The Nineteenth-Century English Novel: Family Ideology and Narrative Form

T HE N INETEENTH-C ENTURY E NGLISH N OVEL This page intentionally left blank T HE N INETEENTH-C ENTURY E NGLISH N O...

Author: James F. Kilroy

49 downloads 1230 Views 624KB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

T HE N INETEENTH-C ENTURY E NGLISH N OVEL

This page intentionally left blank

T HE N INETEENTH-C ENTURY E NGLISH N OVEL : FAMILY I DEOLOGY AND N ARRATIVE F ORM

James F. Kilroy

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL: FAMILY IDEOLOGY AND NARRATIVE FORM Copyright © James F. Kilroy, 2007. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–7646–8 ISBN-10: 1–4039–7646–5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

To Mary, who discussed every idea, read and reread every page, and improved this work in countless ways. Her unfailing love and support made this possible.


TABLE

OF

C ONTENTS

Introduction

1

Protecting the Family: Mansfield Park and Lodore

35

A Question of Survival: Dombey and Son and The Newcomes

79

The Threat of Evolution: The Mill on the Floss and The Daisy Chain

117

The End of the Story: The Master of Ballantrae and Ernest Pontifex

153

Notes

185

Bibliography

205

Index

219


“S’il n’ya a plus de P’ere, ‘a quoi bon raconter des histories?” “If there’s no more father, what’s the use of telling stories?” 1

Roland Barthes

1

Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du texte (Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1973), p. 75.


I NTRODUCTION

I

n the virtual museum of the visual arts, the gallery displaying English painting of the nineteenth century is dominated by genre painting: depictions of ordinary people—les gens—primarily in domestic settings. The hearth is the dominant setting in which comfortable scenes of parents and children are presented. More explicitly than in works of previous times, these visual depictions convey stories; their generous details and structures evoke readings, typically moralistic ones. Within the gallery there is a clear progression, not only in depictive techniques, but in effects: the later paintings increasingly elicit feelings of protest, rather than a celebration of order. Moving from that gallery into the one displaying modernist works, the diminishment of representation is shocking, and the celebration of color and more abstract form is exciting; but it is the absence of narrative that is most unnerving. The domestic themes that were so comfortable to regard or, later, so immediately challenging to consider, accompanied by their richly detailed depictions of home life, have disappeared. One is disoriented, because the art is no longer familiar in several senses of the word. Genre art was not peculiar to the nineteenth century; there is always some element of plot in a representational visual depiction: a mythological grouping implies its own narrative sources, a battle scene reports a verifiable history, a portrait reveals the sitter’s character in terms of causality, and even a still life or landscape can convey the material conditions of the period in which the work was painted. In fact, it is precisely such contexts that most interest current academic critics of the visual arts. But in England a distinctive preference for narrative art on domestic subjects marks the century. Such intensified interest in domestic portrayals derives from the Romantic valorization

2

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL

of common life, and additionally reflects the expansion of viewership and the gradual shift from wealthy patrons to middle-class taste and interests, and museums dedicated to providing art for the appreciation of such broader publics. This development of artistic styles and subject matter is evident when considering the most popular prints of the period. Hogarth’s several series of paintings of the 1730s, with their domestic subjects and strong moral lessons, evoked scores of imitators. In that vein, Francis Wheatley’s depictions of families at work or play, particularly his “Four Times of the Day” (1799), were produced in prints so inexpensive that they decorated the walls of even modest homes. In the nineteenth century, painters such as George Morland and David Wilkie built their careers on the taste for such domestic depictions. Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, which typifies the eighteenth-century domestic novel, provided subject matter for so many painters that Thackeray, an idiosyncratic but popular of critic of art, sarcastically proposed that the Royal Academy exhibition dedicate a special room for the display of such paintings. In fact, the popularity of genre painting, and specifically of domestic portrayals, defines the nineteenth century. Surveying the period, Christopher Wood concludes that it was such popular depictions “that first taught the Victorian public to equate painting with literature, taught them that a picture was something to be read, a novel in a rectangle.”1 Although often discounted by later critics as inferior to history painting and portraiture, domestic narrative paintings became so popular that by 1863 they represented the greatest number of entries in the Royal Academy show. The popular appeal of Robert Braithwaite Martineau’s “The Last Day in the Old Home” (1862), remarkable for the amplitude of its details and the urgency of its message, derives from its narrative. The composition focuses on a male figure, raising a glass of wine while a child imitates his gesture; nearby a pale woman his age looks on, and at a desk an older woman examines what appear to be legal papers spread before her. The painting’s title provides the key for constructing the narrative, in which the details within the work are functional: there are tags on the furniture; noble ancestors look down from portraits on the walls; suits of armor indicate the heroic past, a strong contrast to the painting of a horse set aside against a wall in the foreground, suggesting one source of the family’s fall from fortune. The father seems to be initiating his son into the world of dissipation as he offers a toast, on the occasion of the family losing possession of its ancestral home. The picture’s moral point is insistent: the dandyish father clearly enjoys the prospect of a glass of wine, even though his

INTRODUCTION

3

family is being evicted from the estate due to his profligacy, and his wife and children are bound to suffer. In considering such paintings and successive ones, a pattern of changing representations of domestic life over the century becomes clear, from the sweet sentimentality of the first decades, to a critical turning point at mid-century, to increasingly sober and even shocking portrayals of unfaithful husbands, abandoned wives, and homeless orphaned children in the late Victorian era. There are evident connections to the social discourse of the time, as the effects of industrialization and urbanization were felt and as reforms were being debated; but the change in representation manifests the entire movement toward realism in the arts.2 These striking changes in the subject matter of the visual arts do not reflect political realities like illustrations in a history text; they were substantive statements in the dialogue of the time in which they appeared, so that the insights they offer should be read in the context of political and ethical discourses of the period. The very feature of Victorian genre painting that subsequent generations found offensive—the insistent moralizing—constitutes its inherent protest and its participation in the public dialogues of the time. Participating in the debate over the various pieces of social legislation proposed by Lord Shaftesbury, depictions in the visual arts of orphaned children or exploited mine workers emerge in the 1840s and 1850s as subject for academy paintings. Later in the century Augustus Egg would be acclaimed for his three-part series, now referred to as “Past and Present,” which conveys an account of the destruction of a family caused by the mother’s adultery; as popular was William Powell Frith’s series, “Road to Ruin,” (1878), which portrays the decline of a wealthy young man from his gambling days at Oxford to his suicide. However, by the end of the century such intense concern with family relations almost disappears; the idyllic scenes of domestic harmony or the shocking depictions of familial discord have been supplanted by the femme fatales of the decadents, or the dreamy and often erotic decorative effects of such aesthetic painters as Lord Leighton and Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Genre painting develops not only in its subject matter, but, more importantly, in form and expressive technique. At the end of the nineteenth century, as at the beginning of the twenty-first century, genre paintings of happy families continued to appear. There will always be a market for homey representations by artists like, in our time, Thomas Kinkade; such works reveal enduring popular tastes. But in constructing a historical account, scholars concentrate on those works

4


that advance the forms and techniques of the medium, which challenge not only practices but orthodox beliefs and attitudes, and thus participate in the broader forms of ideological discourse. I do not mean to focus only on experimental, innovative works. Although the term avant-garde has acquired particular associations with the modernist agenda, there is a tendency to elevate those works that defy conventional attitudes and expressive practices and neglect those popular works that may more accurately reveal the ideologies of the period. Both kinds of artifacts bear examination: the popular ones to establish a base, the set of largely unexamined attitudes and techniques; and the innovative ones to reveal what aspects of orthodoxy are being challenged. Even granted that visual depictions, like verbal statements, typically contain some element of judgment, we are struck by the overtness of the rhetorical appeal of genre paintings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The viewer of a stereotypical early Victorian domestic portrayal is expected to judge: to regard the scene of a mother and child embracing while the father appears in the doorway, returning from work, as emblematic of the family as a model of social solidarity, or the scene of one generation attending the deathbed of a grandparent as inspiring dignified and dignifying sentiments, or the scene of little brothers and sisters returning from school as a recognition of the security provided by home life in its most elemental manifestations. Genre paintings not only tell stories; they prescribe moral responses, and English nineteenth century ones elicited judgments derived from a teleology and set of ideologies specific to the historical period. This is, after all, the age of Biedermeir, which was not only domestic, but moralistic: art was expected to be gemütlich: not only comfortable and cozy, but morally elevated: “it should reveal soul or mind.”3 A century later, our responses to such paintings are affected by our quite different intellectual concerns, and by an awareness of the discrepancy between the smug visual representation and the stark realities of life exposed by demographic data: the lower life expectancies, higher death rates attributable to inadequate health care, and the grim facts of child labor. But we conclude that, except for comic or at least ironic depictions of such domestic subjects, the galleries devoted to visual art of both the previous and subsequent centuries are nearly bereft of such works: the taste for genre paintings of domestic life is a specific feature of the nineteenth century, revealing a set of social concerns and ideologies that do not dominate the attention of the immediately neighboring centuries.

INTRODUCTION

5

To an even greater degree the nineteenth-century English novel concentrates on domestic affairs—on courtship and marriage, naturally, but on parent-child and sibling relationships nearly as commonly. Recognizing the ideological nature and function of representational art, both visual and written, we can trace a pattern in the development of the novel in its relationships to historical events and social conditions. More importantly, we can discern the ways in which literary works participate in the formation and critique of domestic ideology, and, in turn, how the very form of the novel gradually came to be adapted by the modified ideological assumptions. To trace changes in subjects and forms of the novel, I will consider nine novels, including both works that had in their time widespread appeal, for they are likely to reveal the broadest set of representative attitudes, and works that challenge not only orthodoxies but also modes of expression. In the process the inherent connection between ideology and the forms of artistic expression—that is, the ways in which beliefs, or at least challenges to conventional attitudes, shape narratives—will become evident. By analyzing a set of both popular and experimental works of the period, I hope to indicate how changes in paradigms of ideology require modifications of modes of narration, and specifically how developing discourse on the nature and function of the bourgeois family reshapes the genre of the novel. Of ideologies that underlie discourse in England during the period extending from the French Revolution to the end of nineteenth century, none is explored in fiction as frequently as the reverence for the family as a prime social unit, a model of order and an essential instrument for educating the young. The “family plot” in which parental authority is either challenged or affirmed, and in which internal relations—particularly those of siblings—are interrogated, was built upon human concerns so primal as to serve as a template for the narrative plot. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it had acquired a special relevance. In a period in which people perceived that social and political systems had changed drastically from earlier times, the function of the family became a contested area, one in which ideological discourse progressed so rapidly that real changes in attitudes become evident over a period as short as a century. As monarchy and political authority were called into question, so was patriarchy. As the claims of fraternity proved illusory after the French Revolution, bonds between family members seemed fragile. As the steady progress of society was disputed, the very survival of the family appeared to be threatened, and the family was viewed as increasingly removed from

6


society. Subsequently, separation came to be regarded as marginalization: the family came to be seen as antithetical to social advancement rather than as instrumental in development. Through the nineteenth century in England, in political discourse, as in literary works, increasing concern was expressed about the viability of the family and about its progressing marginalization from the world of commerce. In the relatively short period of about a century, domestic ideologies regarding patriarchy, sibling love, and the familial participation in the socialization of children were progressively modified. However, while conceptions of the family changed, the actualities of that social unit—its size, function, and structure—proved remarkably stable, as has been discovered by recent historical scholarship based on demographic research. The debate over the interpretation of such data has been heated, making the specialized discipline of family history a matter of intense argument. Systematic study of the English family developed in the nineteenth century within two new fields of scholarship, sociology and anthropology, and in their popular subdisciplines, ethology and ethnology. The study of foreign populations, particularly within England’s extensive empire, provided data about the fundamental social unit through which already sensitive questions could be explored. Both Comte and Spencer offered theories about the primacy of the family in the development of human societies, and in intellectual journals of the time there appeared a debate over when and how the family developed. The claim that the family derived from the clan, a matter that had been widely discussed and refuted for decades, prompted Friedrich Engels’ 1884 The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, which argues that a shift from matrilineal to patrilineal inheritance practices developed relatively late in human history as a result of concern for acquiring and retaining private property. And the much earlier Communist Manifesto contained direct refutations of contemporary reverence of family: “The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor.”4 As the nineteenth century progressed, the new science of psychology prompted more systematic and rigorous scrutiny of the family. As formulated by Freud, that science claimed that family experiences are fundamental and determinative: personality, pre-articulated impulses, and sexual

INTRODUCTION

7

and all other human adaptations and maladaptations originate in relations within one’s family. Until the latter half of the twentieth century the examination of the family within the social sciences was conducted almost exclusively by sociologists, building on the theories of Frederic LePlay, Emile Durkheim and Talcott Parsons, and focusing on the functions and characteristics of the family. The result of their systematic examinations was to establish within western culture the family of the last few centuries as a discrete unit, characterized by a considerable degree of autonomy, but constituted by close relations of parents and children, with only tangential connections to extended familial relationships. However, over the past forty years historians and social scientists, using new demographic techniques and examining documentation such as letters and family records not previously considered, have investigated the English conjugal family with new rigor, so that we can now discern a pattern of continuity, as well as important aspects of complexity. The work of such historians as Peter Laslett, Michael Anderson, Lawrence Stone, John Demos, Linda Pollock, and Tamara Hareven has prompted the construction of a distinctive discipline of family history, accompanied by academic courses and degree programs. The 1962 publication of Philippe Aries’ Centuries of Childhood caught popular attention by its claim that children became true subjects of attention fairly recently, as evidenced by the paucity of their representation in art and in documentary evidence.5 While this hypothesis was soon disputed, the argument had broad appeal in a society that professed to be so earnest in its concern for offspring. Lawrence Stone’s more substantive Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (1977) offered a similarly appealing historical claim that the modern family, now called the nuclear family, characterized by affection and centered on children, had developed in the seventeenth century, replacing the extended family, characterized by strong kinship relations but weaker conjugal ones, which had prevailed for the previous centuries. But within the same few years, the claims of both theories were being challenged, particularly through use of new demographic techniques made possible by new forms of electronic technology.6 Peter Laslett’s The World We Have Lost (1965) took on the nostalgic claim contained in the title, offering evidence drawn from demographic records that in terms of size, function, and structure, the family has changed little since medieval times. In this and a series of books, he and his colleagues in the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure argued that in pre-industrialized

8


England men and women married at about the same ages as they do today; they became parents to about the same number of children; they formed households of their own, separate from their parents; and illegitimacy was no more common or uncommon in any past historical period. “No easy contrast can be drawn between the world we have lost and the world we inhabit when it comes to births, marriages and deaths,” he concluded.7 Of particular importance was the scholarly reinvestigation that the move toward industrialization had weakened the family. It had been argued that when parents were removed from the hearth, where most compensated work had been done, to pursue work in factories and mills, the provision of critical socializing functions such as education were shifted from the family to the state. Even that claim has been solidly refuted on the basis of examination of statistical evidence.8 One source of the strength and resilience of the family has been the continuing view that it is the prime social institution. While the family was affected by political and social changes in the eighteenth century, its status as the original and most essential institution was largely unquestioned. Locke claimed it was the very model for civic governance, an assumption reiterated by Hegel a century later. The family provides formative models of social behavior: mutually benevolent relations among parents and children; responsive and responsible authority, evidenced in parental rule; civility, in the precious ties among siblings; benevolence, in familial care for the infirm and elderly; and proper socialization, seen in the education and moral guidance of children. However, from the earliest written records on, fears have been expressed that the institution of the family was under threat of extinction, a belief that may indicate no more than the enormous value placed upon it. Domestic affections inevitably clash with civic and commercial endeavors, and in the eighteenth century the sense of vulnerability is increasingly pronounced. In Defoe’s The Family Instructor (1715 and 1718) and in his novels, as in those of Samuel Richardson, one fundamental concern recurs: the imminent threat to harmonious family relationships posed by an increasingly materialistic society. As a template of orderly society, it was argued, the family had to remain constant in its form, resisting influences that threatened its internal cohesion. As the move to urban centers progressed, and as modes of employment changed, the facts of family life were in some ways transformed. As schools replaced parents in providing instruction for the

INTRODUCTION

9

young, one treasured role for parents was removed. With revisions of property law and the entire legal system developed in the eighteenth century, the very notion of the individual, and accordingly of the family, was being steadily and substantially modified.9 A patrilineal system of family inheritance had been standard in England in medieval times, replacing the practice in which property and rights were passed equally along the lines of both husband and wife, and in which the entire extended kin were perceived as the basic family unit, at one stage including servants, who were regarded as part of the family. But at some time, the specific causes of which are still under dispute, “the great family” gave way to core, closed units, living separately, typically consisting of parents and children of a single generation, what we now call the nuclear family. Although never self-sufficient, nor separable from large social units, the family came to be regarded as a discrete entity, responsible for its own protection, and for decisions regarding reproduction and financial security. Over the centuries from medieval times to the Enlightenment period, concern about lineage declined, property law changed, and a sense of enhanced solidarity among family members was emphasized. Such a change was reflected in domestic architecture, in which servants came to be housed outside the home or in clearly distinguished quarters. However, in preindustrial England the size of a conjugal family was not significantly larger, nor was it usually composed of kin outside the immediate social unit of parents and children, forming an extended family living together under one roof. Up to the end of the eighteenth century, decisions on whom to marry were typically made by the parties themselves, albeit with advice from parents, although without any absolute rule by them. Some functions were surrendered to other social institutions, such as education, health care and support for poor or elderly individuals, but the core responsibilities of the family to advance its own interests, protect its own members, and assure its continuation remained largely intact. If the actual family has not been shaped and reshaped over the past few centuries, it has a history of more subtle changes, particularly in its views of itself and in ideological attitudes toward it.10 John Demos’s three-phase model for discerning changes in images of the family, although formulated to describe the experience in America, applies as well to English culture. He proposed that in the Enlightenment and extending to the early part of the nineteenth century, what he calls the colonial phase, the family was largely taken for granted, regarded as consonant in its ends and operations to the larger

10


society. In the nineteenth century, however, it was seen as separated from society, even occupying a different and endangered sphere. It came to be seen as a refuge, “a haven in a heartless world,” in Christopher Lasch’s term, the role of which was not complementary to the world of politics and commerce, but protective from that world. In its secluded state, the internal workings of the family acquired exaggerated importance: for children “maturation became disjunctive and problematic,” and the “transition to adulthood became longer, lonelier and more painful.” In its third phase, in the twentieth century, the family becomes less a place of protection for its members as a place of rest and recuperation, and the binding nature of family responsibilities is debated. This three-phase scheme provides a line of development for the purpose of this study.11 The project of exploring changes in the conception of the family is one of examining attitudes, not facts; but perceptions are based on real situations and events. After the French Revolution, threats to family stability were perceived as imminent, leading to a sense of either greater coherence, or greater fragmentation. Historians such as Randolph Trumbach argue that to the frightened English observing the civil discord in France during and especially after the French Revolution, the family acquired a heightened value: it became a stable force against anarchy, a conservative force. On the other hand, as Lynn Hunt observes, the entire political iconography of the French Revolution was familial: The king who should have been responsible and benevolent, had become a tyrant, so the sons had to take over. . . . There is never a father present in the new representations of the Republic, and mothers, except very young ones, are largely absent. The parents had disappeared from this family, leaving the brothers to create a new world and protect their now orphaned sisters.

