reader, rather than Hetty: ‘well-read ladies may find it difficult to understand her state of mind’ (373), he insists. See Freud’s essay, ‘The Uncanny’, where he describes his own aimless wandering around Siena in which, without a knowledge of the city and seemingly against his (conscious) will, he kept retracing his steps and returning to the same place (1997: 213). The narrator’s repetition here of the same description of Hetty offered by Dinah early in the novel – ‘poor wandering Hetty’ – suggests the endorsement of this perspective, as Dinah’s moral authority is matched with the narrator’s omniscient perspective to provide an apparently irrefutable judgement of character. Seth Bede had been bought out of this militia, due to family commitments (211), which underlines his privileging of local ties in contrast to Arthur’s deployment of his military position to emphasise his singular status in the community (through, for example, wearing his uniform at public events).

3 Travelling Companions 1. In later life, Ouida lived an increasingly impoverished existence in Italy (see Bigland 1950). Vernon Lee linked her (relative) lack of success as a writer in her lifetime to social isolation, ‘often describing herself as an alien, having no ties, of nation, blood, class or profession’ (Cooper Willis 1937: xii). Both women, linked by birth to Britain, exemplified a kind of cosmopolitan subjectivity (see, for example, Colby 2003: 251). 2. See Chapter 1, n. 24, on considering Lee’s work within the context of aestheticism. 3. Ouida (1880/2005), Moths, Toronto: Broadview, 97. All subsequent references will be to this edition. 4. See also Ouida’s essay ‘The Sins of Society’ for a similar view. Here, Ouida berates the poor example set by ‘royal personages’ who are ‘never content. They are incessantly discovering pretexts for conveying their royal persons here and there, to and fro, in ceaseless, useless, costly and foolish journeys’ (1895: 15). 5. Vere is deceived by her mother into believing that marrying Zouroff will prevent him from blackmailing Dolly. That Zouroff has no such intentions, and that Dolly had openly been his lover in the past, is not revealed to Vere until years later. 6. Moths implies that Vere, married at sixteen, is subject to repeated marital rape and one such incident is elliptically reported relatively late in the novel (390). Both of Vere’s babies die shortly after birth and she feels no attachment or grief for them. 7. Cross notes a fad for Nihilist sub-plots in late nineteenth-century British fiction (1985: 44–5). Interestingly, Lee includes a Nihilist sub-plot in Miss Brown

168

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

Notes and I would argue there is an echo of Ouida in Oscar Wilde’s early play Vera, or the Nihilists. Vernon Lee (1884), Miss Brown, Doylestown, PA: Wildside Press, 428. All subsequent references will be to this edition. For the significance of Jane Morris’s travels in Italy, see Parkins (2007). While Walter Hamlin has been seen as Lee’s unflattering depiction of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Psomiades 1997: 165), his name is also very close to Walter Hamilton, the author of The Aesthetic Movement in England (1882), which was written in response to public parodies of aestheticism and stressed the movement’s contribution both to high art and domestic design (Psomiades 1997: 13). Brake, however, has also seen a link between Walter Pater and Hamlin (2006: 47). I agree with Brake’s contention that Lee seems to have relied on a ‘hodgepodge of discordant elements’ for her characters ‘in order to confound alleged resemblances between them and real persons, most of them her acquaintance’ (2006: 47), even though this strategy failed spectacularly, judging by the social opprobrium Lee suffered. The location of the house seems based on Kelmscott House, the Morris residence at Hammersmith by the river, where Lee visited Jane Morris in 1882 (Cooper Willis 1937: 95–6). Prior to the Morrises, the house had been known as The Retreat. Rossetti had briefly considered leasing the house before William Morris discovered it. Lee’s own impressions of aesthetic houses varied greatly. In letters to her mother, she described William Michael Rossetti’s home as ‘grimy, dingy, filthy’ while Kelmscott House she found ‘beautiful and quite different, homely, artistic, and rare, from any aesthetic house’ (Cooper Willis 1937: 87, 95–6). See Feldman (2002) for a fascinating interpretation of Rossetti’s Chelsea house as an example of domestic aestheticism that similarly troubles conventional Victorian gendering of home and work. Feldman argues that in both his art and his domestic arrangements Rossetti ‘turned to the private, interiorised and feminine as a way of countering the pressures of modernisation’ (2002: 73). Feldman, however, is far more generous towards her subject than Lee. In Miss Brown, Hamlin’s domestic arrangement is a hypocritical posturing that in fact reaffirms traditional class and gender privileges. In this way, Anne’s position is consistent with other contemporary feminist critiques of aestheticism, which sought to reconcile aesthetic ideals of taste and pleasure with an enhanced everyday life (see Gagnier 2001: 239). Also worth noting is that Lee’s heroine shares a surname with George du Maurier’s parody of aesthetic women, Mrs Cimabue Brown (Psomiades 1997: 166). One of the criticisms levelled by Robert Buchanan at Rossetti and his associates in ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’ was that the artistic/literary establishment had become complicit in the construction of a celebrity culture around the members of the school, charging that even the Athenaeum ‘advertised nearly every week some interesting particular about Mr. Swinburne’s health, Mr. Morris’s holiday-making, or Mr. Rossetti’s genealogy’ (1871/1997: 238). Anne, like Aurora Leigh, is half-Italian on her mother’s side. See Bilston on the significance of Italy as ‘a contrast to the restraints of Britain’ for women writers

Notes 169 in the nineteenth century who associated the South with passion, freedom and authenticity (2004: 139, 141, 142). Racial characteristics are also deployed in Miss Brown to stress the fundamental incompatibility of Anne and Walter, most explicitly when Anne visits Walter’s ancestral home for the first time: ‘surrounded by all those portraits of his ancestors, she suddenly saw herself and him reflected in one of the long dim mirrors; she, so tall and strong, so powerful of bone and muscle, with her strange, half-southern, half-Jewish, and almost Ethiopian beauty, by the side of that slight, fair, pale, aristocratic man, with features sharp like those of a highbred race-horse, nervous and wistful and dreamy, as if he were tired of his family having lasted so long’ (173–4). 16. Elsewhere in Miss Brown, Lee distinguishes Rossettian aestheticism from the work and politics of William Morris. For example, after her disillusionment with Hamlin, Anne declares: ‘I don’t think … that aestheticism has had much generosity of aspiration in it so far, except in isolated men like Ruskin and Morris; but I am sure it will eventually improve some matters even for the lower classes’ (329–30). 17. Recent critics have noted Lee’s prescience in depicting the significance of Rossetti’s work for the emergence of decadence from aestheticism, marked by Hamlin’s circle’s rejection of realism and advocacy of transgressive sexualities in Miss Brown (McLeod 2006: 62; Maltz 2006: 222 n. 4; see also Gagnier 2001: 243). In 1884, however, Lee was vilified for this characterisation, which was seen as a thinly veiled and uncharitable attack on the recently deceased Rossetti. 18. The temptation of self-renunciation for independent women is a recurrent feature in many of the novels discussed in this study, including North and South, The Daughters of Danaus, Red Pottage and Clash.

4 The New Woman’s ‘Wheels of Daily Existence’ 1. Such a desire has also been seen as consistent with an emerging modernist sense of the place of the artist (Parsons 2000: 27; Felski 1999–2000: 23). 2. I would therefore also disagree with Parsons’ contention that ‘As both social figure and literary caricature, [the New Woman] was a specifically urban character’ (2000: 82). In many of the Punch caricatures which Parsons cites as playing a significant role in the cultural circulation of meanings of the New Woman, this figure is pictured in country lanes or other rural settings, engaged in outdoor activities like shooting, cycling or walking (e.g. ‘A New Woman’, 8 September, 1894; ‘What It Will Soon Come To’, 24 February, 1894; ‘In Dorsetshire’, 6 September, 1899). The emphasis on a hearty physicality (as well as the more obvious mannishness that Punch constantly associated with the New Woman) suggests that any understanding of the New Woman as exclusively urban overlooks the ‘uncontainability’ of women that the Punch representations imply. 3. In Red Pottage, Hester and Rachel depart for the Antipodes, while Hadria in The Daughters of Danaus sees Paris as her (temporary) refuge and site of creative fulfilment. 4. See, for example, Caird (1897), The Morality of Marriage, and Other Essays on the Status and Destiny of Women. On this issue, see also Heilmann (1996).

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5. Caird’s description of an alienated domesticity bears an uncanny resemblance to Betty Friedan’s mid-twentieth century descriptions of the middleclass woman’s domestic life in The Feminine Mystique (‘When a woman tries to put the problem into words, she often merely describes the daily life she leads. What is there in this recital of comfortable domestic detail that could possibly cause such a feeling of desperation?’ Friedan asked; 1963: 30). Caird’s critique in fact went further than Friedan’s, in daring to critique motherhood per se (see Heilmann 1996, Johnson & Lloyd 2004). 6. Born on the Isle of Wight, Caird, whose father was Scottish, was raised mainly in London. At 23, Caird married into a Scottish landowning family whose estate, Cassencary, seems to be the model for the setting of the Fullerton family home in The Daughters of Danaus. Curiously, the house is also believed to have been the basis of ‘Woodbourne’ in Walter Scott’s 1815 novel, Guy Mannering (Heilmann 1996: 77). 7. At the opening of the novel, Hadria is depicted in the abandon of dancing in the secret club she shares with her brothers and sister, which is devoted to free discussion of radical topics and occultish practices derived from Celtic myth (5–6). 8. Although prior to her marriage, Hadria’s husband had expressed unconventional views on marriage (he ‘too regarded the ordinary domestic existence with distaste’; 122) and promised her a freedom she could not enjoy in her father’s house, Hubert subsequently lapses into orthodoxy on a wife’s role and place. 9. Caird’s choice of name for Hadria’s home, Red House, surely cannot be coincidental. William Morris’s house of the same name is often considered an ideal(ised) example of the balance between art and life sought in the Arts and Crafts movement (see, for example, Waithe 2004). The fact that, by contrast, Hadria can find no accommodation for her own creativity in Red House seems a pointed rejection of any utopian solution to women’s domestic discontent. 10. On the rise and gendering of suburbia, see Hapgood (2005), Cunningham (2004) and Parejo Vadillo (2005). I disagree, however, with Murphy’s reading of the liberatory potential of the separation of home and work represented by the commuters’ escape (2001: 165–6), which seems based on the assumption that the workplace (like the daily commute itself) was not as routine and belaboured as domestic life. There is never any indication in The Daughters of Danaus that Hubert finds his work fulfilling; the only work which is presented positively in the novel are forms of creative, intellectual or philanthropic labour. 11. As Hapgood notes, the aristocratic ideals associated with country house gardens persisted in the late-nineteenth-century suburban garden, even if only in an aspirational sense, and were further fostered by women’s ‘garden romances’ such as Elizabeth von Arnim’s best-selling Elizabeth and her Garden, first published in 1898 (2005: 94–5, 99–103). 12. Hadria’s subsequent adoption of Ellen Jervis’s infant daughter further marks her out for social exclusion or at least disapproval from both her social peers and the villagers of Craddock Dene. 13. See also Pease (2006) who argues that middle-class feminists from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries found boredom politically useful

Notes 171

14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

to highlight the enforced idleness of women through the constraints of feminine duty. For other critical discussions of this chapter, see Keep (2002: 139–40), Murphy (2001: 168–9), Heilmann (2004: 230–1 and 2005: 32–3) and Surridge (2005: 136–8). While Hadria deserts her two (unnamed) sons, she is accompanied in her flight by Martha, Ellen Jervis’s daughter, and her nanny Hannah. Heilmann reads this as an attempt to reconstitute a female-centred family based on choice and affinity rather than coercion or duty (2004: 231). See also Surridge (2005: 135). For example, see Osborne (2000: 5–6), Schivelbusch (1986: 60–2) and Revill (2004: 85–6). I think it is an over-statement, however, to describe Paris as Hadria’s ‘escape from patriarchy’ as Murphy does (2001: 170). Just as in earlier locations in the novel, Caird offers a complex notion of place in which the natural and the social are always mutually constitutive, rendering all spaces problematic to varying degrees for women who want to evade social prescriptions. Hadria’s response to Paris as a kind of imaginary and almost utopian space resembles other texts by expatriate women who claimed a freedom to construct new selves in this city (Parsons 2000: 150–1). Hadria’s guilt that her rebellion has caused her mother’s collapse (a guilt Algitha also shares) is reinforced in the narrative by the doctor’s specific warning that any recalcitrant actions by her daughters could be fatal for the invalid (360, 366). This unconventional grouping may also be seen as another portrayal of the sickroom ‘as a kind of utopian order’ in Victorian fiction that Bailin describes (1994: 13). Mary Cholmondeley (1899/1968), Red Pottage, London: Anthony Blond, 110. All subsequent references will be to this edition. Hester’s relationship with her brother James is clearly indebted to that between Eliot’s Maggie and Tom Tulliver and The Mill on the Floss is a fairly explicit intertext in Red Pottage: Warpington vicarage, for instance, is located on the river Drone, which runs through Middleshire (41). Epigraphs from Eliot also open chapters 11, 14 and 29. See also Peterson’s discussion of the significance of Eliot’s influence on Cholmondeley (1999: 183, 184). For more on the relationship between women’s shopping and ‘slumming’, see Rappaport (2000: 108–141) and Koven (2004: 184–227). See Koven (2004: 184–227), Vicinus (1985: 239) and Ardis (1990: 127). Examples of novels depicting life in ‘outcast London’ include Walter Besant’s All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882) and Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago (1896). This was also the period in which non-fiction works of social observation were emerging such as Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People of London, the first volume of which, East London, was published in 1889. See Nord (1995: 195) and Sypher (1993: 108). Interestingly, Webb’s refusal to succumb to the ‘temptation’ to become a novelist also reflected a profoundly gendered view of legitimate and illegitimate genres for public discourse (see Ardis 2002: 18–23). Webb and Harkness subsequently ended their friendship over (misleading) press reportage that Webb had exaggerated her evidence to

172

Notes

a House of Lords inquiry into sweated labour (McKenzie & McKenzie 1982: 251, Ardis 2002: 251) – another instance of the fraught nature of women’s claims to discursive authority. 27. Linda Peterson makes a similar point by arguing that Red Pottage is a kind of retelling of Cross’s George Eliot’s Life (1885), without the necessary ‘break with domestic life’ that was so important in Eliot’s life and career (1999: 179).