The implied replacement of patriarchy by fraternity was a powerful argument, albeit, in the view of English commentators, a hazardous one. But the audacious claims of the revolution revised the terms of domestic discourse, and in the views of some social historians, accelerated the movement toward a more clearly defined domestic space, and even to the elevation of the family as a sacred entity.12 Edmund Burke’s impassioned refutation of the revolution provoked the equally emphatic response of Mary Wollstonecraft, whose paired works, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and A

INTRODUCTION

11

Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) set the course for much of the revision of domestic ideology in the following century. In the first work she begins by accepting the orthodox affiliation of family with the state, and even the functional relationship: “The character of a master of a family, a husband, and a father, forms the citizen imperceptibly, by producing a sober manliness of thought, and orderly behaviour.”13 But, provoked by Burke’s facile employment of the domestic analogy, she attacks his assumption that it justifies exploitation of individuals, particularly women and children. In the following text, she explicitly allies the tyranny of the state with that in the home: the “weak king” is identified with the “weak father of a family” in that both are “eager to crush reason.”14 Her argument prioritizes the individual over the social unit, effectively reflected in the titles of the two works, the earlier referring to the plural “Men,” the later to the singular “Woman.” This shift prefigures that of the broadest contours of ideological domestic discourse—from dominating concern with the family to focus upon the individual family member, a change that pervades the second treatise. In place of orthodox views of patriarchal order, she proposes the “reciprocal duty” of parents and children. She denies the validity of the justifying monarchial and familial authority by appeal to divine rights going all the way back to “our first parent”; instead, she proposes the “reciprocal duty” of parents and children, deriving from the responsibility to acknowledge the rights of individual members (224). In such a program, wives and children are held accountable as much as the patriarch is, and guilt is assigned to those that comply with tyrannical rule within the family as much as to the instigator: “Respect for parents is, generally speaking, a much more debasing principle; it is only a selfish respect for property. The father who is blindly obeyed, is obeyed from sheer weakness, or from motives that degrade the human character” (225). Wollstonecraft acknowledges the challenge of modifying habitual behavior, but she claims reason on her side: “But, till society is very differently constituted, parents, I fear, will still insist on being obeyed, and constantly endeavour to settle that power on a Divine right which will not bear the investigation of reason” (228). The cogency of her arguments and the urgency of her rhetorical expression contributed substantially to challenges to orthodox ideologies of the family. Other events of the early years of the new century contributed to an intensified sense of concern about the family. George IV’s attempt to divorce his wife provoked a backlash of defense for domestic virtue.

12


The public scandals of the Regency period and the widely publicized escapades of Byron and other rakes, which drew fascinated attention during the following years, raised the issue of domestic tranquility to a new level of public discourse.15 The Caroline Norton case prompted a series of proposals to protect the property rights of wives, culminating in the 1882 Married Women’s Property Act. That political debate kept alive arguments about whether women might be viewed as retaining autonomous rights as legal entities, a proposition that was feared by some as weakening family ties. Construction of family ideology was a key element in the establishment of middle-class culture. Peter Gay’s massive explication of bourgeois culture during the nineteenth century reveals not only its pervasiveness, but its vulnerability during this period of rapid change. While the term bourgeois was often used derisively to expose the resistance of the bourgeoisie to the progressive claims of the avant-garde, but it also served a reifying purpose: identifying the class that had acquired such political and financial power as to become a metonym for the new age. The bourgeois family, then, is defined both by negative claims offered by artists and social commentators critical of bourgeois society, and by advocates of an institution viewed as a model of efficiency and civil order.16 In debates over the Reform Bills, Factory Acts, and Poor Laws during the 1830s claims were made that parental authority was being undermined by the removal of the father, and in many cases the mother, from the household to work in factories or mills. In industrial areas, women and even children might well work in factories, mills, or mines, abandoning the household. Lord Shaftesbury, the most effective of social reformers of the period, articulated what was a common fear: “domestic life and domestic discipline must soon be at an end; society will consist of individuals no longer grouped in families; so early is the separation of husband and wife, of parents and children.”17 Assumed in his claim is an idealistic concept of intimate, loving domestic life, attributed to some time past. Nevertheless, removing the place of work from the home to the factory inevitably had some fragmenting effect and planted a hint of possible extinction, making it all the more precious. Over the course of the nineteenth century, majority adherence to earlier claims of the sanctity of the family as a quasi-religious institution deteriorated as social critics, including novelists, pointed out the fissures within the temple of the family. For Victorian historians, who viewed history teleologically, as a sequence

INTRODUCTION

13

in time and space that follows a single line and advances toward an articulated end, the claims of Malthus raised questions about the viability or future of this basic social unit. Despite the perception of imminent annihilation, the family survived, albeit by adapting to changing work conditions and socializing functions. Alterations of commercial law and practices extended ownership of land or business enterprises beyond members of a single family, thereby modifying the practice of inheritance strictly along blood lines. Moves from rural to urban areas weakened family ties forged in seclusion and forced greater interaction of family members with strangers and neighbors. Providing for education by the state, and in schools rather than around the hearth, shifted the responsibility for one of the family’s most important functions. Jacques Donzelot’s The Policing of Families argues that as this primary social unit relegated responsibility for such functions as medical and educational care of children, it shifted to an instrumental position, enabling “government 18 through the family,” rather than “government of families.” But in its essential functions, the family continued in substantially its original form and structure, although claims of the “decline of family values” continue to the present time to be proclaimed in political discourse. By the mid-century there emerges a growing perception of the domestic sphere as markedly separated from the world of commerce, even as its diametrical opposite. The hearth comes to be regarded as a haven, characterized by cooperation rather than competition. The two spheres of family and the commercial world even come to be viewed as binaries of female and male, alien and even antagonistic to each other. Ruskin’s formulation, quoted in nearly every study of Victorian family ideology, claims a nearly absolute separation: This is the true nature of the home—the place of Peace, the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt and division. In so far as it is not this, it is not home; so far as the anxieties of the outer life penetrate into it, and the inconsistently-minded, unknown, unloved, or hostile society of the outer world is allowed by either husband or wife to cross the threshold, it ceases to be home; it is then only a part of that outer world which you have roofed over and 19 lighted fire in.

Surely no family operated in such seclusion from the world of commerce on which it depended for financial sustenance; but its ideological representation as a haven was widespread.20

14


To later generations the adulation of the family seemed extreme, especially in the appropriation of divine status. Not only was the father identified with a divine ruler, but the mother became sanctified as “The Angel in the House.” A purported compliment, as Coventry Patmore originally used it, the term was appropriated into a popular ideology that subsequently was exposed as injurious to women. The definitive works of Elizabeth Langland expose the underside of this Victorian reverence for the family, and particularly for the “angelic” matriarch: it relegated the economic and political roles of the wife to a supportive, secondary position, with the result that even a social critic as astute as George Eliot privileges the patriarchal attitude that 21 regards woman’s work in the home as nearly worthless. Prompted by the debate on the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, discourse recorded in intellectual journals and popular fiction of the following decades reveals increasing awareness of the insularity of and even oppression within the family.22 By 1869, John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women, a critical text of the period, points out the tyranny fostered by patriarchy: If the family in its best forms is, as it is often said to be, a school of sympathy, tenderness, and loving forgetfulness of self, it is, still oftener, as respects its chief, a school of willfulness, overbearingness, unbounded self-indulgence, and a double-dyed and idealized selfishness, of which sacrifice itself is only a particular form: the care for the wife and children being only care for them as parts of the man’s own interests and belongings, and their individual happiness being immo23 lated in every shape to his smallest preferences.

By the last decades of the nineteenth century, the perception of the family as being a haven from a corrupting materialistic system is rarely voiced in public discourse; by then its exaltation, and most of its elevated associations have also disappeared. Concerns about population growth, legislation that provided women and children rights that had been denied them, and a rejection of the paternalism that drove 24 so much social legislation contributed to the change of sentiment. The perceptions that dominated discourse of the century, that the family had been crippled or at least substantially changed by advancing industrialization, have been discredited by recent scholarship. Historical research based on hard data, including journals and letters as well as quantitative information, reveals a steady continuation of traditional family responsibilities and relationships. While some historians

INTRODUCTION

15

continue to impute intensification of affective relationships and paternal dominance, there is little proof that the family was so transformed. As Linda Pollock concludes, on the basis of extensive examination of family documents, “Parents did wish, in theory, to have a great deal of authority over their children, but in practice they did not achieve this aim.”25 In short, during the period under study, extended families in England were not more common; patriarchal authority was no more absolute; sibling relationships were no closer; maternal affection was no more manifest; relations among various generations were no closer; internal conflicts were no less common; and the core functions of parents of socializing and educating the next generation were not substantially different. However, there were widespread perceptions of a determinedly contrary nature growing throughout the nineteenth century, revealed in the ideological discourse, and, of special interest, in the treatment of the family in the novel. Between the French Revolution to the end of the nineteenth century, the period in which the classic English novel was developed, the dominant philosophic assumptions derived from the continental philosophic thought of Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel, in which literary expression was regarded as subjective, in its essence the product of imagination and desire. In that context the novel became the most potent form, exceeding the power of lyric poetry, that other favored Romantic form, by incorporating causal and temporal relations through narrative and assuming some degree of dialectical response from the reader. Its popularity, described in many historical accounts, may even be seen in the ways in which music and the visual arts were perceived as novels—program music or genre painting that could tell stories, colored by the personality or even genius of the artist. Over these hundred and twenty years the mimetic aspect of the novel was not absolutely abandoned, nor was its instructive, moralistic potentiality, but with changes in fundamental philosophic, religious, and political beliefs, their efficacy was questioned, with the result that the form of the novel was transformed. Philosophical and psychological theories of the past decades have reshaped our concept of the novel and our understanding of the process of reading, revealing complexities that destabilize earlier understandings, particularly the ways in which culture both provokes and constrains expression. Decades of heated critical discourse have brought us to address at least three questions dealing with a set of processes: the ways in which the novel creates realities as well as recording them; the ways in which perceptions of such realities has

16


shifted from a single, coherent and authorized statement becoming, particularly in the modernist movement, a set of unreconciled questions and exchanges; and finally, the ways in which fictional form is shaped by the formulation of ideologies. The development of the novel from primitive myths, oral epics, history, biography, and conduct books has been, and will, no doubt, continue to be, traced by industrious scholars, whose claims and conclusions in turn reveal their own timebound perceptions. In the twentieth century critical attention to the literary form shifted from its mimetic aspect to its expressive and objective functions, to use Meyer Abrams’ still useful terminology. But in the twenty-first century we take as a foundational assumption that the novel offers no more than a distorted mirror of an idiosyncratic, subjective reality, held before the face of implicated viewers (plural) by an agent with complex ulterior motives, who herself or himself is the product of social and political discourses. The text is encoded with a multitude of messages, overt and latent, and is the production of the author, the reader, and the society and its past. The contours of narrative—where an account starts and where it ends—are determined by a complex set of assumptions about the purpose of telling a tale. Its language and rhetoric are determined by, and in turn determine, assumptions about the credibility and intentions of the author and the purported interests of the reader. The experience of reading, and more so of criticizing, is predicated on assumptions about the nature and capacities of verbal expression and delimited by changing claims of epistemology, ethics and even ontology. If narrative, and specifically the novel, must convey an impression of what is real, it depends on “a fragile consensus about reality,” one that is never fixed, but that changes over time.26 Literature is shaped by ideology and at the same time contributes to the formation of ideology. It does so differently at each of its several stages: the period and process of its creation; the time and place for which it as calculated to be read, and the various times and places when it is read and reread—and responded to critically. As Denis Jonnes succinctly formulates it: Whatever form it may take, whatever its institutional focus, however simple or complex the stories a culture chooses to tell itself, story represents an articulation elicited in response to the pressure which sexual, reproductive, necrotropic functions exert upon human col27 lectivities and their individual members.

INTRODUCTION

17

And, finally, ideological assumptions substantially determine the formation of narrative, its structure, its language, and the techniques its author uses to control the reader’s responses. This claim of that ideology shapes not only expression, but the very shapes of narratives is fundamental to this study. Fictional narratives derive from varying degrees of critical engagement with issues of ideology. Narratives are written because authors “have something to say,” and we reread and direct critical attention to a certain set of them because the claims, observations, or even questions they offer provoke responses in us, even centuries after the statements were first articulated. However, decoding—deriving from narratives the underlying motivating elements—is difficult because the ideologies are multiple and include contrary and even contradictory elements as they participate in the very formation of larger ideologies, a process that continues to operate long after the formation of narrative, in the process of reading. Just as narratives are the products of ideological discourse, they themselves participate in the critique of and modification of ideologies. As Catherine Gallagher, in her definitive study of the ways in which discourse on industrial reform in England affected narrative form, observes, “Discourse exists between and within ideologies, thereby creating the coherence and legibility of ideological conflict. Literary forms often disrupt the tidy formulations and reveal the inherent paradoxes of their ostensible ideologies.”28 It is tempting to describe a pattern of development in the novel based on consensus regarding ideologies, in which the earliest texts assume agreement on, for instance, the validity of patriarchal authority, in which the narrative voice is granted by the reader a high degree of control, in which the narrative is allowed to preach and instruct because of prior subscription to lessons that are only reiterated, and in which the gross shape of the narrative—its limits (beginning and ending) and principle of inclusion (plot contents)—are justified by the moral or instructional intentions of the writer. We can find such a formula operating in a simple version of novelistic writing: Daniel Defoe’s The Family Instructor. Written before his novels, these two volumes (1715 and 1718) are a series of dramatic dialogues recording a family’s experiences, focusing upon a father who neglects the proper religious instruction of his children but subsequently realizes his failings and corrects his course in raising his other offspring. The series concludes with accounts of the subsequent lives of the children that reveal the effects of their upbringing. The moral message is insistent: the son who resisted his parents’ rule is left at the end a cripple and a