5 Street Politics 1. Elizabeth Robins (1907/1980), The Convert, New York: Feminist Press, 64. All subsequent references will be to this edition. 2. Robins began the novel adaptation even before the play had been performed probably due to doubts concerning whether, given its overt political content, the play would ever be staged (Tylee 1998: 142). Robins had originally hoped the production would coincide with the large suffrage demonstration planned for February 1907, but Votes for Women! was performed at the London Court Theatre in April–May 1907 (produced by Harley Granville Barker) and at Wallack’s Theatre, New York in March 1909 (Tylee 1998: 142, 143). Despite having just 24 commercial performances in all, as Tylee notes, the influence of Votes for Women! was considerable: ‘the London production attracted full houses, the audiences including not only prominent suffragists but MPs … and it generated pages of reviews and articles in leading publications’ (1998: 143). 3. Vida later berates Lord Borrodaile for men’s inability to do more than scrutinise women: ‘We are civilised enough, at all events … to listen to men speakers clever or dull – we listen quiet enough. But men! – a person must be of your own sex for you to be able to regard him without distraction … All you see in any woman is her sex. You can’t listen’ (195–6). 4. Vida’s shifting allegiances will in part be marked by her change of opinion regarding suffragette disregard for the niceties of (bourgeois) feminine appearance. When, after one lively meeting, Vida points out the torn hem on Ernestine’s gown, the suffragette nonchalantly tears off ‘a yard’ of trimming and drops it out the carriage window, greatly impressing Vida (167–8). Ernestine’s pragmatic approach to dress, it should be noted, was somewhat at odds with the ‘party line’ on fashion that would be actively promoted in the WSPU’s weekly newspaper, Votes for Women, from 1908 onwards (see Parkins 2002). 5. Ernestine Blunt’s name seems an obvious play on the suffragette Evelyn Sharp, but her appearance and speaking prowess more closely resembles Christabel Pankhurst, although her working-class status complicates this, suggesting that she is a composite figure. Winkiel (2004: 588) also sees Blunt as a version of Christabel, but both Joannou (1998: 106) and Tylee (1998: 145) claim the character is modelled on Mary Gawthorpe, due to the fact that she was a speaker at the suffragette rallies that Robins transcribed. Harman states unequivocally that Blunt was based on Teresa BillingtonGreig (1998: 205). The fact that Billington-Greig was of imposing physical stature, while Ernestine is described as being ‘so little that, unless she’s on a chair, she is swallowed up’ in a crowd (176), seems to favour either Gawthorpe or Pankhurst as the model given the relatively diminutive size of

Notes 173

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

these two suffragettes. Interestingly, Emmeline Pankhurst was concerned that Vida may be seen as a version of Christabel: in a letter to Robins, she expressed reservations that the heroine with ‘a past’ (Vida) was originally named ‘Christian’ and asked Robins to change the name (Marcus 1978: 752). The ‘bold, free look of a man at a destitute woman must be felt to be realised’, Higgs wrote (qtd in Nord 1995: 15). The importance of cross-class disguise to uncover the nexus of class and gender in women’s disenfranchisement was also demonstrated later in the suffragette movement by Lady Constance Lytton, who disguised herself as a working-class woman in order to prove that lower-class suffragettes received harsher treatment in prison (see Lytton 1914). The General Strike began at midnight, May 3, 1926. On May 4, workers employed in transport, printing, metal and chemical industries as well as building and power stations went on strike which, together with the million coal miners already locked out, involved over three million workers (Renshaw 1975: 169, 175). Although much of the strike activity took place outside London, it was administered from Trades’ Union Congress headquarters in the capital, with no substantial advance planning (Renshaw 1975: 170). The ‘second-line’ unions (in industries such as engineering, shipbuilding, textiles and the post office) were called out on May 11 but the government’s intransigence and lack of significant public support outside the trade union movement led to the Strike being called off on May 12 (Seaman 1966: 198). Unofficial strikes by local strike committees continued in many areas and the coal strike continued until December (Seaman 1966: 200). Ellen Wilkinson (1929/1989), Clash, London: Virago, 53. All subsequent references will be to this edition. Volunteers from the middle and upper classes mobilised to support the government by providing ‘blackleg’ labour during the Strike. Women from the middle and upper classes, encouraged by Lady Astor, were active in opposing the Strike, notably working at the food and distribution centre for strikebreakers in Hyde Park (Laybourn 1996: 2–3). This overly schematic characterisation will, however, be problematised in several ways over the course of the novel. Helen’s character, for instance, is recuperated to some extent by a melodramatic sub-plot about the tragic death of her lover in the War, but she remains a class enemy in political terms to the end of the novel. Most private cars, of course, were deployed by strikebreakers, with Lord Curzon administering a motor pool in London (Phillips 1976: 155). For some, the General Strike offered a new experience of modern mobility: for instance, Churchill’s only experience of the Underground occurred during the General Strike. His wife Clementine said: ‘He knows nothing of the life of ordinary people. He’s never been on a bus, and only once on the Underground. This was during the General Strike, when I deposited him at South Kensington. He went round and round [on the Circle Line] not knowing where to get out and had to be rescued eventually’ (Moran qtd in Renshaw 1975: 181). Such complexities of political affiliations, class and identity are also borne out in the character of Mary Maud, former suffragette and supporter of the Strike, but herself the owner of a coal mine.

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13. This reconciliation is also figured by the truce between Mary Maud and Gerry, who contend for Joan’s loyalty but who end with a mutual recognition of shared causes and common goals (and are thus also distinguished from the somewhat disgraced Tony).

6 Moving Dangerously 1. The concept of nonsynchronicity, introduced in Chapter 1, is derived from an essay by Ernst Bloch, ‘Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics’. In an interesting instance of synchronicity, however, Bloch’s essay was written in 1932, the same year that To the North and Cold Comfort Farm were published. 2. Having earlier been associated with Woolf, Bowen later lapsed into ‘middlebrow’ status and has only relatively recently been recuperated within ‘serious’ literature and considered worthy of academic attention (Ellmann 2003: 17–18). As late as 1978 Hermione Lee could still conclude an article on Bowen with the rather half-hearted plea: ‘it is not enough to treat Elizabeth Bowen as merely a writer of sentimental romances, another Rosamund Lehmann’ (142) – doing justice to neither Bowen nor Lehmann. Ellmann’s judgement that Bowen’s ‘fiction wavers on the boundary between classic realism and modernist experimentalism’ (2003: 8, 16; see also Brassard 2007) seems apt, as does Maria DiBattista’s attention to cultural hybridism in her account of Bowen’s ‘troubled modernism’ (2007a). To the North contains broadly modernist elements such as representations of subjectivity in flux, a lack of closure and a certain degree of aesthetic selfconsciousness (see Lunn 1982: 33–7). On the ‘middlebrow’ status of Cold Comfort Farm, see Hammill (2001). 3. Stella Gibbons (1932/1938), Cold Comfort Farm, London: Penguin, 7–8. All subsequent references will be to this edition. 4. See Hammill (2001) for a more extensive discussion of literary influences on Cold Comfort Farm, including the novels of Hugh Walpole and Thomas Hardy. 5. As the fates of the various Starkadders suggest, in Cold Comfort Farm travel is not a form of escape confined to women. At the opening of the novel, travel to exotic locations is the solution for young men rejected by Flora’s widowed friend, Mary Smiling. Because of her refusal to marry them, ‘fifteen gentlemen of birth and fortune … had flown to such remote places as Jhonsong La Lake M’Luba-M’Luba and the Kwanhattons’, where they work in unspecified but presumably imperial occupations (12). The empire as refuge for dissatisfied young men is juxtaposed with the carefree travel of Mary (to Egypt). The possible perils of global mobility, however, are indicated by the fate of Flora’s parents who ‘were addicted to travel’ and die suddenly of an infection, possibly exotic in origin, at the start of the novel (11). 6. In To the North, Bowen pointedly represents a similar view of the countryside as an imaginary literary location through a humorous scene in which Cecilia rejects Julian’s proposed drive to the country to visit Pauline at boarding school, responding that ‘Buckinghamshire was too small, not many times the length of his car; they would soon overshoot the school and run out of the county’ (74).

Notes 175 7. See, for example, Danius (2001) on the significance of motoring for European writers and artists in the early twentieth century, including Fernand Léger, Maurice Maeterlinck and Octave Mirbeau. The significance of the car in modernity for women like Woolf will be discussed further in Chapter 7. 8. Brassard has noted the link between ‘female sexual agency and modernity [through Emmeline’s] active engagement with travel and transportation’ (2007: 283), but I think this is too narrow: female agency more generally is a concern in To the North through both Emmeline’s and Cecilia’s fascination with travel and mobility. 9. Similarly, later in the novel, Emmeline in Paris imagines the ‘contraction of space’ to visualise Cecilia sitting on the lawn at her aunt’s Cotswolds’ house Farraways (144), while at the same time Cecilia wonders if ‘there is a moon in Paris’ in contrast to the dismal weather at Farraways (172). 10. The implied homosexuality of Peter Lewis is another complication here. His impaired health, his office competence and his non-threatening camaraderie with Emmeline present a troubling association of homosexuality with culturally feminine attributes that can only represent a diminished masculinity in the context of the novel. 11. In 1933, only twelve percent of driving licences were held by women, but the introduction of a formal driving test in 1935 is believed to have led to a marked increase in the number of women driving (O’Connell 1998: 46, 58). 12. See Ellmann on the significance of the recurring motif of ghostly houses and ‘an anxious solicitude for place’ in Bowen’s fiction (2003: 7, 12–15). 13. This is not to say that Emmeline’s longing for home while on the continent was unique to women; it was a common response by English travellers to the ‘foreignness’ of Europe (see, for example, Pemble 1987 and Buzard 1993). What is noteworthy about Emmeline’s response in the context of To the North, however, is that it signals her unease with defining herself solely as an adventurous modern woman and reveals an emerging self-awareness of a kind of residual conventionality.

7 Destinations of the Modern Woman 1. Virginia Woolf (1928/1977), Orlando: A Biography, London: Granada, 186–7. All subsequent references will be to this edition. 2. Vernon Lee (1897/1908), ‘In Praise of Old Houses,’ Limbo and Other Essays, London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 40. All subsequent references will be to this edition. 3. To give just two examples of mobile authors at the beginning and end of this study: George Eliot’s life was divided between provincial beginnings and a distinctly metropolitan milieu and she was a frequent traveller throughout the Continent; and Elizabeth Bowen, who from childhood travelled back and forth between England and Ireland, included travel writing as well as fiction in her oeuvre. 4. Schröder 2007: 131. On the significance of modern transport, and mobility in general, in Woolf’s writing, see also Beer (1990) and Bowlby (1997a and 1997b). As Shiach (2005) points out, however, Woolf’s interest in modern mobility coexisted with a persistent interest in interior space, as titles such as Jacob’s Room and A Room of One’s Own indicate.

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5. Vernon Lee (1905), ‘The Motor Car and the Genius of Places’, The Enchanted Woods and Other Essays on the Genius of Places, London: John Lane/Bodley Head, 96–7, emphasis added. All subsequent references will be to this edition. 6. As Ferruggia notes, Edith Wharton also contrasted the freedom of movement offered by the car to the constraints of rail travel (2006: 75). Wharton travelled extensively through Europe and northern Africa in her chauffeurdriven car, especially prior to the First World War (Ferruggia 2006: 67). 7. In her essay ‘On Modern Travelling’ Lee similarly associates this kind of ethical disengagement with ‘our modern, rapid, hurried travelling’ of train journeys: ‘There is something almost superhumanly selfish in this rushing across countries without giving them a thought … The whole of Central Europe is thus reduced, for our feelings, to an arrangement of buffets and customhouses, its acres checked off on our sensorium as so many jolts’ (1908: 95). 8. See, for example, Lee (1905), The Enchanted Woods and Other Essays on the Genius of Place. 9. As Colby points out, the decade covered by The Spirit of Rome was marked by a series of significant events in Lee’s life (such as the deaths of her parents and her separation from Kit Anstruther-Thomson) that coloured Lee’s responses to what she called the ‘impersonal and almost eternal’ city (Lee 1906: 205; Colby 2003: 259). 10. In understanding the past as an embodied concept, there is a clear continuity between Lee and Pater (Leighton 2000: 2). 11. Leonard Woolf would similarly describe the car as a transformation of the Woolfs’ everyday lives: ‘Certainly nothing ever changed so profoundly my material existence, the mechanism and range of my every-day life, as the possession of a motor car’ (1968: 177–8). He also contrasted the slowness and constraint of travel before the car (represented by the railway) with the ‘wonderful feeling of liberation’ (1968: 181) derived from motor touring. 12. Leonard Woolf described how car travel provided Virginia with the raw material of impressions upon which she would subsequently draw in her writing: ‘I do not think that anything gave Virginia more pleasure than [touring on the Continent by car]. She had a passion for travelling, and travel had a curious and deep effect upon her. When she was abroad, she fell into a strange state of passive alertness. She allowed all these foreign sounds and sights to stream through her mind … which months afterwards would become food for her imagination and her art. This and the mere mechanism and kaleidoscope of travel gave her intense pleasure, a mixture of exhilaration and relaxation’ (1968: 178–9). 13. At the beginning of the war, the British War Office was still refusing to authorise already-established entities such as the Women’s Hospital Corps. Consequently private bodies – like the Munro Ambulance Corps that Sinclair accompanied – had an ambiguous status in Belgium (see Raitt 2000: 152). 14. Sinclair was designated ‘Secretary and Reporter’, with responsibilities for account-keeping and fundraising through ‘toss[ing] off articles for the daily papers’, but the Journal makes clear that she contributed little to the work at hand during her time in Belgium. See May Sinclair (1915), A Journal of Impressions in Belgium, New York: Macmillan, 4. All subsequent references will be to this edition. Raitt speculates that Sinclair may have financed the

Notes 177

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

project, although the Journal does not disclose this. Sinclair had previously made a substantial contribution to the Medico-Psychological Clinic; its director, Dr Hector Munro, was the leader of the Ambulance Corps (Raitt 2000: 154–5). ‘Mrs Torrence’ (Baroness De T’Serclaes), a trained driver, had earlier volunteered to become the temporary chauffeur for a Colonel of the Belgian Motor Cyclists Corps while waiting for hospital duties to commence (70–1) and subsequently earned a distinguished reputation for her wartime nursing after leaving the Munro unit. The visceral reaction against the safety of speed Sinclair records here is later echoed in her novel The Tree of Heaven, which describes the heroine’s experience as a driver in the Women’s Service Corps: ‘… as Dorothea drove her car-loads of refugees day after day in perfect safety, she sickened with impatience and disgust. Safety was hard and bitter to her. Her hidden self was unsatisfied; it had a monstrous longing. It wanted to go where the guns sounded and the shells burst, and the villages flamed and smoked; to go along the straight, flat roads between the poplars where the refugees had gone, so that her nerves and flesh should know and feel their suffering and their danger’ (1918: 301). As does his chief example of an adventurer, Casanova. DiBattista (2007b) draws on Simmel’s essay in her discussion of Woolf’s sense of adventure but does not mention Simmel’s explicit gendering of the adventurer as masculine. In The Tree of Heaven, for instance, participation in the war becomes a kind of litmus test against which other forms of collective action, such as the suffragette movement (which Sinclair had supported at the time), are tested and found wanting. Even in Red Pottage, where the two heroines flee England together for the Antipodes, it is implied that Rachel eventually marries, leaving Hester’s status, and her future, undisclosed. The queer implications of women’s mobility that some of these novels suggest were astutely observed in Sarah Waters’ (1999) neo-Victorian novel, Affinity, in which two working-class women do escape together to a new life in Italy, but only at the expense of the betrayed heroine who can find no escape from middle-class convention other than suicide.