18


beggar, “and though always very penitent for rejecting his father’s government and instruction, yet never submits himself to his Father, so as to be received again, and dies miserable.”29 The episodes are consecutive and the message consistent throughout. However, although the stories are interrelated and the characters adequately delineated, we would not classify this series as a novel because it lacks an essential element: the stimulation to question ideology. The novel does not simply reflect ideologies; in fact, rarely does it do so. Instead, it engages the reader in a process of inquiry. In its flowering in the nineteenth century it becomes, in Bakhtin’s terminology, dialogic, or polyphonic. The breakdown of what seemed to be a universal system of ideologies thus prompts a particular form of discourse that characterizes or defines the novel. Responses of the reader may range from pliability to active resistance, but some reaction is evoked through features of the text such as idiosyncrasies of the narrative voice, omissions of plot elements, or inclusion of moral or interpretative claims that seem excessive or at least arbitrary.30 Bakhtin’s term, which recognizes the element of both a narratological process of dialogue (exchange between two parties, including narrator and reader) and a characteristic of language in which a word may play upon past meanings, homophones and metaphors, has provided a rich approach for much recent literary scholarship. Acknowledging the polyphonic and even dialectical elements in certain narratives we become aware of the ways in which meaning is produced and in the same act refuted. But at the same time it evokes the question of whether any meaning or any value statement is possible. On this vexing question of the intertwining of ideology and criticism Terry Eagleton provides a tenable solution; he argues that literary texts “express” not ideology, but the converse: the text is “a certain production of ideology,” just as a dramatic “production” transforms a text into “a unique and irreducible entity.”31 To insist on a continuous dialectical pattern in literary texts that first proposes and immediately denies propositions about its subject is to relegate literature to an absurd new-critical plane of existence, unrelated to concerns of the worlds of its author, and of readers of multiple historical periods and cultural settings. On the contrary, I argue that narratives elicit responses of both concurrence and denial in a dynamic that reflects on and creates ideologies both of the period in which the work was produced and that in which it is read or reread. Those various ideologies are interwoven into systems of social relationships with characteristic features, including attitudes toward class, gender, age, and those social institutions constructed to control

INTRODUCTION

19

behavior, so that even as the text is encoded with assumptions about individuality, for instance, the readers’ responses are limited by different assumptions. In the dialogue evoked by reading uncertainties about social attitudes or values, innate contradictions between conflicting ideologies and the insufficiencies of single prescriptions of ethics are brought to the surface in such a way that, beyond the process of reading and responding, assumed ideologies may be questioned and even refuted. The dialogic process of reading is thus inherently related to the actuality of political, religious and social thought. On a broader plane, the novel participates in exchanges between ideologies, or discourses, that question assumptions of contrary propositions and prompt reconsideration. Although some texts only evoke fantasies and articulate desires without proposing corrective social responses, some go further, participating in the formation of social attitudes that may even result in political change. In canon formation an important qualification has been a text’s effectiveness in eliciting multiple responses and judgments from readers, acknowledging that perceptions are complex and even internally contradictory. Or to state it conversely, a text is excluded from consideration as canonical if it evokes only a simplistic response of concurrence without engaging the reader actively in the examination of contrasting and complicated claims. In his use of the term chronotope, Bakhtin acknowledges the inherent interrelationships of ideologies and relative time and space. An important set of interchanges evoked by narratives is “chronotopic”—reflective of or at least related to a historical period and cultural site—but unspoken and unconscious. Bakhtin’s best exegete Michael Holquist says that these interchanges, “lie deeper . . . than the prejudices imposed by ideology.”32 Recognition of chronotopes (of which there may be more than one in a single narrative) should inform reading and interpretation of texts, for they provide the means to fuse its form and content and determine our ethical responses. Thus, a complex, important aspect of the dialogue inherent in narratives is that between the chronotope of the reader and that of the historical period and locality in which the text emerged.33 Continuing disagreements in defining Bakhtin’s term make chronotope an imprecise term to employ in this work, so I have chosen to use another, possible equally controversial one—ideology—but in the qualified manner in which it is employed by Bakhtin. The word has been imported from the disciplinary language of political science, in which it typically denotes a false assumption or claim.34 But in cultural analysis Louis Althusser’s formulation has become the standard definition: ideology is not a system

20


of actual social relationships, but “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”35 That constructed system creates an appearance of coherence and thus sustains the state’s power, eliding the contradictions of actual life. Of such systems of representations the configuration proposing a unified concept of the family is fundamental. Again, Althusser provides the defining statement: children, he argues, are always born into roles determined by family ideology: It is certain in advance that it will bear its Father’s Name, and will therefore have an identity and be irreplaceable. Before its birth, the child is therefore always-already a subject, appointed as a subject in and by the specific family ideological configuration in which it is “expected” once it has been conceived. I hardly need add that this family ideological configuration is, in its uniqueness, highly structured, and that it is in this implacable and more or less “pathological” (presupposing that any meaning can be assigned to that term) 36 structure that the former subject-to-be will have to “find” its place.

The purpose of this study is to reveal how ideology appears and functions in the novel, and, more important, how it affected the very structure of that literary form at a time when that structure was undergoing drastic change. To direct focus more efficiently, I consider a small selection of texts in which questions about the survival and functions of the family are of such central concern as to be said to determine the narrative scope of the texts. Acknowledging the dialogic nature of such texts, I will emphasize the complex process in which the novel dynamically exposes, critiques, qualifies, undercuts and sometimes reiterates ideology. Following an introductory survey of the ideological issues and formal characteristics found in Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), intended to set a base model for the excursions to follow, I examine four pairs of novels to trace the modifications of family ideology and the concomitant formal modes of fictional expression over the period of the nineteenth century: Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) and Mary Shelley’s Lodore (1835), representing the Regency and Romantic phase; Charles Dickens’ Dombey and Son (1848) and William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Newcomes (1853), novels tracing changes in single families during the tumultuous midcentury period; Charlotte Yonge’s The Daisy Chain (1856) and George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), works in which the early reactions to the most provocative scientific and religious claims appear; and, finally, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae (1889) and

INTRODUCTION

21

Samuel Butler’s Ernest Pontifex (1903), which represent the final phase of these developments in the nineteenth century. I chose these texts for two reasons: First, each of the narratives concentrate on the fortunes of a single family, including consideration of the continuation of the family over successive generations, and thus reveal extended ideological attitudes and concerns about that social institution. Second, these novels represent a developing series of literary formal practices; their modes of narration, construction of plot, and expectations put upon readers constitute in toto a history of the structural development of the novel over a century. The choice of the period seems obvious, given the priority of the novel as a form of literary expression in the nineteenth century in England. In offering literary texts as evidence to describe ideology of the period, I recognize their function as reflecting attitudes rather than realities. I agree with the formulation of one of James Branch Cabell’s characters that “literature is a vast bazaar where customers come to purchase everything except mirrors.”37 The point deserves reiteration and emphasis, for, in constructing popular histories of England, some have offered as historical data selected fictional accounts as the equivalent of hard data, such as might be found in journals, court records, or the vast array of demographic information now increasingly accessible. Fictional accounts are valuable to seeking to understand the past, but only as reflections of perceptions—of the author, of her or his intended readers, and of ourselves as readers. Of these, the first is most readily examined, because we can discern the author’s place in contemporary society and his or her ideological attitudes from supporting biographical works. Similarly, we can discover what concerns were current in that historical period. The information is valuable, for the ideology of an institution so dominant in thought as the family is subject to historical accounting as much as are political attitudes or financial practices. Peter Laslett succinctly warns against “looking the wrong way through the telescope” in how we use literary evidence in historical sociology, but he sees its utility: it can call attention to “commentary rather than description, commentary on tendencies rather than on present realities, reflections to be shared . . . rather than mirror-like reflections of the society. . . . The subject matter of imaginative literature shows forth above all what engaged the minds of the generation of the author.”38 Even this disclaimer requires further qualification: the novels discussed in this text reveal attitudes of authors of a certain class, the bourgeoisie, focusing upon families of that class as well. These texts do not offer a comprehensive account of the attitudes of

22


the multitudes of the lowest, the highest, and this powerful middle class that constituted English society. Having acknowledged the limitations of examining literary texts, rather than historical accounts of the period, the question remains: why choose a series of novels for this study? The novel is the quintessential domestic literary form, in both its favored subject matter—courtship, marriage, relations within families—and in its audience. In her definitive history of the novel, Margaret Doody describes the continuous attention given to the family, but succinctly notes the complicated treatment it is given: The family we commonly see in novels is constantly in trouble, in danger of shipwreck, on the verge of splitting up. . . . The Family has been around as a unit of psychosocial thought for a long long time. The Novel, however, does not offer easy support to what are presently called “Family Values.” The Novel, the genre that best describes and interprets the dynamics of family life, also displays the pain of the family. “Happy families are all alike,” says Tolstoy . . . but we do not really see many of those. Nor does the Novel answer to Freud’s “Family Romance” with its incestuous objectives. The family may be vital, it may be important for a character to return and be temporarily reunited with the original constellation—but that is never a simple homecoming. What once existed is not restored. What comes to pass is the creation of a new and more flexible com39 pound elaborated and amplified by new connections.

In the nineteenth century, during which the English novel attained an unprecedented popularity, attracting a set of the most serious and talented writers and progressing to become a serious venue for intellectual expression, it focused almost exclusively on family matters. In doing so it was responding to the heightened interest of its readership in domestic matters. Charles Dickens described the audience for the serial in which his stories would appear “a family sitting around a fire,” so that, as Janice Carlisle suggests, “the world becomes a hearth, perhaps a more satisfying home than the novelist had known 40 either as a child or as an adult.” But this was also the period in which the family was perceived as being closest to annihilation, so that the very threat evoked a defensive statement or at least a warning call of imminent disaster. Fictional treatment of British imperialism began not when the Empire was at its height of power, but in mid-century, when its hegemonic aspirations were being challenged in India. Religious beliefs are most vehemently proclaimed when there is a need

INTRODUCTION

23

to proselytize or when faith seems under threat. Ideologies, long unarticulated, most require iteration when they seem vulnerable. As Clifford Geertz puts it, It is, in fact, precisely at the point at which a political system begins to free itself from the immediate governance of received tradition, from the direct and detailed guidance of religious or philosophical canons on the one hand and from the unreflective precepts of conventional moralism on the other, that formal ideologies tend first to 41 emerge and take hold.

Treating ideologies perceived as threatened or losing their power, the novel serves a primarily defensive function, propping up the beliefs of the past and attempting to forestall imminent changes, an effort that often seems futile. In fact, authors may be attracted to defending ideology and arguing against modifications of it because they are arguing against new or recent propositions that have already acquired either appeal or actual force. While several of the texts studied in this work favor ideological propositions of the social minority, at least one, Ernest Pontifex, revels in the destruction of an ideology that, at that point in history, is regarded as insupportable. Shadowing the narratives over this historical period is a sense of immanence, a fear that a precious ideology, a particular set of beliefs about the primary social institution of the family, is being discounted and abandoned, and even the most vigorous in attacking the pretensions of family ideology is not insensitive to its human value. The word “familiar” acknowledges the association of the domestic with the traditional, a vestigial reminder of the belief that the family represented a primal social unit, the source not only of moral and practical instruction, but of all stories. Freud identified one such narrative as denoting a fantasy of separation from one’s parents as occurring in maturation; but in tracing the etiology of fictional narratives one can generally discern the sources in fascination with the varied relationships and functions of the family. Parental discipline becomes the first model of patriarchal rule; sibling relationships provide models of social interdependencies, amplifying marital love or subverting parental authority; and the family’s dual responsibilities to preserve lineage and yet adapt dependent members of the family to become independent of it provide models for basic narrative patterns. The entire process of telling—of making fiction—may derive from primitive attempts to understand, to adapt to, and in some cases to resist the prime relationships experienced

24


within the family. As Roland Barthes shrewdly observes: “If there’s no longer a Father, why tell stories?”42 The novel was particularly suited to explorations of family ideology. In Beginnings, Edward Said claims that the novel originates in concern for genealogy and claims of patriarchy; it exhibits what he terms filiation. Authority, he argues, as it appears in literary creation, denotes not only possession of power, but also origination, production, and paternity. The author exhibits first the power to initiate, to begin, and the ability to control and direct a narrative account, just as the patriarch inseminates and then leads and controls the critical activities of the family. Said argues such a description of narrative authority characterizes the novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, what he calls the “classical novel,” and points out that it is typically concerned with orphans, outcasts and solitaries—those defined by exclusion from a family. Plot, then, is essentially concerned with responses to a patriarch, narrations consisting of attempts to justify or protest patriarchal rule, the entire structure of the novel determined by issues related to family structure and functions.43 Adopting Said’s formulation of narrative—both in terms of creation and criticism—as in its essence involving filiation, I propose to investigate the formal manifestations of a changing set of familial relationships as they appear in novels of a relatively short period, a little over one hundred years, during which, I argue, we can see a clear shift in ideology about the family in a set of specific aspects, and in which formal changes in the form of the novel are apparent. I extend the period of consideration beyond what Said regarded as its “classic” phase, that is, to nearly the end of the century, and work to show how modifications of the form can be traced and explored to see the essential interchanges between the text and late nineteenth century. I conclude that modifications of the novel’s form were inherently related to incremental shifts of ideology that can be traced and explored to reveal essential interchanges between the text and specific ideologies. While some aspects of the ideological determination of plot have been established by earlier critics, I mean to show how the process of ideological change is reflected in formal modifications.44 Two specific features of the nineteenth century English novel most clearly serve its dialogical nature. The inclusion of subplots in the novel enhances a dialogical function, offering alternative solutions to common problems and even providing a polyphonic account through which meaning is both constructed and questioned.45 Second, the personification of the narrator, and particularly the employment of

INTRODUCTION

25

multiple narrators, serves to provoke resistant responses to claims made. In The Imaginary Puritan, Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse argue that since its emergence in seventeenth-century England, the presence of an “author” in the sense of a personified figure with his or her own personal life has promoted such discourse and even urged action.46 But in the period under study, the idiosyncrasy of the personified narrator elicits such skeptical responses that the dialogical exchange leads to a discounting of authority, problems of textual closure, and general unnarratability. Peter Brooks goes so far as to insist that first person narrative accounts are inevitably concerned with problems of closure, authority and narratability, in which case a reading must participate in a dialogical exchange.47 Furthermore, just as a work of visual art may be admired for its “painterly” qualities—evidences of brushwork, pigment, or medium that call attention to the act of composition—narratives that we call novels contain reminders of their very artifice. While it attempts to convey impressions of lived experience, the novel constantly undercuts its own claims of accurate or exhaustive depiction through its silences, through framing, through use of limiting narrative techniques, and even through its own admittedly imprecise expression. The reader is prodded to awareness of the narrative’s own unreliability at the same time that it may claim concession or agreement. It is, as Lennard J. Davis aptly phrases it, “both factual and factitious. . . . It is a report on the world and an invention that parodies that report.”48 Given the dialogical nature of the novel, and its coexisting claims to be mimetic and instructive, articulating specific ideologies in literary texts is difficult, for narrative can proceed in more than one direction simultaneously. Furthermore, explicit presentation of ideologies almost certainly provokes an ironic response. Take, for example, what may be the most extremely positive ideological view of family as it sometimes appears in philosophic, religious, artistic, and even literary works: the proposition that the structure of the family parallels the divine order under the rule of God the Father. Investing the domestic patriarch with absolute authority, regarding the rebellion of one generation against its predecessor in Miltonic terms, or judging family members by reference to the Holy Family would require elevation of domestic interactions to an unattainable level of perfection. Thus Pater’s “Angel in the House,” if regarded as anything other than hyperbolic embroidery, functions only ironically, revealing the unattainability of the role assigned to women, much as painting the figure of a male child as resembling an infant Jesus would hold him to a standard beyond

26


attainment. One must examine such complex implications of ideologies as they appear in narrative through a myriad of filters, recognizing quite contrary and even contradictory elements within the constant changes of both social conditions and perceptions or ideologies, and, even more complicated, both the reflective and formative functions of narrative. In addition, the family we are discussing is a type, not an actuality, one that disguises its own variability, for real families change in time and varying situations. If we add to that the much more convoluted variance in readings of narrative texts, as the most challenging theorists of the past generation have required us to do, the difficulties of approaching the Proteus-like text become daunting. And yet one more complication must be added: perceptions themselves can change reality. Varying views of the coherence, or the vulnerability, of the family prompted legislation that in turn transformed that domestic social unit. But just as external factors affected both the functions of the family and perceptions of it, the reverse was true; as relationships with the household and the family’s perception of itself shifted over time, the larger society was accordingly reshaped. Like Oscar Wilde doubting whether fog existed in London before Whistler painted it, we recognize as readers the extent to which our realities are created by our perceptions. Finally, it is tempting to describe changing treatments of ideologies in the novel as proceeding toward or away from a point of consensus. To claim there was a time in which attitudes toward some subject of discourse were in widespread agreement would at least provide a beginning point from which one could trace an upward or downward pattern of changing attitudes. But ideologies are themselves products of conflicting perceptions and values. In monetary terms, one would say they derive their value from their scarcity, not from commonality. To explore the effects of discourse on narrative form I will examine a discrete set of aspects of the ideology centering on the family, an ideology exalted as essential in the culture of the time, but one continually in the process of drastic modification. Then, by extracting the ideological issues treated in a set of representative novels, I hope to disclose the ways in which ideological changes forced structural adaptation of the form of the novel. I contend that although little actual change took place in family organization or function, there was a pronounced shift in ideologies, reflected in differing terms of the discourse that appears in and shapes the narrative. This shift in turn forced a reshaping of the form of the novel so severe that it occasioned fundamental questioning of the viability of the novel, setting in

INTRODUCTION

27

progress a self-reflexive tendency that characterizes fiction of the following century. Cognizant of the dangers of periodization, I hope to avoid giving the impression of this development as what Frederic Jameson denounces as the “fatally reductive” claim of a “a seamless web of phenomena, each of which, in its own way, ‘expresses’ some unified inner truth.”49 There are not discrete phases, sealed off from each other, in which questions about the functions and structure of the family are serially considered; in fact, challenges to patriarchy and other issues continue to be debated throughout the period, and probably throughout modern history. But there is a progression of specific issues under consideration as the century proceeds, and there is increasing hostility toward, or at least skepticism about, the claim that the family represents an orderly society and such allied propositions. And, clearly, there is a set of progressive structural modifications of the modes of fictional expression, and of the structure of the novel. However, in dealing with ideologies, there are no pure manifestations. For example, patriarchal rule was promoted as a foundational ideal. To assert that there was a period in which fathers could exercise and enjoy absolute power over family members would make a convenient point from which to proceed; from that base point we could graph a pattern of decline, offer arguments of causal relationships, and even offer moral commentary or instruction on how to restore benevolent authority and harmonious relationships. However, the evidence regarding the relationships of fathers to families indicates there was no such period of consensus or absolute rule; and certainly within as short a period as the last two hundred years one could not find substantial changes in relationships between parents and children. Fathers were not routinely granted unqualified submission by their children; their judgments were not acceded to without protest; and the wisdom, or at least the practicality, of their judgments on critical questions was not exempt from dispute. Even in the choice of marital partners for children, their decisions were not received as absolute, or at least they were received no more frequently then than they are at the present time. In investigating the effects of ideological discourse on the formation of the novel, I do not include concepts of matriarchy as they develop during this period for several reasons. This important and complex subject has already received extensive critical examination, instigated by the challenging arguments offered by such scholars as Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, whose arguments provide a fundamental claim made in this work: that discourse on changing ideologies determines literary expression.50 However, equally compelling in

28


determining the structure of my work is the claim that the perception that the family was declining in status was formulated primarily in terms of threats to the patriarch. Finally, during the century under consideration, that discourse took the form of increasing resistance to paternal rule, even when maternal rule was being lauded, leading to shifts of narrative concentration on surrogate fathers, fraternal relations, and eventually to a near rejection of the rule of the father. In the narratives under study, the matriarchal figures are subject to critical scrutiny, but as ancillaries, supporters of the patriarchal rule. While it is true that this enables the daughter to advance into greater power, a pattern that is seen in Dombey and Son, for instance, the formal design of the narrative nevertheless indicates a prime concentration on the fate of the patriarch. Symptomatic of the deterioration of a coherent positive ideology of the family over the course of the nineteenth century is the strain evident in conclusions of the narratives: the difficulty of achieving satisfactory closure. From narratives that end with the reunification and augmentation of a family—the most positive assertion of its value—subsequent novels treated in this study resort to tactics of killing off problematic characters or leaving in question the outcome of the family and, eventually, abandoning the family altogether. But throughout these narratives, each of which takes up the contested issue of whether a family—by extension the family as an institution—can survive, is the tendency to dialectical order, resulting in equitable presentation of opposing views by means of plot or by manipulation of narrative devices.

“A Little Republic”: The Vicar of Wakefield To establish a starting point in a continuing process of dialogical inquiry, Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) serves well as an exemplar of the novel as it will develop over the following century.51 Like such models as Don Quixote, it plays a predictable narrative line, stock characters, and insistent moralizing against a set of discordant elements: plot reversals, coincidence, and untenable narrative claims. But inherent in the narrative is subscription to two powerful ideological claims: that the family must be preserved as the very model of social organization, and that parental authority is benevolent in its intention. The plot is set in action by a threat to family coherence that can be concluded only by one of two ultimate developments: the severing of family ties or the reunion of the family unit. The importance of protecting the family is never questioned, nor is the

INTRODUCTION

29

intention of Dr. Primrose in seeking what is best for this children and spouse. Faulty as his parental judgment is proven to be, he gains the sympathy of the reader by the sincerity of his intentions. The trials he faces are directed at his survival less as an individual than specifically as paterfamilias. The structure of the plot is determined by challenges to his role, involving a voyage out of and back into the larger society, during which the cohesion of the family is tested.52 Consistent with the moralistic content of the narrative, the plot is simplified, reduced to that of an exemplar. By removing the Primrose group from Wakefield to a secluded village, it may be anatomized as a model family, just as one isolates a specimen in a scientific experiment. Once the family is settled in its retreat, the father hopes to establish an ideally ordered society, one governed by the virtues of industry and piety. But despite his attempts to maintain a “little republic,” the family is infected by the materialistic values of polite society once the eldest daughters are courted by noblemen and lured away from their protected haven. And the unfolding plot then traces the ways in which such alien forces are resisted, progressing ultimately to the reunion and even reinforcement of the family. The focus in this family narrative is the father, an observation that may seem tautological until the subsequent historical development of this narrative form is outlined, revealing a shift of central concern from the patriarch to his offspring. This is a critically important movement, for the changes in the ideology of the family are not confined to the domestic world, in that it represents larger social and political units. And changes in the family are essentially changes in views of patriarchy or social, religious and political rule. As Kate Millett wisely claims, “Patriarchy’s chief institution is the family. It is both a mirror of and a connection with the larger whole.”53 Primrose’s patriarchal authority is never presented as absolute or even entirely benevolent. For all his assumptions about directing the lives of his children and eschewing vanity and pretense, Primrose is, for the most part, ignored by his children, even during the family’s steady decline. His wife and daughters insist on dressing themselves above their humble station and indulge in social pretensions, such as taking a carriage to church, over the patriarch’s objections. He does not even claim a superior moral position to them, for his admonitions are so often simplistic and even hypocritical that the reader must interpret them with irony. The narrative structure is simple, consisting of two movements of equal length: the first recording the declining fortunes of the Primrose family, and the second describing Dr. Primrose’s journey aimed at

30


reuniting it. The nadir of the family’s decline occurs half way through the narrative, when Olivia is seduced away from her family. To elaborate upon the societal implications, the text offers, at the very low point of the narrative, an ironic tableau vivante in the family portrait. Not only is this painting too large to be brought into their household, a manifestation of its inflated and even comic dimension, but it depicts them as unified, whereas by this point they have drifted apart, becoming a set of quite differentiated, almost unrelated figures, each pretentious and each out of harmony with the others. Furthermore, an alien figure is unaccountably included in the painting of the closed family unit: the Squire. Portrayed as Alexander the Great in the painting, he thus invites interpretation as a hero, although he turns out to be more likely an invader. In fact, the narrative will reveal him as the very embodiment of foreign and destructive values, the man who turns out to be the seducer of the eldest Primrose daughter. What corrupts the Primrose family in this record of declining fortune? Responsibility rests with the patriarch. Having chosen for his family separation from society, he now is exposed as uninformed and misguided, with the result that his precious family, his legal and moral responsibility, becomes internally fragmented. The family’s separation from society has removed it from the social communal challenges that militate against pretense, and the patriarch’s rule has been relinquished to the alien values of wealth and status. In the second half of the novel, the voyage of Dr. Primrose to rescue his daughter and reunite his family reverses that pattern of decline. Responding to his wife’s expressions of dismay on learning of their daughter’s elopement, the Vicar proclaims a noble aspiration of familial devotion: “Ever shall this house and this heart be open to a poor returning repentant sinner.” His statement introduces a rich narrative motif, one that is to appear often in subsequent family novels: the parable of the prodigal son. It is plot replete with religious overtones and employed as a model of ethical behavior within a family. Thus the Vicar’s plan is associated with a holy quest, and even becomes an archetypal pilgrimage as he goes off, armed with Bible and staff. Like most such heroic voyages, it is a circular one, leading back to home; but this voyage home has acquired elevated associations. The Vicar exemplifies responsible patriarchy by reuniting his family in terms of the family’s internal operations rather than merely seeking its social advancement. When he is confined to a debtors’ prison, he secures the reunification of his family and, paradoxically, brings it back from isolation by engaging it in benevolent care for others.

INTRODUCTION

31

Considering Goldsmith’s earlier objections to the new and increasingly popular form of prose fiction as being trivial and even immoral, it might seem surprising that he took the form of the novel for this discourse. A few years before writing this, his only novel, he admonished his brother to avoid such works: Above all things let him never touch a romance, or novel, those paint beauty in colours more charming than nature, and describe happiness that man never tastes. How delusive, how destructive therefore are those pictures of consummate bliss, they teach the youthful mind to sigh after beauty and happiness which never existed, to despise the little good which fortune has mixed in our cup, by expecting more 54 than she ever gave.

But this avoids the idyllic and instead exposes unwarranted claims of perfect contentment in family life through adept undercutting. Scenes of heightened emotion or inflated sentiment are treated ironically, and hypocrisy and social posturing are repeated targets of satire. Much of this exposé is conveyed through the employment of a narrative voice, that of Dr. Primrose, which is itself pretentious and ponderous, so much so that the entire text may be read as primarily satiric.55 His optimistic claims are repeatedly undercut, so that what he posits as truth or plausibility is often at variance with what the reader concludes. At a critical point, for instance, when the narrator proclaims his “unutterable happiness,” he finds his home burning to the ground (125). Such sudden narrative turns undercut the implied lines of causality as well as the articulated claims of the narrator. The symmetry of the narrative resembles that of the classic literary confession, in which the fall from grace leads to a climax of spiritual discovery. In a contrary sense this parallel form is a triumph of perception, as the u-shaped narrative pattern is transformed into a chiastic structure of interlinking symmetrical arcs. The ironic implications of incidents in the first half are thus accounted for by the subtext of emerging awareness, on the part of the reader, of the unreliability of the verbal account. By the second half of the narrative, then, plot becomes more arbitrary, providing only the requisite degree of plausibility, while providing for extended exploration of thematic issues. In the end the symmetrical design is emphasized as the divided family is reunited and the errant father is restored to his proper station, but the familial roles in the restored unit have been substantially redefined.

32


The novel’s very first sentence—“I was ever of the opinion, that the honest man who married and brought up a large family, did more service than he who continued single, and only talked of population”—might seem to offer an appealing theme to be illustrated by the following account of Dr. Primrose’s experiences. But in the context of the entire narrative, and assuming that process of rereading and reconsideration upon which criticism must be based, this opening claim is so ironic as to provoke dialogical readings. The doctor’s confident, even boastful claim (“I was ever of the opinion”) invites resistance, as does the imposed contrast between action and talking about action in the last phrase. This reaction to the very first statement is justified, for the text proceeds to pile up dubious claims of veracity by the Vicar in the opening chapters to the extent that he can be regarded only ironically. He talks a great deal about matrimony and takes pride in his pamphlets on the Shistonian controversy, but in abstract terms. His intense conviction that clergymen should not be allowed to remarry would have seemed academic even to his first readers, and his manner of disquisition makes him look pedantic and ineffectual.56 Even more indicative of the transparency of his literalness is the epitaph he has composed for his wife and has framed and hung over the fireplace; he claims it “admonished my wife of her duty to me, and my fidelity to her; it inspired her with a passion for fame, and constantly put her in mind of her end” (41). But only one anxious about the strength of marital bonds would rely so on the assurance offered by verbal formulations. The text subverts itself so that the act of articulation, especially of a patriarchal sort, becomes suspect. Appropriately, the moral arbitration is left to a character who has kept silent and disguised: Sir William Thornhill. His intervention points to those qualities that have been lacking in Dr. Primrose, what Hume called the private virtues, such as prudence and industry. He does not advocate the kind of disregard for cash that Primrose earlier had, but dispenses funds to the worthy and the unworthy, and restores order. The final confrontation between him and his villainous nephew revolves around critical verbal distinctions, the nephew citing the letter of the law set down by his uncle as his defense, and ultimately claiming that the written nuptial agreement would remain binding. But the conclusion is unambiguous: actions count more than words, and material concerns are far from irrelevant. John P. Zomchick cites this novel as signaling the emergence of the “juridical subject,” which “owes its coherence to a system of legal beliefs, principles, and practices, which attain frequent and clear visibility both in the society and the narrative of eighteenth century

INTRODUCTION

33

England.” In his analysis Thornhill becomes the fiction’s supreme magistrate, and a corrective alternative to the title character. “Even though the paterfamilias Primrose has settled notions about proper domestic management, he cannot enact those notions in his own family without transgressing the text’s sentimental presuppositions and destroying the harmonious domestic idyll that the narrative struggles to maintain.”57 But Zomchick regards this maneuver as unsuccessful, for the imposition of Thornhill’s transcendent natural law does not adequately reconcile the polarities of attitudes toward authority that have been disclosed by the text. Zomchick’s impressive analysis of this novel, based largely on Peter Brooks’ theories of narrative as stimulated by desire, lead him to conclude that the impulse is not here satisfied. But read as a text evoking dialogical inquiry into ideologies, particularly on that set of issues involving the family, the final presentation of an outside juridical statement simply offers the broadest and most objective context in which to interpret the narrative of one family’s efforts to accommodate to the ways of the world. The narrative offers contending arguments concerning the responsibilities of the patriarch, particularly on questions about the degree of separation from materialistic society that the family should seek, the limitations of parental rule, and the fragility of fraternal bonds. But each of these issues is, by the dramatic nature of the presentation, subjected to inquiry and challenge. Even the pronouncements of the patriarch are not privileged, but made so dubious as to invite resistance by the reader. And yet the narrative progresses toward resolution so that patriarch and the family are reunited and reformed. What seems at first reading to be a straightforward tale of one family’s trial and reunion, centering on the benevolent rule of a Christian patriarch, emerges upon critical examination as a complex discourse on discrepancies between announced principles and human behavior, between intention and action, even between articulation and reality. Such dialogical content is found also in novels by Samuel Richardson and Daniel Defoe, but Goldsmith’s achievement is the more impressive because of the subtlety of the discrepancies it exposes. The superficially simple aspects of the narrative—its symmetrical plot structure, its defined narrative voice, and the pattern of Christian pilgrimage—all coalesce into a balanced formulation that resembles an instructive parable, offering the security of a predictable plot line, defined roles for characters, and a strong conclusion. At the same time, the entire account is destabilized by the transparent inconsistencies of the narrator, the sudden reversals of event, and the reiteration

34


of discrepancies between what is professed and what is performed, so that a scrutiny of complex aspects of family ideology, particularly the claims of patriarchy, is evoked. Yet at the end, the novel reiterates the viability and even resilience of the family. Confronted by corrupting, materialistic forces, and weakened by waning patriarchal rule, the Primrose family succeeds in reintegrating itself, so that it is stronger in the end. Thus the novel serves as a model both familial and familiar for subsequent narratives.

CHAPTER 1

P ROTECTING THE FAMILY : M ANSFIELD PARK AND L ODORE

O

nly a few generations after the appearance of Goldsmith’s novel, the disruption of the French Revolution and the intellectual challenges of German philosophy brought about widespread interrogation of patriarchy and the permanence of the family. A fear that English society was being destabilized by the developing factory system and by urbanization was already widespread in the late eighteenth century, but when Austen began drafting Mansfield Park, fundamental political and social institutions appeared to be under attack, so that discourse concerning patriarchy, internal family relations, and the socializing functions of that unit were intensified. The French Revolution, the public spectacle of marital infidelity in the English royal family, and the political instability of European neighbors made patriarchal/civil rule at home seem vulnerable: if the monarch could be deposed for violating a basic social contract, so too could the parent. The valorization of “fraternity” in revolutionary France promoted a model of brotherly and sisterly love, but in time the blood shed in the name of such brotherhood provoked intensive discourse on the legitimacy of such claims.1 Preserving the political order was frequently expressed in terms of defending or strengthening the family. In the public debates and publications in defense of the 1800 Act of

36


Union, Westminster’s determination to quell the power of the independent and potentially unmanageable parliament in Dublin was disguised as an effort to create a new harmonious family under the form of Great Britain. In the quintessential domestic literary genre, the novel, the terms of that discourse are not only evident, but also formative of its continuously developing form. As Margaret Doody has clearly proven, the novel did not originate as recently as the eighteenth century, but derives from classic Roman and even earlier narrative forms.2 Nevertheless, certain previous claims need not be dismissed: the rapid development of the form during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reflected intensifying changes in social discourse concerning courtship and marriage, particularly for women.3 In particular, hypergamy, marriage above one’s status, became a conventional subject of the novel.4 Implicit in the typical courtship plot is the conflict between parties who seek advancement through marrying outside the family’s class or even lineage, and those determined to strengthen class and family ties by restricting courtship to within the lineage or class. In the standard narrative pattern, marriageable offspring who become parties to alliances outside the family and even class are confronted by resistance and impediments from parents who seek the security of common class and familial ties. But the narrative thrust is to elicit the reader’s sympathy for the former, and thus to endorse such external relationships. The implications of such narrative strategies as manifestations of preserving class structures, or national identities, are substantial, for the defensive response bespeaks an assumption that class and national distinctions are vulnerable, even under threat. Within their very endorsement of the forces of change and their accommodation of outside influences, novelists such as Fielding and Goldsmith reflect a pre-Revolutionary confidence in heterogenization. The extension of that trend into incorporation of cognate family members, what Tony Tanner terms “familialization,” becomes a dominating ideological concern of the novel in the succeeding century.