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Index acceleration, 4–6, 24, 126, 128, 133, 151, 160 see also speed adventure, 9, 11, 19, 32, 95, 151, 153, 157–9, 177n17 aestheticism, 9, 18, 29–30, 62–77, 164n23, 168n9, 168n12, 168n13, 168n14, 169n16, 169n17 missionary aestheticism, 71, 76 affect, 15–16, 19, 79, 136, 140, 147, 152–4, 160, 164n19 see also emotion agency, 19, 22, 28, 30–2, 37–40, 62, 66, 70, 80, 88, 98, 119–21, 126, 131, 134–5, 139–40, 142–4, 153–4, 156–8, 160–1, 163n15 and class, 14, 30, 57, 109, 114 cultural agency, 18, 78, 103, see also philanthropy, creativity diminished agency, 17, 39, 46, 54, 62, 77, 96, 135, 154, 156, 161 ethical agency, 32, 41–4, 148 masculine agency, 13, 132, 134–5 political agency, 18, 76, 103, 104–5, 107, 112, 114–17, 122–3 sexual agency, 14, 130, 175n8 women’s agency, 1–2, 11–18, 24, 40, 49, 61, 79, 103, 109, 122, 129–30, 161, 163n14 Ahmed, Sara, 79–80, 152 alienation, 32–3, 52, 75, 81, 135, 138–9, 170n5 Ambulance Corps, the, 153–8, 176n13, 176n14 Anderson, Amanda, 13, 39–40 Anderson, Perry, 7, 125 Armstrong, Nancy, 129 art, 63, 69, 73, 76, 99, 100–2, 132 commodification of art, 49, 68, 70 Asquith, Margot, 94 Astor, Lady, 173n9 Austen, Jane, 129, 131

authenticity, 52, 61, 69, 72, 98, 100, 105, 117, 130, 139, 154 autonomy, 12, 18, 35–8, 59, 75–6, 79, 91–2, 98, 105, 120–2, 126, 148, 151, 153, 155, 163n15 Bailin, Miriam, 171n20 Baudelaire, Charles, 5–6, 11, 16–17, 29, 78, 90, 132, 162n4, 162n6, 164n21 Baudrillard, Jean, 7 Bauman, Zygmunt, 162n7 Beer, Gillian, 33, 37 Bell, Vanessa, 151 Benjamin, Walter, 17, 60, 164n21 Benson, E. F., 129 Berman, Marshall, 6–7, 32, 140–1 Besant, Walter, 171n25 Bildung, 6 Billington-Greig, Teresa, 172n5 Bilston, Sarah, 168n15 Bishop, Elizabeth, 158 Bloch, Ernst, 7, 143, 174n1 Bodenheimer, Rosemarie, 165n7 Booth, Charles, 171n25 Bowen, Elizabeth, 174n2, 175n12, 175n3 To the North, 3–5, 9, 12, 19, 124–6, 129, 131–43, 159–60, 163n16, 174n1, 174n2, 174n6, 175n8, 175n13 Brake, Laurel, 168n9 Brassard, Geneviève, 175n8 Buchanan, Robert, 168n14 Burstein, Miriam Elizabeth, 162n2 Butler, Judith, 12, 160–1 Caird, Mona, 82, 170n6 The Daughters of Danaus, 3, 6, 14, 17–18, 78–80, 80–92, 159–60, 169n18, 169n3, 170n5, 170n6, 170n9, 170n10, 171n17 The Morality of Marriage, 80, 169n4 capitalism, 24, 29, 50–1, 74, 97, 121 191

192

Index

cars, 119, 121, 125, 130, 132, 134–5, 140–2, 148, 151–2, 173n11, 175n7, 176n11 car crash, 4, 12, 132, 140–3 see also motoring, transport, modes of Castoriadis, Cornelius, 12, 163n15 celebrity culture, 70, 136, 168n14 change, 2–6, 13–14, 16–17, 25–8, 32, 33–5, 113, 118, 124–5, 129, 134, 143, 145, 160, 164n1, 165n10, 166n12 uneven rates of change, 7, 143 see also industrialisation, progress, speed, urbanisation Cholmondeley, Mary Red Pottage, 14, 18, 78–80, 93–103, 159, 169n18, 169n3, 171n22, 172n27, 177n19 Churchill, Clementine, 173n11 Churchill, Winston, 173n11 city, 2, 8–11, 18, 29, 32, 73–5, 79, 113, 119, 124, 126–7, 131, 142, 149, 159, 165n5 industrial cities, 22–4, 27–8, 31, 33, 36, 67 see also London, metropolis, Paris, urban class, 7, 19, 66, 73, 77, 82, 87, 107, 116–17, 130, 173n6, 173n9, 173n10, 173n12 class conflict, 96, 117, 122 class divisions, 14–15, 97 class identity, 14–15, 97, 109–12, 119, 123 middle class, 14–15, 18, 80, 94–5, 98, 103, 122, 130 working class, 14–15, 71, 75, 94–8, 109–10, 114, 119, 120–2 Colby, Vineta, 176n9 comfort, 11, 32, 56, 101, 128–9, 131, 137–8 community, 17, 33, 35–6, 38, 42, 45–7, 86–7, 137, 166n17, 167n25 Conor, Liz, 11, 104 consumer culture, 130, 136 consumption, 23–4, 40, 49, 61, 72, 119, 129 Corbett, Mary Jane, 33 Corbin, Alain, 28

corporeality, 51–2, 63–4, 107, 149, 169n2 country, 2, 8–11, 21–2, 33–4, 73–4, 100–1, 124–5, 127, 129–31, 134, 136–7, 139, 143, 149, 163n11, 174n6 see also pastoral, rural, village crowds, 104–5, 109–13 cultural authority, 98–100, 102–3 Curzon, Lord, 173n11 Danaus, daughters of, 8 Danius, Sara, 175n7 decadence, 169n17 de Certeau, Michel, 136, 138, 140 democratisation, 2, 4, 122, 148 destinations, of women, 17, 33, 78, 88, 102, 104, 138, 145–6, 159 De T’Serclaes, Baroness (Mrs Torrence), 177n15 Diana, Princess, 132 DiBattista, Maria, 174n2 177n17 Dillon, Steve, 164n20, 164n21 dislocations, 3, 8, 11, 17, 22, 27, 34–5, 45, 48, 52, 56, 72, 100–1, 131, 137–40, 145, 157, 161 domesticity, 2–3, 5–6, 18, 21, 23, 68, 94, 100, 103, 105, 107, 138–40, 170n9 and femininity, 2, 25, 39, 67–8, 77–9, 98, 102, 129–30, 159, 166n19 limitations of domesticity, 21, 29, 58, 77, 81–3, 93–5, 101–2, 157 see also home, marriage du Maurier, George, 168n13 Duncan, Isadora, 132 Egg, Augustus, 48 Eliot, George, 94, 101, 165n10, 171n22, 172n27, 175n3 Adam Bede, 3, 9, 12, 17, 21, 33–47, 48, 160, 163n16, 166n12, 166n13, 166n15 The Mill on the Floss, 171n22 Ellmann, Maud, 174n2, 175n12 emotion, 16 emotional geographies, 15–20, 79–92, 93–103, 147–58, 160