“The Daughter That He Wanted”: Patriarchy, Endogamy, and Family Survival in Mansfield Park Jane Austen is the quintessential novelist of the family. “Three or four families in a country village” she prescribed to her niece as the ideal subject for fiction, and her novels rarely extend beyond that limited scope. Eudora Welty, in a sense her heir as an analyst of family ideologies, put

PROTECTING THE FAMILY

37

it succinctly: in Austen’s novels, “the unit of everything worth knowing is the family. . . . Family relationships are the natural basis of every other relationship and the source of understanding all the others.”5 Distinctive as is her treatment of such issues, it is neither sentimental nor uncritical; in fact, in examining family concerns she directs attention at the very aspects of family ideology that dominated English critical discourse, social and political, in the first decades of the nineteenth century: the continuing interrogation of the limits of patriarchy; increasing valorization of sibling relationships, and an intensified questioning of the extent to which courtship decisions should be influenced by patriarchy and financial concerns. Although her narrative treatment of such issues is often comic, at the core of her consideration is a serious recognition of the importance of wealth and power, which make her novels such rich sources of evidence for critics reading her texts in terms of cultural history. In treating courtship, for instance, the texts acknowledge, while not prioritizing, the practical issues of social position and property. As W. A. Craik and others have pointed out, in the early phases of industrialization, choosing a marital partner was, even more than in later periods, a matter of critical, practical concern: Marriage is a social contract, and so entails social obligations. In an age where there are no social services, no insurance schemes, no national medical care, no pension schemes for sickness or old age; where large families are the norm, and where divorce is virtually out of the question, a man who marries commits himself to heavy responsibilities, and the woman who marries stakes the rest of her life on his performance of them. An adequate income is not merely desirable, it is vital. Hence a very reasonable concern on everyone’s part with the 6 assets of a possible suitor, and the fortune of a possible wife.

In her six novels, concern for preserving family estates, for maintaining some degree of patriarchal rule, and for avoiding familial discord echo the discourse about politics and social order. Considered as a unit, the series of novels constitute less a representation than a dissection: an extended dialogical exercise exploring ideologies through narratives designed to present two or more responses to claims, culminating in and concluding in syntheses that, while modifying specific aspects, reiterate the endorsement of the importance of the prime social unit, the family. Within the corpus of Austen’s novels, Mansfield Park (1814) offers the most overt and thorough examination of family relations. Its

38


patriarchal figure is subjected to critical scrutiny beyond that directed at the other fictional parents. It is the most substantial of her works in its ideological content, for it offers the most thorough analysis of family relationships, depicted not only as manners, but in the light of a perceived imminent threat to the institution of the family. Here, more than in any of her other novels, the family is depicted as so fragile, vulnerable, and under threat of annihilation that attempting to preserve it will call for the most extreme forms of defense. Furthermore, while family concerns dominate all of Austen’s works, this text provides the clearest model to show how such ideological discourse determines the very form of the novel. Marilyn Butler’s description of Mansfield Park as “the most visibly ideological” of Austen’s works is apt, but the term need careful qualification, for the text is not didactic, and certainly not dogmatic.7 In this text, as in many other novels of the early nineteenth century, the family is regarded as nearly sacrosanct, a model of order and place of moral instruction. As it did with the church or the state, the ideological debate of the time focuses upon perceptions of the family’s status, particularly whether its centrality can be sustained, and whether its functions will be modified as a result of the new industrial system and the revolutionary spirit imported from the continent. The questions in this period are not whether there need be a parent, king, or bishop, but rather what limitations of patriarchal rule must be considered; not whether harmonious relations among siblings, citizens, or church members are to be fostered, but how they can be reconciled to a system of industrial competition; and not whether the family, state or church will survive, but how either central or marginal its position will be within the larger, modernized society. In treating such ideological issues such as defining the limits of patriarchal rule, certain novels explore contending arguments, usually in dramatic form, in such thoroughness that the very form of the literary work is determined by the attempt to resolve conflicting positions. To the extent that they can be so resolved, the narrative may be closed with assurance. As the ideological discourse becomes more extreme, when fundamental issues of the need for patriarchal rule, the possibility of harmonious relationships within families, and the effectiveness of the family as an agent of socialization of the young are challenged, the possibility of reaching a resolution that reaffirms the traditional bourgeois family and the potential for satisfactory narrative closure become less likely. As a representation of ideological discourse of the first decades of the century, Mansfield Park assumes throughout the narrative that the


39

family is a model of benevolence and social order, but it is an institution perceived to be subject to dangerous corrupting influences, at least by its patriarch. Throughout the narrative, the actions of individual characters are analyzed primarily in the aspect of their roles in threatening or preserving a vulnerable family. Its narrative shape, where it begins and ends and what events are included in the account, is determined by the effects of sustaining family integrity following an action which was recognized as carrying considerable risks. But the plot line provokes ideological responses, enhanced by discourse contained within the narrative and leading to conclusions about the complex matter of the family’s relationship to the larger society, enabling the narrative to acquire strong closure. Its structure points to a dialogical subject equally reflective of the period’s ideology, and one that even determines the entire narrative structure: the question of the degree to which the bourgeois family can define itself as distinct from its extended members, and the degree of responsibility to those related members.8 The vehicle for exploring this issue focuses on a patriarch who is so concerned about the security and survival of his family that he resists any accommodation to change and in the process endangers the family he sought to protect. The main issue that drives the plot is the extent to which patriarchal authority should strive to close off the family as a defensive tactic, even to the extent of approving endogamy at a time when the family has become less self-sufficient. In this account of a representative patriarch, the estate represents the person and his authority, making the novel’s title point to a metonymy that pervades the text. But it places the main female character in a subsidiary position, not only in the plot line, but in terms of the ideological issues treated in the narrative. Although the moral judgments of Fanny Price are subject to narrative scrutiny, they are considered only in terms of her relationship to the Bertram family, identified as its patriarch Sir Thomas Bertram and by the household. As a niece, Fanny represents a contended class of challenging the validity of the precise boundaries of the family. Fanny, a cognate member of the family, has a claim to membership, similar to that already claimed, to an extreme extent, by her aunt, Mrs. Norris. But that very similarity points to the hazardous nature of defining the family broadly rather than narrowly, by incorporating cognate members into it. Ultimately, Fanny becomes part of the family, more because the patriarch recognizes that the family depends on her participation than because she marries into it. That she becomes Edmund’s sister, in a metaphoric sense, is more important than that she becomes his wife— in terms of the narrative of this patriarch’s experiences.

40


The narrative, then, records a causally related series of events establishing the boundaries of the family, progressing to a conclusion that redefines that unit. The ideological issues raised by the account are matters of particular concern at the time, and the alternatives Sir Thomas considers are raised to a level of active discourse for the reader as well. Alternative responses are presented in such a manner as to provoke genuine discourse, making vivid the puzzles posed by several incidents in the narrative—the extreme reaction against the production of an amateur theatrical, Fanny’s unhappy return to the family of her birth, and curious disdain for the improvement of Sotherton. Sir Thomas’s concern about the hazards of outside influences leads him to attempt to seclude his family and resist any modification of the household. Although his possessiveness and fear exceed normal behavior, the issues regarding the protection of his family that Sir Thomas faces are presented in the text as truly debatable by the reader, for whom Fanny serves as an agent through whom possible reactions can be comparatively considered. While the narrative concludes with a restoration of family order that implies that certain of his responses were justified and others harmful, it is the dramatization of those responses that elicits ideological discourse. The opening chapter specifies three issues regarding family functions that the ensuing narrative proceeds to explore. First to be mentioned are sibling relationships. The three Ward sisters are introduced, with special attention to Maria, who “had the good luck to captivate” a much more prosperous husband, Sir Thomas Bertram. Subsequently, but through that marital connection, one of the remaining sisters was able to make a match, albeit with a clergyman friend of Sir Thomas, with the result that their living is dependent on him. The last sister, Frances, married “to disoblige her family,” an ambiguous phrase, but one that suggests severing obligations and family ties. Marrying a Lieutenant of the Marines, “without education, fortune or connections” is presented as an act of violation of both parental rule and prevailing social practice. For her defiance, and because of a letter that insulted Sir Thomas, Fanny’s mother has been, for years, cut off from her sisters. Even in these brief, introductory references to the marital arrangements of the Ward sisters boundaries of sibling ties are obliquely interrogated: marrying outside the approved circle of class and fortune is disapproved, while the mutual benefits of extended familial relationships are lauded. But defining the appropriate degree of participation among married siblings is not brought to a conclusion, as it continues to be a subject of discourse. Even though all three


41

of the Ward sisters are married, and so have contending family relationships and responsibilities, their sibling bonds are regarded as privileged. But from the start, maintaining bonds among married sisters strain and very nearly break the sibling relationship they purport to honor. Mrs. Price, clearly intrudes into the workings of the Bertram family, and is ultimately punished by exclusion for doing so. The position of Fanny, the daughter of the least prosperous of these sisters, is clouded. The alienation of one sister from the others is a matter to be regretted, for mutual affections and responsibilities among siblings are valorized; but the response of each may be justified by their roles both in their natal families and in terms of those family roles they have assumed through marriage. In recounting this initial family rift, a fundamental question under ideological consideration has been specified: what are the bounds of sibling relationships, before and after such fraternal members marry? As the narrative proceeds, that question is made more urgent in the light of perceived threats to the institution of the family from outside forces, particularly those associated with the secular values of the emerging bourgeois society. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the bourgeois family in England regarded itself as both a model of integrity and an increasingly vulnerable institution. Responsibility for extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins became less compelling as the family focused on developing its own defenses against perceived corrupting influences of society. Statistical evidence proves that families in England had for centuries already separated themselves to a great extent from such extended relationships, establishing private living quarters for single nuclear families and possibly incorporating accommodations within the household or servants. In the predominately rural society of previous centuries, in which mobility away from one’s place of birth was uncommon, ties among relations could be maintained, but as the industrial revolution progressed, and families migrated to industrial centers, such ties became tenuous. In such a period of social change, the ideological value of what is lost or threatened is likely to be magnified. Furthermore, concern for extended relatives played into the increased consciousness of class status, in which claims of membership in a well-connected family were sought. The result of such ideological elevations of extended family relationships fostered the same attitude; a desire for exclusivity, leading the bourgeois family to emphasize the need to maintain its position and protect its boundaries. From Sir Thomas’s initiating action of bringing his niece into his home, the entire set of narrative consequences, and the subsequent

42


ideological discourse proceeds. The effect of this action on sibling relationships is the first aspect considered, as Fanny is only slowly and reluctantly received into the family. In facilitating this, or in complicating it, Sir Thomas plays the determining role, for he is legitimately concerned for his own offspring and fears the effect of bringing any outside party into the household. Later in the narrative, as Fanny earns a more secure place in the family, she is regarded by him as a threat to his own authority, particularly when he attempts to force her to marry against her will. The Bertram family perceives itself as being under threat from economic and financial realities, an interpretive assumption that must be stated at the start. In the opening sentence of the novel, we hear that Miss Maria Ward, with “only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet’s lady, with all the comforts and consequences of a handsome house and large outcome.”9 While this initial thrust might seem to promise a narrative that mocks such considerations, financial security is ultimately acknowledged as a legitimate value, and the development of the plot reflects the coherent and quite serious recognition of domestic economy of the period, in particular, the tenuous stability of the bourgeois family in a changing economy. As the impingement of financial pressures becomes more evident, such as when Sir Thomas must leave his home to tend to problems on his plantation in Antigua, and when the disposition of Edmund’s clerical appointment must be decided, the urgency of protecting family and the importance of material security mounts. As Maaja Stewart has established, Austen’s novels expose the ideological inconsistencies of both the “estate economy” and the emerging mercantile system in their apparent valorization of patriarchal authority. The texts are, she points out, heterogeneous, offering contending responses to such claims, and the domestic space of the family becomes not an idyllic alternative to the commercial world, but a “focus of resistance.”10 But in agreeing to bring Fanny into his family, Sir Thomas subjects them to a considerable degree of risk, for any outside influence, even from a cousin, may weaken family bonds or corrupt its youngest members. The concern for protecting the family against corruption by the introduction of new members appears often in narratives of the period. In Wuthering Heights Mr. Earnshaw brings the child Heathcliff into his family, a child coming from a lower class and an urban setting. As a result, relations among family members are


43

strained, even destroyed, and the family is ultimately destroyed by his participation. However, another disturbing threat is voiced in this narrative when Heathcliff falls in love with Catherine, whom he calls his sister, thus in some sense violating the taboo against marriage among consanguineous relatives. The incest theme is recurrent, so much so that it may be fundamental to the whole enterprise of narrating. Deleuze and Guattari argue that the repression of sexual impulses within the family is the source of mythical discourse and even the element on which family relationships are built.11 In the English nineteenth century the ideological elevation of brother-sister relationships seems to have led to a concern about the latent erotic elements, evident, for instance in the 1830s political discourse over legislation allowing marriage to a deceased wife’s sister.12 Relationships between more distant members of a family line were also common subjects of discourse, although marriage between cousins had been legalized for more than a century.13 Scarcely articulated in the narrative presentation of Sir Thomas’s consideration of whether or not to bring Fanny into his household is the even more threatening issue of the risk of violating the taboo against marriage among cousins: He thought of his own four children—of his two sons—of cousins in love, etc.;—but no sooner had he deliberately begun to state his objections, than Mrs. Norris interrupted him with a reply to them all whether stated or not. (6)

The disjointed syntax indicates the volatility of the possibility of intermarriage, but it also indicates the priority he affords to his own children. Proper as such paternal concern for his own offspring may be, his inordinate preference for his own offspring ultimately are revealed as blinding him to their faults; such an attempt to seclude his children from outside influences runs the substantial risk of depriving them and the entire family of the stimulation and challenges of the larger social forces. Mrs. Norris does address his scarcely articulated concern about the taboo, and attempts to deny its validity: You are thinking of your sons—but do you not know that of all things upon earth that is the least likely to happen; brought up, as they would be, always together like brothers and sisters? It is morally impossible. I never knew an instance of it. It is, in fact, the only sure way of providing against the connection. Suppose her a pretty girl,

44

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL and seen by Tom or Edmund for the first time seven years hence, and I dare say there would be mischief. The very idea of her having been suffered to grow up at a distance from us all in poverty and neglect would be enough to make either of the dear sweet-tempered boys in love with her. But breed her up with them from this time, and suppose her even to have the beauty of an angel, and she will never be more to either than a sister. (6–7)

Marriage between cousins might come too close to violating the implied, but not actual, taboo against sexual relations within the immediate family; nevertheless it lingers as a tantalizing possibility in this text and elsewhere in this period.14 A full discussion of the matter is not provided, indicating that Sir Thomas’s anxiety about the possibility is so strong that he could not comfortably articulate it. Nevertheless, even in hinting at such intermarriage, the issue of whether or not to confine the family is raised. As a protective measure, marrying within the tribe offers protection from unknown and possibly malign influences and harbors material resources. In contrast is the common practice of hypergamous matches, with obvious attractions as well.15 Ultimately, he comes around to accepting a match based on filial relations, a kind of endogamous if not incestuous union, but one that assures the survival of the family line. In the above comment by Mrs. Norris, and in Sir Thomas’s clumsy and constrained articulation of concern that follows, there is revealed another ideological concern of the narrative: the view of romantic love as dangerous: his children could violate a practical social practice because they succumbed to a force that defies rationality. Sir Thomas’s fear proves prescient in this instance as well, for one of his daughters in time does abandon her respectable husband for a man with whom she has fallen in love. His anxieties about the vulnerability of the family lead him to regard any potential romantic alliances outside the family as irrational, another manifestation of his attraction to narrowly confining the family ties—to a form of endogamy. From the start, Mrs. Norris represents the hazards of recognizing extended family alliances. In attempting to influence family decisions, such as bringing Fanny to Mansfield Park, she is portrayed as being selfish and interfering, another plot line that interrogates the ideological insistence on strict family boundaries. In submitting to the urgings of Mrs. Norris in agreeing to bring Fanny Price to Mansfield Park, Sir Thomas further qualifies the definition of family membership. He regards her as less than a full family


45

member, but stipulates that if Fanny should prove to have a “really bad” disposition, she might send her back. But in what seems a reasonable concern for his offspring, Sir Thomas hits strikingly discordant notes, as he attempts to exclude the new member from full acceptance. He emphasizes the need to make a clear distinction between his daughters and Fanny, a pronouncement recorded in such a way that the italicized words invite an ironic reading: There will be some difficulty in our way . . . as to the distinction proper to be made between the girls as they grow up; how to preserve in the minds of my daughters the consciousness of what they are, without making them think too lowly of their cousin; and how, without depressing her spirits too far, to make her remember that she is not a Miss Bertram. I should wish to see them very good friends, and would, on no account, authorize in my girls the smallest degree of arrogance towards their relation; but still they cannot be equals. Their rank, fortune, rights, and expectations, will always be different. It is a point of great delicacy, and you must assist us in our endeavours to choose exactly the right line of conduct. (10–11)

As patriarch of the family, Sir Thomas, more than Fanny Price, is the main subject of interrogation and scrutiny throughout the narrative. While his virtues are recognized—generosity, moral probity, and fidelity to his paternal responsibilities—the narrative is more concerned with his limitations and even faults, so that the text may be read as an account of the reform of Sir Thomas. He is a familiar type: the rigid paterfamilias figure earlier seen in Defoe’s conduct books, and a stock character in Elizabethan drama. But in the imperiled social milieu he seeks to seclude them from normal contact with peers. While Sir Thomas seeks to support and benefit his children, he pursue financial security for them through advantageous marriage matches. Like the comic figures of stock comedy, he reacts excessively to perceived challenges to his rule and goes so far as to attempt to coerce his niece into a loveless marriage. Accordingly, events merit narration, analysis, or omission according to their ability to reveal aspects of Sir Thomas’s paternal inadequacy, his excessive responses to challenges to his rule, and ultimately his reformation and continuation of the family line in the new unit formed by Edmund and Fanny. In such a reading of the text, the marginalization of Lady Bertram is understandable, for she never functions effectively as matriarch of her family, being concerned only for her own comfort.

46


She is so incapable of fulfilling her maternal responsibilities that she has no potent role in a narrative that explores familial responsibilities. Likewise, the Bertram sisters receive narrative attention only as they respond to the incursion of Fanny into their family unit, and as they perform as dutiful or undutiful daughters. The elder son appears only in a peripheral role, while the younger son, Edmund, offers an alternative of filial responsibility, balancing his acknowledgement of duties to his father with his genuine love of Fanny. Mrs. Norris, whose machinations are so extreme as to distract attention—like a stock villain—is afforded a more prominent role, when she challenges Sir Thomas. Fanny’s role is determined solely on her position as an adopted daughter, progressing toward full membership despite aggressive forces of exclusion, to becoming at the end the agent that reforms and protects the family—but most importantly as the instrument through which the reform of Sir Thomas is achieved. Because the estate is identified with Sir Thomas, his redemption is that of the house and its holdings; but the estate serves as a metaphor for the Bertram lineage and for the nation as well. This reading posits Austen’s novel as resembling Wuthering Heights in its metonymic implications and in the acuity of its ideological discourse. Submerged in the text are references to the classic folk motif of the prodigal son, which frequently appears in family novels. In this text, as in the parable, it is the judgment of the father that is most extensively interrogated. Superficially, the contrast between the principled Edmund and his less responsible elder brother who squanders the family’s fortune suggest a parallel, but that proves a dead end, for Tom Bertram is not resented by his brother. The prodigal member turns out to be Fanny, whose refusal to marry according to Sir Thomas’s wishes results in her separation, but who returns at the end to restore family harmony. In the parable and in the novel, the protected resources of the family are what are at issue in both plots, and the resentments among siblings eventually are settled by the advancement of the one what had been separated. Most important, it is the patriarch’s judgment that is at issue in both narratives, which interrogate the soundness of his decisions in responding to his offspring. Just as the parable leads to moral consideration of the wisdom of the father in bringing his son back into the fold, the novel directs prime attention at the efforts of Sir Thomas in including or excluding affiliate members. The narrative is, then, an interrogation of patriarchal authority, presented dialectically, in which more than one plausible response may be considered, leading to a synthesis that concludes the discourse.


47

Dealing as it does with contentious issues—the changed role of the patriarch in a social setting that allows an increased degree of authority to women and in a world in which the closed order of the family was perceived as being under threat by an economic system that made it dependent on individuals outside the household—this novel depicts the challenges faced by the family as so formidable that a vast and effective defense would be difficult to devise. Thus, the responses of Sir Thomas at critical points defy simple concurrence or rejection, as do those of Fanny Price. Nevertheless, it invites the reader’s critical engagement by presenting dialectically opposed arguments and contending pieces of evidence, in the form of dramatized scenes, that elicit a recognition of the magnitude and complexity of the social threats to Mansfield Park. The dialogical form of the narrative is determined by the rhetorical argument, leading to a concluding claim, albeit one that may be disputed, but only in terms of the evidence provided. If Sir Thomas is the patriarch whose authority and judgment are under interrogation, Fanny represents the challenging agent who offers broader, more inclusive discourse. Her birth family was not ruled by a patriarch intent on securing his power; it was held only loosely together by a pair of irresponsible parents, with the result that the children have sought support among themselves. When she is first brought to Mansfield Park, Fanny bemoans her separation from her brothers and sisters in Portsmouth, not her errant parents. Edmund, who generally represents the soundest ethical judgment, offers Fanny similar fraternal ties within the Bertram family, saying she is among “relations and friends, who all love you and wish to make you happy” (15). This is an overstatement, for at this time most of the Bertrams are indifferent to her; but he intends it as an invitation to join the family. When he asks Fanny to talk about her brothers and sisters in Portsmouth, she is revivified, expressing herself with ease and confidence, especially in praising her elder brother, William. The importance of this conversation is striking, as bits of dialogue are interspersed with longer passages of paraphrase, as if to call attention to, or verify, the importance of intensified affection among siblings; and the punctuation is unusual, as the words quoted are both set off and paraphrased, and yet the diction approximates that of the uneducated: “William did not like she should come away—he had told her he should miss her very much indeed” (16). In easing Fanny’s entrance into the Bertram family, Edmund becomes a brother to her, the first of the family to establish such a relationship to her, and the one who continually acknowledges her individuality and worth. The

48


effect of amplifying sibling bonds over paternal ones is to put under scrutiny Sir Thomas’s tactics of emphasizing his own authority over communal family bonds. The novel’s division into three volumes is determined by three critical episodes in the history of a family, each one testing its coherence and considering, dialogically, an aspect of family ideology. In each of these main substructures, the consequences of some deviation from a standard aspect of ideology—sibling relationships, responsibility in the socialization of children, and the influence on the courtship decisions of those offspring—is dialectically treated and concluded with a synthesis of contending positions. The narrative, then, constitutes a dialogical presentation of conflicting arguments in dramatic form, leading to a revised ideological position. The text engages a response that endorses an ideology not only through the account but largely through the ironic tone of the text itself, which evokes ironic responses through the inclusion or omission of events, exaggeration and emphasis of certain aspects of character or action, and, most of all, through the very form of the narrative, the division into chapters and books, and the determination of the opening and closing episodes. The first two chapters serve as an overture, stating the dominant concern—the survival of the family—and presenting the characters and dramatic situation of bringing Fanny Price into the Bertram family, which thus provides the context in which subsequent issues of ideology will be placed. Initially the Bertram family faces a particular threat: increasing financial pressures related to Sir Thomas’s colonial holdings in Antigua. But due to the internal immobilization of its members, the family has reached a critical point. With the death of Mr. Norris, his wife has been brought into the household, compromising the financial plans of the family. More strain has resulted from the extravagance and irresponsibility of the eldest Bertram son, Tom. And, as the plot opens, there is the prospect of extending the realm of the family to accommodate Fanny Price, whose name connotes financial responsibilities. Mansfield Park—man’s field; the secular Eden; the human domain, and even the political state—is facing potential destruction, and the single figure endowed or authorized by tradition to defend it is the patriarch, on whom the narrative focuses. As the narrative action is about to begin, we are told that Fanny “was fixed at Mansfield Park, and learning to transfer in its favour much of her attachment to her former home, grew up there not unhappily among her cousins” (20). The experiment is formulated; she has begun to integrate herself emotionally into the family, and consequently is, if not happy, at least


49

satisfactorily accommodated. The narrated events that follow are not devised to record her advancing contentment or pleasure as much as the effect on the Bertram family of her increasingly intimate role. To signal the commencement of the plot, after the players have been introduced and the issues established, the third chapter opens with the announcement: “The first event of any importance in the family was the death of Mr. Norris” (19). At the start, membership in “the family” is not a matter of dispute. The Bertram parents, two daughters, and two sons constitute a unit intent on closing itself off from infectious outside influences. Fanny is only tangentially included, with articulated limitations on her membership. Moving years ahead, the narrative mentions that the seclusion of the family is sustained, and that Sir Thomas feels secure and contented in his achievements as patriarch; if he has some reason for concern over his eldest son’s extravagance, he is satisfied with the other three children: they “promised him nothing but good.” His daughters, he feels assured, will marry into “respectable alliances,” and Edmund will become a clergyman. The omission of Fanny from his record substantiates the impression that she is no more than a marginal family member. “Family” is defined solely as the core nuclear group, albeit with affiliations with related members for whom financial support may be due. This patriarch repeatedly voices his conviction that his family should be secluded from outside influences even after it has become evident that it is financially dependent, and far less than autonomous, due to Tom’s extravagance and “some recent losses on his West Indies Estate.” Sir Thomas leaves his home for an extended visit to Antigua for two reasons, both of which reveal his intention to protect his family: to deal with those financial issues in his colonial estate, and to detach his son Tom “from some bad connections at home.” His worry about the financial security of the family would have been well founded, for legal records indicate that in a time of expanding financial risks only few families kept their social positions for long.16 But absenting himself from his household provides an occasion for testing the strength of his patriarchal rule, an opportunity welcomed by his two daughters. The text carefully stipulates that it is not any single “gratification” they seek but a feeling of being “at their own disposal.” Their father, in their view, was “no object of love to them, he had never seemed the friend of their pleasures, and his absence was unhappily most welcome” (32). The daughters’ challenge is augmented by the inclusion into the household of alien influences, particularly the Crawfords. The younger

50


Bertram son, Edmund, uneasily attempts to carry out his father’s rule, and with no success. Against such glamorous influences, neither the sensible Edmund nor the intelligent but marginalized Fanny have much agency. The Crawfords are orphaned and already jaded to family sensibilities by life with their guardians, a doting but dissipated uncle and aunt. The apparent effect of such an upbringing on the young brother and sister is Henry’s uneasiness in residing in any place for long and Mary’s insensitivity to religious and social conventions. Almost as culpable is Sir Thomas’s concurrence to the proposal of marriage between his eldest daughter and Mr. Rushworth, accounted for solely by financial advantage. When Sir Thomas, in Antigua, receives word of their prospective union, he agrees immediately, specifically because the match would be “so unquestionably advantageous . . . a connection exactly of the right sort.” Later, when he recognizes that his daughter does not love her fiancé, he regrets his earlier compliance, but he again refers to the engagement as “advantageous”; as the narrative observes, “This was an alliance which he could not have relinquished without pain” (40, 200–201). With Mr. Rushton is associated the contemporary fashion for landscape architecture, the improvement of nature, which in this narrative of family is set in opposition to respect for lineage and continuity. He praises the work done on a neighboring estate in that he could not recognize the old place after the redesign and rearranging had been completed, and he intends to similarly transform his estate, Sotherton. The contemporary fashion of landscape architecture has been explored in detail, showing this novel’s participation in discourse on reforming nature.17 But in this narrative about family survival, what is at issue is a regard for continuity, for lineage, for maintaining a physical space and a social place over time: it is not only modifying elements of the landscape that Mr. Rushton and Mrs. Norris value but the assumption that such modifications must be undertaken continuously, that nothing be regarded as permanent merely because it has existed for generations. As Mrs. Norris exclaims, “If I had any thing within the fiftieth part of the size of Sotherton, I should be always planting and improving” (53). The folly of Sir Thomas and Mrs. Norris is self-evident, but reasoned opposition to such values is dramatically embodied in the responses of Fanny and Edmund, who express their disapproval of marriages of convenience and disregard for tradition in the design of landscapes as much as in social relations. Their roles are more than normative; they constitute antithetical, sometimes extreme positions.


51

The placing of characters in such antithetical positions parallels the dialectical nature of the narrative and facilitates critical reactions in the reader. Fanny’s disappointment with the remodeling of the chapel at Sotherton derives less from its secular features than from the violation to the past that it represents. Her objection to its “profusion of mahogany” is not an anachronistic error of the text; rather, it is a telling indication, like the reference to the crimson velvet cushions, that newly fashionable materials have replaced those of the past. It thus contradicts Mrs. Rushworth’s claim that the decorations go back to the time of James the Second. That the emphasis here is on the taste for continual change in redecorating is underlined by the endorsement of the character that consistently mocks tradition: Mary Crawford remarks, “Every generation has its improvements.” Fanny’s revulsion at abandoning daily prayers in the chapel does not derive from religious conviction; her words are decidedly secular: “There is something in a chapel and chaplain so much in character with a great house, with one’s ideas of what such a household should be!” (86). That Fanny’s counter-position is not simply normative, but dialectically positioned to serve as extreme opposition is confirmed by examining her position within the geographic confines of Sotherton. Fanny’s preference for the closed space of the chapel is contrasted to the determination to seek open spaces beyond the confinements of the estate that the others in the party choose. The walk through the grounds of Sotherton leads the young people to a locked gate and a ha-ha, beyond which the boldest proceed. For Henry Crawford and the two Crawford sisters such property boundaries are only annoying, and their transgression beyond the locked gate implies their willingness to escape the bonds of convention, including the betrothal of Maria to Mr. Rushworth. Paradoxically, as the designated possessor of the key to the gate, Mr. Rushworth comes to be affiliated with Fanny, as they are left behind when the others roam far away. This scene has been read as revealing Fanny’s, or even Austen’s, reactionary fear of change; but regarded within this novel it is essentially one of an intertwined series of extreme positions. In such positioning of regulation, boundaries, and custom against the pursuit of novelty and freedom, the planning of an amateur theatrical production acquires thematic import beyond merely that of an amusement. The dramatization of this event occupies a particularly detailed and concluding segment of the first of the three numbered parts of the novel, and it is scrutinized and debated primarily in terms of similar violations to custom and physical spaces. Placed within the

52


narrative as a climax to the first of its three movements, the announcement of plans to mount the theatrical serves as a defining event, charting the varied responses of Bertram family members, as well as a set of outsiders resident in the house, to family allegiances. From its initial suggestion by an outsider, John Yates, the proposal to put on Kotzebue’s play Lovers’ Vows is much more than merely an enjoyable pastime; it reflects his social set’s boredom and its disdain for the past: a failed attempt to perform it at a neighboring estate, he says, would “have immortalized the whole party for at least a twelvemonth!” (121). That the performance was cancelled because of the death of the grandmother at the neighboring Ecclesford is not incidental: that event was regarded as no more than importune. Because my concern in this analysis is to establish how specific ideologies relating to the family determine the structure of the narrative, I will focus upon those aspects of these chapters that are the most explicit subjects of discourse. The appeal of assuming fictional identities suggests abandoning, if only in play, those family roles into which each has been born; Tom Bertram, trying on the role of head of his household during his father’s absence, is comfortable in such play-acting; his brother, less inclined to play the roles involved in social advancement, is uncomfortable in any person assuming, even temporarily, a different position. By implication, then, what is at issue is the extent to which the younger generation is authorized to supplant parents. The discourse between the brothers takes the form of a metonymical exchange regarding the physical house of the Bertrams. To Mr. Yates’s initial suggestion that the family put on a play, the elder Tom has reservations about how far the house might be altered, suggesting that only providing a curtain would be sufficient. When his suggested is dismissed, and substantial alterations of the house are proposed, Edmund tries mockery as a defensive tactic, even ironically proposing that the house be transformed into a theater. However, by that same evening, Tom has so accommodated to the remodeling idea that he describes how the billiard room and adjoining room—the father’s room—could be made into a green room. Edmund’s objections to acting are debated and acceptably answered by his brother, leaving the core disagreement between them as how far the physical arrangements of rooms may be altered. In this exchange the Bertram residence becomes a metonym for the patriarchal unit: the house of Bertram appears as both figure and fact.18 Thus when Edmund exhorts, “I think a theatre ought not be attempted—it would be taking liberties with my father’s house in his absence which could not be


53

justified,” and Tom responds, “His house shall not be hurt. I have quite as great an interest in being careful of his house and you can have,” they are, by extension, debating the possibility of supplanting their father’s role (127). The elder brother, who in terms of primogeniture, would be expected to play the most responsible role, is shown to be less reliable than his younger brother, and disagreements among siblings regarding their relative standings vis-à-vis the father are made clear: soon the elder brother is scolding the younger: “Don’t expect to govern every body else” (128). But the issues raised by the proposal are more fundamental to family ideology, for altering the functional arrangement of the home is like rearranging elements of the landscape: a violation of custom and propriety. Even when Tom stipulates that bookcases and billiard tables might be moved for only a week, Edmund objects to what he terms this “innovation.” Altering the rooms in question constitutes an assault on the authority of Sir Thomas, reducing his study to a green room only for convenience, and elevating the place of the younger generation in the house. As only an auxiliary member of the family, Fanny initially has no substantial agency in this debate; accordingly, she is associated with marginal spaces in the house. In the following chapter, the extended description of the white attic and the East room, sparsely furnished marginal accommodations, reiterates the metonymical associations of domestic spaces with individuals and in the process defines the varying extent of their influences. During Sir Thomas’s absence, Mrs. Norris has moved into the house. She describes an encounter with the son of the workman responsible for doing the alterations of the house for the performance in which she objects to the boy bringing some pieces of lumber into the household but subsequently takes the boards from him to deliver them herself. What superficially would appear to be only another revelation of her intrusive nature actually redirects attention back on the impropriety of altering the father’s house, and reveals her abrogation of patriarchal authority. In several cases the alignment of roles in Lovers’ Vows reveals the characters’ relative merits and foibles; Mary Crawford gladly takes the part of Amelia, thus hinting at her boldness, while Edmund only reluctantly takes the part of her lover, Anhalt. But the implications regarding failed family responsibilities other identifications are more potent. Maria Bertram, who will in the course of the narrative leave her husband and ultimately be banished from the family, takes the part of the matriarch who has already been the mistress of Baron Wildenhaim, a suggestive premonition. Tom, who by virtue of his status as eldest male