Index 193 empire, 23, 47, 64, 66, 174n5 enfranchisement, 1–3, 109, 114–15, 173n6 Engels, Friedrich, 99 escape, 20, 27, 48, 59–61, 64, 74, 76–7, 80, 83, 91–2, 119, 130, 137, 156, 159, 170n10, 171n17, 174n5, 177n19 ethnicity, 7, 72 Evangelista, Stefano, 164n23 everyday life, 3, 76, 85, 87, 91–2, 125–6, 134, 136, 143, 147, 168n13 exile, 5, 22, 47, 53, 56–7, 59, 67, 88 expatriates, 48, 167n1, 171n18 experience, 3, 4–6, 8–11, 15–17, 19, 21–2, 31–2, 47, 70, 78–80, 82, 88–9, 92–4, 98, 100, 103, 116, 124–5, 132, 136–7, 140, 144, 152, 158–60, 162n4, 162n6, 162n9, 162n10, 163n11 fallen women, 13–15, 21, 31, 35, 39–40, 159, 163n16 fashion, 15, 19, 49–50, 53, 55, 63, 72, 127, 129, 136 Feldman, Jessica R., 168n12 Felski, Rita, 5, 10, 124–5 femininity, 25, 30, 39, 51, 68–70, 72–3, 78–9, 81–2, 87, 93–5, 97–8, 110, 114, 122, 125, 129, 132–3, 172n4 feminism, 122, 130 Ferruggia, Gabriella, 176n6 flâneur, 5, 11, 14–16, 29, 78, 90, 108, 149, 162n4, 164n20, 164n21 flux, 3, 6–7, 24, 27, 34, 70, 77, 83, 125, 134, 137, 146, 162n7 fragmentation, 11, 132, 145 freedom, 13, 29, 65, 79, 83, 88, 90, 95, 113, 132, 151, 171n18 freedom of movement, 2, 6, 14, 17, 20, 37–8, 52, 66, 80, 101, 104, 116, 148–9, 152, 176n6 and sexual transgression, 2, 13, 21, 159, 163n16 see also agency, participation Freud, Sigmund, 167n23 Friedan, Betty, 170n5 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 4–5

friendship, female, 71–2, 93, 98, 159, 177n19 Futurism, 132 gardens, 85–7, 91–2, 170n11 Gaskell, Elizabeth Mary Barton, 102 North and South, 5, 9, 14, 17, 21, 22–33, 48, 94, 163n16, 164n1, 165n3, 169n18 Gatens, Moira, 41 Gates, Sarah, 46 Gawthorpe, Mary, 172n5 gender, 7, 19, 38, 66, 75, 77, 82, 87, 103, 107, 114, 118–19, 120, 122, 134–5, 143, 160, 173n6 gender identity, 2, 123 see also agency, mobility General Strike, the, 116–19, 173n7, 173n9, 173n11 Gibbons, Stella Cold Comfort Farm, 9, 19, 124–31, 139, 143, 160, 174n1, 174n2, 174n4, 174n5 Gluck, Mary, 162n4 Great Hyde Park Meeting, 106 Gunn, Daniel P., 34, 166n12 Hamilton, Walter, 168n9 Hammill, Faye, 174n2, 174n4 Hapgood, Lynne, 170n11 Haraway, Donna, 93 Harkness, Margaret, 99, 101, 171n26 Harman, Barbara Leah, 172n5 Harvey, David, 3, 6, 125, 162n10 Heilmann, Ann, 171n15 Hertz, Neil, 42–3 Higgs, Mary, 114 Hill, Octavia, 94–5 Holme, Constance, 126 home, 2, 5, 11–12, 19–20, 24–5, 32, 68, 78–80, 88, 103–4, 115–16, 131, 137–8, 159, 166n16, 175n13 England as home, 47, 78–9, 84, 91, 102, 177n19 limitations of home, 6, 58, 80–4, 86–8, 89, 91, 102, 170n13 see also domesticity homelessness, 102, 137–8

194

Index

houses aesthetic, 67–8, 75, 168n10, 168n11, 168n12 country, 87, 125, 130–1, 137, 142 immobility, 1, 4, 28, 44, 56, 58, 63, 80–1, 101, 118–19, 126, 137, 152, 154, 161 independence, 30–1, 36–7, 40, 54, 60, 62, 66, 70–1, 73, 75, 77, 83, 101, 120, 156, 159, 169n18 financial independence, 19, 37, 68, 117, 153 industrialisation, 2, 4, 24, 29, 32, 36–7, 55, 73–4, 121, 127, 134 inertia, 83, 87, 91, 118, 141 infanticide, 35, 40, 46, 166n13, 166n15 innovation, 3–4, 16, 124–5 instability, 13, 19, 26, 125, 137, 140 isolation, 12, 42, 49, 52, 54, 77, 83, 92, 94, 167n1 Italy, 64, 77, 137, 168n15 itineracy, 21, 36, 38, 52, 56, 58, 83, 117, 127, 145 Joannou, Maroula, 172n5 Jones, Miriam, 165n10 journeys, 12, 15, 18, 143, 149–50, 156, 160, 166n18, 167n4 in Adam Bede, 35, 40–7 in The Daughters of Danaus, 88–9, 91 in Miss Brown, 65–7 in Moths, 59–61 in Red Pottage, 93, 102 in To the North, 133–4, 135–6 Karslake, John Burgess, 1–2, 13 Kaye-Smith, Sheila, 126 Kern, Stephen, 162n10 knowledge, 30, 75, 78, 80, 98–9, 108, 136, 165n7 forms of knowledge, 98–100, 103 ‘situated knowledges’, 91 Lamb, John B., 165n10 Langland, Elizabeth, 78, 129 Larson, Jil, 13 Lash, Scott and Jonathan Friedman, 6

Lawrence, D. H., 126 Leavis, F. R., 33 Leavis, F. R. and Denys Thompson, 131–2, 137, 142 Lee, Hermione, 174n2 Lee, Julia Sun-Joo, 165n3 Lee, Vernon, 19, 145, 152–3, 158, 167n1, 164n23, 168n9, 168n10, 168n11, 169n17, 176n10 ‘In Praise of Old Houses’, 144, 146–7, 150 Miss Brown, 3, 6, 9, 17–8, 48, 61–77, 159, 164n23, 167n7, 168n9, 168n12, 168n13, 169n16, 169n17 ‘On Modern Travelling’, 176n7 ‘The Motor Car and the Genius of Places’, 147–9, 150–1 The Spirit of Rome: Leaves from a Diary, 149–50, 176n9 Léger, Fernand, 175n7 Lehmann, Rosamund, 174n2 leisure, 28–30, 55, 65, 88–90, 104 liberation, 4, 6, 11, 37–8, 65, 77, 116, 122, 151, 161, 163n18, 176n11 Light, Alison, 124, 131, 139 locatedness, 23, 32, 142 location, 2–4, 7–12, 19–21, 24–5, 37, 83, 159 places of retreat, 51, 60–1, 67, 77, 84, 87, 137–40, 143 see also city, country, home, place, space, suburbs London, 18, 23–4, 67, 70–71, 73–4, 77, 94–101, 104–5, 108, 119–20 Lytton, Lady Constance, 173n6 machines, 106, 131–2, 135, 142 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 175n7 Maltz, Diana, 71, 76 Marcus, Sharon, 159 Markovits, Stefanie, 165n3 marriage, 1–2, 14, 32, 37–9, 56, 59, 61–2, 65, 77, 80, 83–4, 93–4, 100, 103, 121–2, 131, 138, 140–1, 143, 166n17, 170n8 Marx, Eleanor, 99 Marx, Karl, 162n7 Matus, Jill L., 44, 166n16 May, Jon and Nigel Thrift, 7

Index 195 McDonagh, Josephine, 34, 46–7, 165n10, 166n13 McNay, Lois, 12 metropolis, 8–9, 52, 60, 77, 103, 117, 120, 122, 131, 139 migration, 22, 102 Mill, John Stuart, 1–4 Mirbeau, Octave, 175n7 mobility, 1–4, 4–7, 8–15, 15–20, 33, 37, 43, 50 and affect, 6, 79–80, 89–90, 92, 142, 148, 150, 155 and agency, 2, 15, 19, 31, 39, 65–6, 71, 78–80, 98, 113–15, 141, 149, 151–2, 160 and class, 14, 23, 29, 67, 94, 116 and temporality, 145–52 dangers of mobility, 4, 13, 17, 19–21, 31, 44–5, 83, 135, 140, 143, 156–7, 159–61, 166n14, 174n5 downward mobility, 13–14, 44–5 social mobility, 14, 32, 53, 61–2, 66–7, 70, 75, 80, 93–4, 96–7, 103, 127 see also emotional geographies, escape, fallen women, journeys, liberation, movement, travel ‘mobility turn’, 160 modernism, 9, 19, 124–5, 132, 144, 169n1, 174n2 modernity, 2–4, 4–7, 18, 32, 142 affective responses to modernity, 2–3, 26, 28, 52, 55, 66, 72–3, 134–5, 138, 140, 149 American modernity, 55, 64 ‘conservative modernity’, 124–5, 130 ethical responses to modernity, 28, 32 gendering of modernity, 4, 9–10, 16, 135 unevenness of modernity, 7–8, 13, 125, 134, 143–4, 158, 160 urban modernity, 4, 120, 126, 129, 139, 164n21 women’s modernity, 6, 9–10, 15–20, 35, 70, 130, 144–5, 160, 163n11 see also change, flux, nonsynchronicity Morris, Jane, 62, 168n9, 168n10 Morris, William, 62, 71, 168n10, 169n16, 170n9

Morrison, Arthur, 171n25 motherhood, 21, 38, 39, 119, 166n17, 170n5 motoring, 132–5, 145, 158, 175n7, 176n11 see also transport, modes of movement, 5–6, 8, 22 movement across spaces, 53, 80, 104, 122, 129, 134 movement between spaces, 8–10, 16–18, 20–2, 79–80, 105, 117–19, 124–5, 127, 130–1, 159–60, 163n11 see also freedom of movement, mobility Munro, Hector, 176n13, 176n14 Munt, Sally, 164n20 Murphy, Patricia, 170n10, 171n17 nature, 16, 30, 61, 73, 81–2, 85, 125, 134, 136–7, 139, 171n17 Nevinson, Margaret, 94–5 New Woman, 77–80, 84, 88–9, 91–2, 93, 101, 103, 169n21 New Woman fiction, 6, 9, 13, 18, 62, 68, 79, 91, 93, 102–3 Nihilists, the, 57, 72, 167n7 nonsynchronicity, 7, 8–10, 13, 19, 23, 34–5, 51, 58, 70, 124–5, 127–9, 142–3, 144–7, 162n10, 174n1, 175n13 Nord, Deborah Epstein, 9, 11–12, 16, 164n21 nostalgia, 3, 10, 20, 24–7, 32, 34, 121, 130–1, 137, 140 Nunokawa, Jeff, 50–1 objectification, 63–4, 109 O’Connell, Sean, 135 orientalising, 63–4, 70 Osborne, Peter, 7, 89 O’Shea, Alan, 6 Ouida, 61, 164n23, 167n1 Moths, 3, 9, 12, 17–18, 48, 49–61, 77, 159, 167n6, 167n7 ‘The Sins of Society’, 58, 167n4 Pankhurst, Christabel, 172n5 panorama, 46

196

Index

Paris, 53, 58, 60, 88–91, 136–7, 163n16, 164n21, 171n17, 171n18 Parsons, Deborah, 9, 16, 79, 164n21, 169n2 participation, 11, 15–17, 22, 32, 79, 91, 103, 106, 114–15, 120, 153–6, 160–1, 177n16, 177n18 see also politics, women’s education, work passivity, 40, 52–3, 57, 67, 70, 83, 126, 134–5, 157 pastoral, 9, 20, 33, 144 pastoral-parody, 9, 19, 125–7, 143–4 Pater, Walter, 168n9 patriarchy, 1, 12, 14, 18, 37, 63, 79, 94, 101–2, 113–14 Peterson, Linda, 172n27 Pethick Lawrence, Emmeline, 94, 163n18 philanthropy, 31, 55, 57, 75, 78, 81, 94–5, 170n10, 171n23 Phillips, Adam, 15–16 place, 2–3, 24, 45, 81, 84, 102, 136, 140, 145–7, 149–50, 153, 156, 158, 160, 162n2 see also location, space Poe, Edgar Allan, 17, 164n21 politics, 1, 15–16, 18, 63, 71, 73–4, 76, 80, 103–4, 173n12 labour politics, 18, 24, 116–22, 173n7 radical politics, 64, 70–1, 73, 104–5, 121–2 socialist politics, 99, 105, 119, 122 see also strike-breakers, suffragettes Pollock, Griselda, 164n21 Poovey, Mary, 100, 107 positivism, 75 Pre-Raphaelites, see aestheticism Pritchard, Elizabeth, 6 Probyn, Elspeth, 8, 163n17 progress, 4, 6–7, 10, 69, 113, 129, 160 race, 70, 168n15 railway, see transport, modes of Raitt, Suzanne, 157, 176n14 realism, 9, 19, 120–1, 126, 143–4 religion, 27, 36–7, 39