54


offspring should be acting as the father in the family, has been reduced to playing three small roles, all marginal in terms of family responsibility, while the role of the patriarch is to be played by an outsider to the family, Mr. Yates. This last bit of casting turns out to be most telling of all: if Lovers’ Vows is to be considered as analogous to the novel’s plot, it must be noted that the male parent is shown to be irresponsible, that his judgment in affecting the marriage of his daughter is reprehensible, and that he is reformed from his past misbehavior by his son. In short, the dramatic plot is a reversal of the roles found in the underlying prodigal son motif: the son exercises moral judgment in dealing with an errant father. Concluding the first of the three numbered volumes that constitute the novel is the detailed account of plans for the production, particularly its suggestive assignments of roles and extended rearrangements of the household, emphasizing the ways in which this theatrical project embodies a disruption of the family, both functionally and metonymically. The challenge to patriarchy is clear, and so the volume ends with a declaration that immediately forces a return to judgment by custom: “My father is come! He is in the hall at this moment.” Reentering the physical facility of Mansfield, Sir Thomas must respond to the challenge to his family occasioned by the dereliction of his children and the influence of outsiders. The patriarch’s vehement objections, which soon are delivered, are prompted by his awareness of the ways in which what the children claim to be merely a source of amusement actually constitutes an assault on the order and security of his family, as represented by the disorder of his home. When the facts are first disclosed, Sir Thomas does not indicate any strong response, although Tom, anticipating his objection, suggests they discuss it at some later time. Thus, although the shocking subject matter of the play affects the reader’s interpretation, it does not in fact determine Sir Thomas’s response. Instead, his discovery is expressed in terms of references and then by “other symptoms of recent habitation, and a general air of confusion in the furniture” (182). When he encounters Mr. Yates rehearsing for the part of Baron Wildenhaim, father meets father: the authorized patriarch faces his symbolic supplanter. His comments when he returns to the family circle reveal the extent of the offense he has felt: he remarks that he has been in their theater, specifying his surprise at “its vicinity to my own room,” and, while listening to their explanations, shows his annoyance at their misbehavior. At once he has every prop removed and all modifications of the rooms restored to their original order, and


55

the text offers a list of the items of household management he undertakes, including restoring the billiard room to its usual function. In these actions he reestablishes his patriarchal authority through restoring the architectural and functional order of the house.19 Sir Thomas’s rectitude is dramatically established by the report of the response of that individual who most clearly represents the values of fashionable society, Mr. Yates: the young visitor regards the patriarch as “disagreeable,” and, in a most ironically telling phrase, concludes that he is the most “unintelligibly moral . . . infamously tyrannical” of his class of fathers (191). Obliquely but pointedly the entire project to present the play is referred to in terms of filial disobedience. Canceling the theatrical plans entails at least temporarily purging the family of infectious outside influences; Mr. Yates leaves for more enjoyable circles, while Frank Crawford goes off to Bath, where he will once again reside with his disreputable uncle. Mrs. Norris, already marginal in her family membership, retires to her cottage but takes with her the stage curtain: a useful bit of material but also a metonym for the attempted theatrical performance. As the second volume of the novel proceeds, Sir Thomas’s confidence that the Bertram family prospects can be restored to security are shadowed by the evidence of both Tom and Edmund’s weakness during their father’s absence and by mounting assaults on his authority. Sir Thomas’s attempt to seclude his family from outside influences has been compromised by his own concurrence in bringing Fanny into his household, as well as by the increasing unhealthy influence of his sister-in-law and those characters brought into the family circle by her: the niece and nephew of the wife who succeeded her in the rectory. Soon Edmund remarks to Fanny that the young Crawfords “seem to belong to us—they seem to be part of ourselves” (196). To this claim Fanny responds immediately, reminding her cousin that Sir Thomas wants no “addition” to the family: “The repose of his own family circle is all he wants.” Of course, removing the family from all such extramural contacts is impossible; as the Bertram offspring approach marriageable age, alliances outside the family must be made, and Sir Thomas has already agreed to one such affiliation for his daughter. The narrative proceeds to report further incursions on the seclusion Sir Thomas desires, particularly as both of the Crawfords move toward romantic involvement with his children. Love to Sir Thomas is a threat, a force that may lead a young person to neglect prime ties to the family. When Maria decides to persist in her engagement to Mr. Rushworth, he is relieved because he feels she

56


acted rationally, “without the prejudice, the blindness of love.” In reporting that Maria’s real motivation is “hatred of home, restraint, and tranquillity,” the text restates the factor of family ideology in determining responses to characters and actions (202). Thus Mary Crawford represents denial of family alliances, while Fanny and Edmund reiterate fidelity to the family and concern for its protection. As the narrative’s focus of concern, Sir Thomas receives the fullest analysis, in which contending motives are most fully exposed. Domestic ties constitute, for him, the prime consideration, against which all actions and desires are measured. Even after realizing that his daughter Maria does not love her intended spouse, he makes a gesture of allowing her to break the engagement, but is quickly relieved when she holds to her decision. Financial gain, no doubt, affects his judgment, but he offers a more surprising motive: “A well-disposed young woman, who did not marry for love, was in general but the more attached to her own family” (201). He seeks a degree of exclusive familial ties that preclude the offspring from becoming mature individuals capable of establishing their own families. To him, love is suspect as a force of exogamy; it could lead family members to stray and abandon their natal ties, and thus endanger the family. When Henry Crawford seeks Fanny’s hand in marriage, Sir Thomas seems to encourage the match, but in this case his actual motives are not revealed. When he sends Fanny to her room at the end of the ball held in honor of Fanny and her brother, the text coyly refrains from reporting his true intentions and says only: In thus sending her away, Sir Thomas perhaps might not be thinking merely of her health. It might occur to him, that Mr. Crawford had been sitting by her long enough, or he might mean to recommend her as a wife by shewing her persuadableness. (281)

Why leave his motives so indeterminate, in a narrative in which motives are frequently analyzed by an omniscient and amused commentator? His exact intentions might be conflicted to the point that he himself could not give an exact account. However, to Sir Thomas, Fanny is still neither a full member of his family nor a mere outsider. This curious obfuscation of motives is paralleled two chapters later in the text when the proposal of Henry Crawford to Fanny is presented, a passage remarkable in that the suitor’s words are not recorded directly, and only a few of her responses are cited. In terms of narrative design, retreating from dialogue that might make Henry sympathetic and his


57

expressions of love for Fanny explicit leaves his motives subject to doubt and sustains the focus on Sir Thomas and Fanny, rather than on the pair of lovers. At the conclusion of this central of three sections of the novel, Sir Thomas’s familial ties to his niece are maintained as transitional; he has not yet accepted her into the family and so does not have clear responsibility for her. However, his personal regard for her, forces of sentiment that Sir Thomas had earlier regarded as dangerous, are at work toward bringing her into the family. In the final section of the novel Fanny Price is integrated into the Bertram family, thus strengthening it against a series of assaults and concluding the discourse on the extent to which exogamous influences may be accommodated into the familial unit. In the very first incident in the final book of the novel, Sir Thomas breaks the impasse—imposed by his own sense of exclusiveness and reflected in the attitudes of Mrs. Norris and of his own children—by allowing some accommodation of Fanny into the family from which she feels excluded: he directs that the fireplace in her room be lit, and that it be done so every day. Metonymically, this small act constitutes implanting her as a functional part of Mansfield Park, but it also signals his willingness to alter the physical arrangements of the house to include a proper place for Fanny (322). For a man who had earlier exhibited such shock at the rearrangement of furniture within his home, this willingness to alter the house layout indicates that the household— that is, the family—may indeed change. The main impediment to his acceptance of Fanny in this last movement is her refusal to accept the proposal of Henry Crawford. She is uncomfortable in engaging in such a discourse with her uncle, making the debate unbalanced, in that Sir Thomas’s objections are far more extensive than her reluctant responses. But when the exchange is analyzed into its components, the very terms of dispute appear to be different from what might be first assumed. Clearly, Sir Thomas views romantic love as an irrational distraction from the solid concerns with financial security and family advancement. Just as he could overlook his daughter’s lack of love for the man to whom she was espoused on the grounds that practical considerations were more important, he regards Fanny’s aversion to Henry as a temporary state, a feeling that would be overcome in time, and as a result of more pragmatic consideration. But Fanny’s position is not far different. She admits to feeling a physical, sexual attraction to Crawford, and even acknowledges the practical advantages to marrying him. Those are not in question; her objections, unarticulated by her but specified in the text, are to his lack

58


of principles, observed by her during the recent episodes (317–18). And for reasons of decorum, she does not report those to her uncle. The resulting semantic block brings the debate to an impasse, leading Sir Thomas to conclude that her resistance reveals her selfishness; she, on the other hand, regards herself as driven by fidelity to clear principles. The conflict that shapes the development of the plot then becomes patriarchal authority versus individual principles, a classic plot motif, but one complicated in this instance by questions about the legitimacy of Sir Thomas’s patriarchal authority. He does not at this point in the narrative regard himself as her parent, nor does he regard Fanny as a full member of his family. In acting as the parental representative when Henry Crawford seeks Fanny’s hand in marriage, as the text carefully stipulates, he “seemed to stand in the place of her parents” (314). He even admits that Fanny is not in the same position as his daughter: “You are not to be judged by the same rule. You do not owe me the duty of a child” (319). The italicization reiterates Sir Thomas’s stubborn resistance to allowing her a place in the family. If he cannot claim from her dutiful compliance, he can expect gratitude, an inferior expectation in that it recognizes mere material obligations rather than affections. Exempting her from filial responsibilities may relieve her from feelings of guilt, but it reminds her of her alien status, bereft of familial ties to her adopted family. The pressure on Fanny to comply with her uncle’s demands does not abate, but the question of her membership in the family becomes modified. In conversation with Fanny, Edmund refers to the Bertrams as “all your family,” indicating her advance in membership. Close as these two have become, their mutual regard expressed by this point indicates how fully they have become brother and sister. Sibling relationships are privileged in this text. Fanny’s love for her brother is the strongest, most absolute of all relationships. As a result, Henry Crawford’s support of her brother constitutes for Fanny one of the very strongest claims for gratitude if not affection. However jaded they may be in terms of ethical values, Mary and Henry Crawford are mutually supportive in every instance. In contrast, sibling ties within the Bertram family seem curiously loose, and the two sisters compete for the affection of Henry. At the end, once the relationship between Fanny and Edmund has advanced to the status of sister-brother love, it constitutes a model of intimacy, and comes to provide the formula for restoring family integrity. However, as the sibling relationship shades into a romantic one, the issue of incest, that initial fear of Sir Thomas, resurfaces.


59

Sir Thomas’s scheme to send Fanny back to Portsmouth is an attempt to disillusion her with her family so that she will see the need to accept Henry Crawford’s proposal; it is a “medicinal project,” designed to cure her from delusion by reminding her that she is no longer a member of the Price family, nor is she a Bertram. Put in these terms, it is a cruel affront, making Fanny an unwilling exile: the child made to become the Prodigal by the exclusion of the father—another reversal of plot from the biblical parable. Fanny’s initial anticipation of the pleasures of resuming her place in the Price family ironically underscores the value of full family membership that the narrative imputes: To be in the centre of such a circle, loved by so many, and more loved by all than she had ever been before, to feel affection without fear or restraint, to feel herself the equal of those who surrounded her. (370)

Of course, her hopes are futile: her father is drunken and devoid of feeling for her; her mother is unresponsive, particularly to her daughters. Fanny’s only consolation seems to be her bond with her sister Susan. Sir Thomas’s plan succeeds: she realizes her exclusion from her own family and decides that Mansfield Park must become her home. This distinction between family and home, allowing that one can choose the latter while not yet part of the former, reflects the metonymic nature of domestic space mentioned above. Over the period of her absence, the Bertram family had deteriorated in substantial ways: Tom’s illness, Julia’s elopement with Mr. Yates, and Maria’s involvement with Henry Crawford have combined to weaken the familial bonds that Sir Thomas and Fanny had so treasured. Sir Thomas, on whom the narrative has predominantly focused, has suffered the longest, as would be expected of the main perpetrator of the series of events that constitute the plot. In recovering he comes to recognize his failings as a patriarch: his undue strictness, his excessive indulgence in his daughters, and most of all, his lack of “active principle.” It was to the lack of “principle” that Fanny earlier referred in specifying the main fault of Henry Crawford: in supporting the proposal to mount the play, he had trespassed against property, and, by extension, of propriety—the two terms have become interrelated. In the case of Sir Thomas, he had similarly disregarded or at least discounted principle. And he recognizes in his earlier misjudgments evidence of their and his own lack of “active principle”: “They had never been properly taught to govern their inclinations and tempers, by that sense of duty which can alone suffice” (463). His recriminations need

60


to be regarded with care, for if Fanny, who was not taught such principle, nevertheless acquired it on her own, it may not be the result of education or parental guidance at all. Additionally, among the Bertram offspring, some seem to have been born with a moral endowment that largely guides their actions. However, the dialectical terms remain relevant, and the discrepancy between the moral commentary voiced by characters and those derived from analysis of action point to the complexity and vitality of ideological discourse as it appears in novels. The narrative reaches its conclusion when Edmund, acting on behalf of his father, invites Fanny to return to Mansfield Park, thus rescuing her and bringing her solidly into the Bertram family: his first words to her are, “My Fanny—my only sister—my only comfort now” (444). At the end of the novel the prodigal son has become a daughter: Fanny is brought back to her home and awarded with the love of a father. And the focus is unremittingly directed on the father, whose faulty judgement led to the family division, but who, in being reformed, reunites and revivifies the family. He is rewarded at the end with Edmund’s marriage to Fanny, making her his daughter at last, and his renewed patriarchal authority is proven in an act that risks the reader’s disapproval: he excludes a truly prodigal child, one guilty of audacious misbehavior, and forbidding her from returning to the household. A mitigating factor is offered to account for the severity of this action: he has concluded that the integrity of the family requires her removal. The addition of Fanny’s sister Susan into the household amplifies the recognition that the family must be expanded, not restricted, particularly from cognate sources, from within the extended family. Thus an issue of family practice raised at the narrative’s start earns accompanying closure: initial adoption of Mrs. Norris into the Bertram circle, which had proven so disastrous, pointed out the hazards of such accommodation; but the valorization of sibling affectional ties throughout the text has come to prove the risk worth taking. Among the Ward sisters, among the Bertram children, and particularly within the Price family at Portsmouth, relations among brothers and sisters are sanctified. Although the following paean to such ties, in which “even the conjugal tie is beneath the fraternal,” appears as Fanny Price’s sentiment, it reflects an attitude that underlies the text: Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connections can supply; and it must be by a long and unnatural estrangement, by a divorce which no subsequent


61

connection can justify, if such a precious remains of the earliest attachments are ever entirely outlived. Too often, alas! It is so.— Fraternal love, sometimes almost every thing, is at others worse than nothing. (235)

The resolution of the novel, in which the Bertram family, augmented by the addition of Fanny’s sister Susan, as well as the marriage of Fanny to Edmund, finally endorses endogamy, the practice that had been feared by Sir Thomas at the outset. The married cousins appear at the end as a model of happiness and domestic security. Glenda A. Hudson describes this narrative move in which a cousin is incorporated into the family as “a centripetal or inward movement, a tightening of familial ties, and thus a resistance to external changes.”20 Though I agree with her reading, I regard the discourse on patriarchy as determining the course of the narrative and thus would argue that his restoration to power determines closure in the novel. The most substantial threats to the family, regarded initially as primarily financial, turn out to be the result of patriarchal insecurity and neglect. Although the narrative gives more extended attention to instances in which Sir Thomas properly exercises authority, such as canceling plans for the theatrical performance, it omits those in which he allows his affection for his children to outweigh his awareness of their own moral laxity. Thus assessing his culpability is made difficult. Instead, exploration of the limits of his patriarchal rule is provided, extensively, in his attempt to control his niece in her response to the proposal of Henry Crawford. While Tara Ghoshal Wallace offers a cogent argument that such a portrayal of his patriarchal weakness substantiates her reading of the novel as “a horrifying picture of family life,” I would argue that at issue is not patriarchy, but questions about the limitations thereof.21 The greater weakness in exercising proper authority is seen in the younger members of the Bertram family. During their father’s absence, the vanity and selfishness of the daughters becomes manifest, and the sons prove incapable of incorporating their father’s judgment into the management of the household. Moral responsibility for their failure to develop “active principle” cannot be solely assigned to the father, for, as was pointed out above, Fanny seems to have developed it on her own, as did Edmund. However, Sir Thomas holds himself responsible, specifically for his excessive control of them, “teaching them to repress their spirits in his presence, as to make their real disposition unknown to him” and allowing Mrs. Norris to indulge and flatter them (463).