Richardson, Dorothy, 163n13 Robins, Elizabeth, 172n2, 172n5 The Convert, 9, 14–15, 18, 104–5, 106–16, 122–3, 159, 163n16 Votes for Women!, 106, 172n2 romance narratives, 14, 92–3, 98, 102, 105, 117, 119–21, 143 Ross, Kristin, 128, 132, 143 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 62–3, 168n9, 168n10, 168n12, 168n14, 169n16, 169n17 Rossetti, William Michael, 62, 168n11 rupture, 5, 8, 22, 28, 33, 102, 116, 124–5, 128, 143 rural, 33–4, 126–7, 137–40, 162n6 Ruskin, John, 71, 104, 137, 148, 169n16 Russia, 56–7, 60 Said, Edward, 23 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 159–60 Scotland, 81–2 Scott, Sir Walter, 165n10, 170n6 seaside, 28–30 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 36–7 self-denial, 39, 59–60, 76–7, 121, 156, 169n18 sexuality, 2, 7, 13, 21, 40, 72, 103, 119, 122–3, 159, 169n17, 175n10 sexual betrayal, 72, 115 sexual desire, 40, 60 sexual double standard, 40, 52 sexual exploitation, 40, 47, 52, 54, 57, 72, 113, 167n6 Sharp, Evelyn, 172n5 Sheller, Mimi and John Urry, 160 Shiach, Morag, 175n4 shopping, 9, 15, 30, 95, 104, 125, 133, 139, 171n23 Simmel, Georg, 17, 19, 89, 157–8, 164n21, 177n17 simple life, 34, 129 Sinclair, May, 19, 176n13, 176n14, 177n18 A Journal of Impressions in Belgium, 144, 153–8, 176n14 The Tree of Heaven, 177n16, 177n18 slowness, 34, 128, 133, 156, 176n11 see also speed

Index 197 social imaginary, 12–13, 163n15 social interventions, 71, 73–4, 95, 99, 101, 114, 171n25 social realism, 19, 73, 77 solitude, 90–1 space, 2, 7, 8–11, 14, 16, 60, 175n9 liminal spaces, 18, 68, 81, 85–6, 92, 100, 139, 143 private spaces, 104–8, 113, 115 public spaces, 15, 18, 80, 90, 95, 98, 100, 104–15, 148 unheimliche spaces, 92, 137–8 see also location, place Spacks, Patricia, 88 spectatorship, 16–17, 29, 89, 106, 108–10, 114, 149, 154, 160, 164n20 speed, 6, 32, 34, 50, 88, 105–6, 116, 118, 122, 125–6, 132–5, 136, 141–2, 149, 151–2, 154, 156, 162n7, 176n16 see also acceleration stability, 124–5, 130, 140 stasis, 5, 32, 61, 105, 138 strike-breakers, 117–18, 173n9, 173n11 subjectivity, 13, 16, 32, 43, 80, 90, 92, 122, 132, 145, 149, 151, 153, 161, 174n2 cosmopolitan subjectivity, 167n1 female subjectivity, 79–80, 98, 105, 107, 122–3, 131–2 modern subjectivity, 10, 19, 27, 103, 129, 132–3, 164n21 urban subjectivity, 24 suburbs, 85, 140, 159, 170n10 suffragettes, 14–15, 18, 104–5, 106–16, 121–2, 172n4, 172n5, 173n6, 177n18 see also women’s suffrage suicide, 43, 87, 91, 143, 177n19 Symons, Arthur, 106 Sypher, Eileen, 115 Taylorisation, 6 temporality, 10, 23–4, 27, 30, 32, 60, 64, 81, 87–8, 90, 92, 117, 127–8, 144–52, 153, 158, 161, 165n7 and place, 24, 81, 126, 142 clock-time, 34

temporal locations, 2, 8–10, 92, 143 temporal order, 33–4 the future, 3, 19, 28, 116, 140, 145 the past, 2, 4, 18, 35, 145–7, 176n10 the present, 2–3, 23, 125–6, 129, 144–7, 158, 160 the temporality of modernity, 4–7, 11, 19, 145, 162n2 ‘what time are we in?’, 3, 7, 19, 23–4, 125, 130, 143, 145, 160 see also nonsynchronicity Thacker, Andrew, 163n11 Tickner, Lisa, 30 timespace, 162n10 time-space compression, 6 tourism, 82, 128 tradition, 4, 7, 10, 16, 28, 59, 63, 64, 125 transport, modes of, 15, 34, 106, 113, 128, 132 air, 2–3, 124, 128, 130, 132, 136, 142 bicycle, 104, 145, 149 car, 2–3, 19, 124, 132, 135, 147–56, 158, 175n11, 176n6, 176n12, 177n16; ethical potential, 147–8, 151–3, 158; see also motoring public transport, 104, 173n11 rail, 2–3, 28, 48, 65, 67, 89, 128, 132–3, 135–6, 140, 148, 151, 176n6, 176n7, 176n11 walking, 2, 31, 52, 76, 82, 84, 94, 106, 113, 136, 140, 149, 150, 165n6 travel, 2, 19, 22–3, 45, 52, 65–7, 71, 83, 118, 126, 129, 132–4, 142, 145, 175n8 as escape, 92, 174n5 as pleasure, 79, 134 as sensory experience, 6, 15, 88–9, 135–6, 148, 150–1, 154–5, 160, 176n12 leisure travel, 23, 28–30, 82 to exotic places, 92, 174n5 see also speed, transport, modes of Tylee, Claire M., 172n2, 172n5 urban, 4–5, 16, 22, 34, 74, 79, 107, 113–15, 126–7, 129, 140

198

Index

urbanisation, 2, 13–14, 32, 35, 127 utopia, 5, 38, 85, 102, 105, 113, 116, 152, 160, 171n18, 171n20 Vadillo, Ana Parejo 122–3 Vicinus, Martha, 72 village, 8, 10, 18, 24–7, 73–4, 84–5, 119, 125, 159 vocation, 36–8, 78, 98, 120 Voce, Mary, 166n13 von Arnim, Elizabeth, 170n11 Votes for Women, 172n4 Walkowitz, Judith, 95 wandering, 15, 17, 21, 35, 42–3, 49, 62, 66, 72, 90, 114, 116, 159–60, 163n16, 166n14, 167n23, 167n24 Waters, Sarah, 177n19 Webb, Beatrice, 94–5, 99, 171n26 Webb, Mary, 126 Weber, Max, 5–6 West, Rebecca, 154 Wharton, Edith, 91, 176n6 Wilde, Oscar, 61–2 167n7 Williams, Raymond, 7, 8–10, 32–3, 126–8, 131, 137, 142 Wilkinson, Ellen, 116, 118 Clash, 9, 14, 18, 104–5, 116–23, 169n18 Wilson, Elizabeth, 11, 164n21

Wolff, Janet, 163n11, 164n21 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 39, 166n19 women and tradition, 3, 19, 31, 81, 98, 125, 159 as commodities, 18, 49–50, 52, 54, 61, 70 as spectacle, 16, 49, 54, 106–9 as unfit for public life, 107–8 woman’s place in modernity, 2–4, 17, 19, 21, 32, 92, 161 women’s education, 6, 15–16, 26, 61–2, 65–6, 75, 77, 80, 113–14, 127 women’s suffrage, 2, 102, 113 Woolf, Leonard, 151, 176n11, 176n12 Woolf, Virginia, 145, 151–3, 158, 163n13, 174n2, 175n4, 177n17 and motoring, 19, 132, 151–2, 175n7, 176n12 ‘Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car’, 147, 150–2 Orlando, 125, 144–6 work, 7, 15–16, 19, 21, 31, 35–7, 54, 71, 75–7, 79–80, 94–7, 101, 103, 117, 120–1, 129, 132, 170n10 see also philanthropy, vocation World War I, 145, 153–8, 176n13 Wright, Terence, 22, 164n1

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