62


Mansfield Park includes a range of ideological discourses—dealing with gender, empire, politics, and power—that have been intensively and usefully explored; but not all such complex issues are brought to satisfactory conclusion in the narrative. Focusing on one or the other of such issues, critics have concluded that it endorses conservative political attitudes, or that it parodies them. The critical attention has revealed the cogency of the treatment afforded complex ideological issues.22 While one must agree with Claudia Johnson that the novel does not satisfactorily conclude its consideration of female choice as it is limited by the exercise of parental authority, that omission does not constitute a structural flaw in the novel.23 The central, determining ideological issue treated in the text is the question of the extent to which the patriarch should allow or forbid extension of membership in the family beyond its immediate membership. By treating successive incursions into the household by Mrs. Norris, Mr. Yates, and the Crawfords, the narrative records Sir Thomas’s changing responses that lead to his reformation in defining the extent to which the family must accommodate outsiders. The narrative’s conclusion is determined by the final disposition of that set of ideological questions, leaving other, albeit related issues unsettled. The narrative eventually affirms the strict exercise of patriarchal authority, not its opposite: Sir Thomas, whose objection to a seemingly trivial amateur theatrical seemed at first excessive, acted properly in protecting his family from outside influences, symbolically represented by preserving the domestic design of his own house. His error derived from being so reluctant to allow Fanny membership in the family, resisting the kind of integration because of excessive fear of outsiders. The less nuanced tone of the concluding chapter, what Johnson calls its “unwonted authorial intrusiveness” signals the sure closure, reflecting the assuredness and authority of the patriarch and the new enhancement of the family, seen its manifestation as the estate, Mansfield Park.

“Maternal Love . . . Her Crowning Glory”: Mary Shelley’s Lodore Of the authors whose novels are examined in this work, Mary Shelley has received the most extensive scholarly study on how her literary creations reveal, critique, and contribute to the formulation of the ideology of the bourgeois family. To critics concerned with biographical sources of artistic creation, it is no surprise that in her fictions this daughter of two formative social theorists of the period, and the wife


63

of the most ideological of the Romantic poets, would participate in such discourse. As a mother struggling to support her young son, having buried three other children, and, of course, as a woman whose elopement with a married man had risked alienation from her adored father, Mary Shelley had confronted and responded to the claims of the dominant domestic ideology, in writing narratives as in her daily social existence. Examining her participation in the contemporary discourse on gender formation, her biographers and critics have discovered perplexing but rich contradictions, resulting in lively disagreement over how she either endorses or attacks emerging ideologies of the domestic woman, even the Angel in the House.24 The primary site of such critical exchange has been her best known novel, Frankenstein, a text that is centrally, almost exclusively, concerned with examination of conflicting claims about the nature of familial responsibilities. Characters are depicted primarily in domestic roles—as fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, brothers, and sisters; and the plot is driven by desires to create, protect, or destroy families. The curious concentric form of the narrative amplifies family relationships in three parallel sets of family members; framing the entire sequence is the account of Robert Walton, in which brother-sister relationships are emphasized, culminating in the testing of this ship’s captain as he attempts to motivate his crew to persist in a quest that is antithetical to domestic comfort. Such familial tension is amplified in the next circle, the story of Victor Frankenstein, who was betrothed to marry a woman whose relationship to him makes her nearly a sister and a kind of stepmother—a situation that resonates with possibilities of incest—a theme barely submerged in the narrative. Victor’s scientific pursuits are already posited as conflicting with his family responsibilities before the monster he has created proceeds to kill family members and, ultimately, his wife. This narrative culminates in the most extreme assault on the ideology of the bourgeois family when Victor’s creation/son/alter ego demands a spouse. The third and central narrative strain centers on the De Lacey family, a model in every sense except that the mother is missing (a recurrent pattern in Shelley’s fictions). Here brother-sister and parent-child relationships are strong enough to bring in new members in order to replicate family units. Centripetal sympathies dominate, and there seems no desire to range far from the hearth. The dynamics of these concentric plots involve an influence radiating from the center: the De Lacey family constitutes the norm by which others are judged, but it also provokes direct responses. Removed from what is regarded as the corruptive world of “rank, descent, and noble

64


blood,” the De Laceys are secretly admired by the monster so that he comes to demand such a life of familial harmony for himself. His demand that Victor provide him with a spouse derives from a quite likely conclusion, given the attractiveness of the De Lacey family, which has been established as the ideal. Similarly, Victor’s horrifying tale of creating a progeny who then must be killed directs the life of Walton, as he is implicated in attempting to destroy the monster. Victor has created an entity with human characteristics so elemental, including the sexual desire to procreate, that he is a danger. Ultimately Victor faces a Sophoclean dilemma: he who created the monster and thus stands as its father must kill his progeny out of a greater responsibility to mankind—to prevent the creature from killing others. Like the father in Yeats’s Purgatory, he must kill his son in order to terminate a cycle of destruction that is identical with the cycle of generation. At the narrative’s end the issues of diametrically opposed responsibilities raised by Victor’s struggle are not resolved, and he is bereft of the very familial bonds that have been established as essential. His counterpart in the outermost circle, Walton, is also isolated as he confronts the prospect of being similarly deprived by the approaching death of Victor, “one who would sympathize with and love me.”25 Furthermore, Victor’s climactic decision to kill his offspring—his creation, the monster—remains incomplete at his death. Although Walton had sworn to carry out Victor’s plan, when his crew refuses to continue the arctic voyage, he relents. In a dying statement, Victor reiterates his demand that the execution be carried out. But when Walton is confronted by the monster, at the deathbed of Victor, when he hears the monster’s version of remorse, he allows the creature to go off to prepare his own self-immolation, although allowing the possibility that he will not do so. Thus in terms of the novel’s structure, the contested issue is abandoned, not resolved at the close of the narrative: the vow to commit filicide, the ultimate taboo, to which Victor has been brought, is averted at the narrative’s end, as the monster is “borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance.”26 Terminating the narrative account before father kills son, while at the same time allowing the monster to articulate his reasons for taking his own life, has the effect of leaving the primary conflict to resonate, unresolved because unrealized. But the novel’s three-part division, its concentric narratives, and this retreat from conclusion of the linear narrative gives it a chiastic structure, in which sets of traditional relationships and responsibilities are, in the end, inverted. Victor is originally


65

inspired by patriarchal impulses; he had anticipated that his creation would recognize him as his parent: “A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.”27 But he at the same time inadvertently proceeds to an act of creation that is in a symbolic sense a kind of matricide: just before realizing his audacious goal of creating the monster, an exhausted Victor has a dream that is transparent in its symbolism: he dreams that he has met Elizabeth, his cousin/near-sister/betrothed, whom he kisses, but in doing so, he seems to have killed her, and the corpse becomes that of his dead mother. What follows, then, constitutes a punishment for his transgression. But he ultimately comes to seek the destruction of his offspring out of fear that the monster will continue to destroy others. The monster, desirous of familial relationships, is prevented from generation, and in jealousy at seeing his parent marry and secure such domestic pleasure, kills his stepmother. But even he, in the closing scene, expresses such regret for his part in destroying his maker that the sense of abhorrence felt by Walton, and by the reader, is mitigated by pity. By the novel’s end, the most primal impulses and sets of relationships are inverted, and the account closes with the monster’s account that complicates earlier responses of horror, allowing just a fading away, rather than a termination of the conflict. Considered, then, as a discourse on conflicting family relationships, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s description of the novel, in his 1818 preface, as constituting an “exhibition of the amiableness of domestic affection” is markedly understated, but apt. Recent critics, particularly those approaching it in terms of discourse regarding gender definition, have explored its potent critiques of a variety of ideologies. The daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft would be likely to interrogate Burkean claims of patriarchy as the basis of civil order and emerging formulations of the proper lady.28 The concentric plots of Frankenstein amplify the central ideological subject: the family. Brother-sister relationships are valorized in each parallel plot. Families are depicted as more intact and harmonious as they retreat further from urban, industrialized settings; patriarchal rule is scrutinized; and the paradoxical role of the family in preparing offspring for independence is anatomized as Victor alienates himself from parents and sibling to pursue his career, just as Walton ranges far from the security of his family, particularly his sister. As Kate Ellis has pointed out, the parallel family groups reveal uneven relationships

66


between the sexes and appropriate onto male-female relations the patriarchal, hierarchical model.29 However, a later novel by Mary Shelley, Lodore (1835), addresses these issues in even greater detail, although with less emotional force. Its narrative line is fragmented, and its characterization is not as complex as that of Frankenstein. However, its thematic range is greater, and its critique of ideologies is more mature. Thus it provides a more useful text for exploring the connection of ideology to narrative form. In a letter of the period, the author describes this novel’s central concern as domestic relations: A Mother and Daughter are the heroines—The Mother who after sacrificing all to the world at first—afterwards makes sacrifices not less of the heart. In the daughter I have tried to portray in its simplicity, and all the beauty I could muster, the devotion of a young 30 wife for the husband of her choice.

This claim of authorial intention deserves consideration because the narrative form of this text is nearly as complicated as that of Frankenstein, and its conclusion is every bit as problematic. The account moves rapidly and repeatedly back and forth in time, beginning with a depiction of the title character’s sister, then shifting twelve years earlier for background information, then forward, then backwards, making the chronological sequence secondary. The title character dies a little over one-fourth of the way into the narrative, and Cornelia, his wife (the mother referred to by Mary Shelley as a heroine) is absent from much of the narrative. Its complex narrative structure, like that of Frankenstein, has the effect of focusing attention on sets of parallel relationships, the totality of which constitute an early nineteenth-century anatomization of the ideology of the bourgeois family. But its conclusion features the reunification of the family and its regeneration, making it resemble the thematic structure of The Vicar of Wakefield, the novelistic form that constitutes a standard against which later novels may be measured. The model of the bourgeois family is proven to be commodious, taking in those who have been excluded or who have excluded themselves from its solace. Patriarchal authority—in its positive and its destructive aspects— is extensively explored in the more developed narrative lines. To protect his daughter from the corrupting values of London society, Lord Lodore takes her away from her mother to raise her in Illinois. But when Ethel reaches the age of possible independence, and, not


67

incidentally, when a suitor presses his intention, he decides to take her back to the city. This decision is recognized as problematic, of course, but Lodore has previously been shown to act impulsively, and, in terms of narrative credibility, this recognition of conflicting, even confusing motives comes to constitute one of the novel’s artistic merits. Even before Ethel reports to him that her art teacher, Whitelock, has made romantic overtures, Lodore expresses premonitions that they cannot remain in seclusion. When the narrative cites his similarity to Prospero in trying to protect his daughter, a violation of their seclusion seems foreordained. But even while such an account is being offered, the text presents pure impulse as a different explanation for his action: “On a sudden, the future, with all its difficulties and trials, presented itself to his eyes; and he was determined to go out to meet them, rather than to await their advent in his seclusion.”31 Only a few pages later, yet another explanation is presented: “This was no abode for the opening bloom of Ethel. For her good his beloved and safe seclusion must be sacrificed” (27). And, more positively yet, the reader is informed that at this time Lodore learns that his wife’s mother has died, thus providing him hope for a reconciliation with his wife, which would restore to Ethel the care of a mother. I cite these various episodes to establish at the start that the psychological exploration of characters is subtle, so that as issues of motive are treated, conflicting explanations are likely to be left unresolved, while at the same time the motives themselves remain inherently intertwined. In deciding to take Ethel back from their Edenic life in Illinois, Lodore acts as a responsible patriarch, concerned with the development of his daughter, but he is also an impulsive individual, perversely enabling his own destruction. But before he can carry out his plan for his own family, Lodore is killed in a duel. While his influence continues to drive the plot through his daughter’s abiding respect for his authority, and because of the stipulations of his will, the narrative does not proceed to explore the consequences of his conflicting impulses. Instead, the father-daughter plot centered on Lodore and Ethel is set in contrast to other parent-child relationships, conveyed through narrative reversals entailing rapid shifts of chronology. Lodore’s benevolent concern for Ethel is amplified in the idealized relationship between his friend from childhood, Francis Derham, and his daughter Fanny. In this set of paired relationships a critique, even a refutation, of the ideology of training daughters for roles of submission to male authority is made most explicit. While noting that each of the young women had enjoyed the favor of their fathers, Ethel, like her mother,

68


was expected by the domineering Lodore to be “yielding, and to make it her duty to devote herself to his happiness, and to obey his will.” Fanny, on the other hand, the daughter of a less assertive father, emerges “independent and self-sufficing” (218). Yet even here contradictory interpretations are dictated in the text: It was singular that the resolute and unshrinking Fanny should be the daughter of Francis Derham; and the timid, retiring Ethel, of his bold and daring protector. But this is no uncommon case. We feel the evil results of our own faults, and endeavour to guard our children from them; forgetful that the opposite extreme has also its peculiar dangers. (219)

Eventually Ethel marries Edward Villiers, whose relationship to his own irresponsible father strongly contrasts with the positive ones already offered, with the result that dialogical discourse regarding the limits of parental authority is provoked. By his gambling, squandering of the family fortune, and general disregard for his son, Villiers’ father seems to have forsaken any claim of fatherhood. In fact, when his son spies his father in such deceitful activity, the text makes those actions so culpable that the son seems authorized in losing regard for him: “The consciousness of a father’s falsehood and guilt acted on him as the sudden intelligence of some fatal disaster would have done. . . . [H]is parent had stepped beyond the line of mere extravagance. . . . He had lost honourable feeling” (138). His son, Edward, is thus justified in regarding himself as “an orphan, a greater victim than an animal cast away by his parent at birth”: “My father is unworthy of his name.” Extreme as that is, the text does not dispute his judgment, and at the very end of the novel, when various characters are meted out poetic justice, Villiers Senior is described as properly punished: his now wealthy wife has deserted him, and he will be denied her fortune (312). But the most extensive parallel domestic grouping is that of Cornelia, Lodore’s wife, and her mother. Herself the product of a dominating, avaricious father, Lady Santerre trains her daughter to seek social standing and wealth and so contrives in arranging her daughter’s marriage to Lodore, who is so much older than Cornelia that their difference in age is cited as a fundamental impediment to the couple’s domestic harmony. She manipulates Cornelia, plays on her guilt, and, when faced by the competition of her son-in-law, she convinces her daughter of the primacy of her duty to her mother. Lodore’s resentment of Lady Santerre’s intervention is understandable: the narrative


69

depicts her as materialistic and dominating and describes Cornelia as helpless, utterly in the thrall of her mother. In this narrative development, the claims of marital ties and filial responsibilities are set in sharp conflict, as extensive arguments are presented on each side, so that Cornelia has to choose one or the other. The choice is far from simple, and not only for Cornelia. Her written response to her husband’s demand that she choose him over her mother is borne out by the values implied in the entire narrative: Ask your heart—if it be not turned to stone, ask it what you have done to compare with the long years of affection, kindness, and never-ceasing care that my beloved parent has bestowed on me. I am your wife, Lodore; I bear your name; I will be true to the vows I have made you, nor will I number the tears you force me to shed; but my mother’s are sacred, and not one falls in vain for me. (68–69)

At this point in the text, the narrative tone and the preponderance of evidence points to the culpability not of Cornelia but of her selfish mother, who forced the issue to such an extremity. Cornelia’s decision to remain in London with her mother rather than join her husband in escaping to America is the result of her mother’s indoctrination: “Lady Santerre won the day. She had worked on the least amiable of her daughter’s feelings, and exalted anger into hatred, disapprobation into contempt and aversion” (70–71). Considering that Cornelia had been informed of his noble reason for fleeing London (the need to avoid a duel with his own son), her choice is hard to justify. Repeatedly not only Lodore himself, but the text as well, assigns blame to the female characters: Lady Lodore’s social pretense and Cornelia’s vanity certainly break the tenuous relationship between husband and wife. Before sailing to America, in a letter to his wife, Lodore assigns full blame to the mother, one of many instances of shifting moral responsibility to women. Years after their affair Lodore remains dominated by his former mistress, the Countess Lyzinski. Horatio Saville’s marriage is threatened by the insecurity of his wife, herself the victim of “the heartless vanity of her mother, who dreaded her as a rival” (164). Even the action that most determined the plot line, Lodore’s separation of his daughter from her mother, is instigated by the child, as she pleads to go with him (61).32 On the other hand, Lodore’s moral position is suspect throughout. In this narrative in which the experiences of various parent-child pairs have proven the importance of the filial tie, he can hardly be justified in

70


separating his daughter from her mother—leading to the conclusion, specified in the text, that his act was morally culpable: depriving a mother of her child is termed “barbarity beyond that of savages,” and Lodore’s rationalizations are termed “false . . . rash and selfish; but of this he was not aware” (62). Consciously or not, Lodore seeks to be the sole object of his daughter’s love, and taking her to the isolated world of Illinois, he succeeds in dominating her life, just as surely as Lady Lodore crippled her daughter. In the formative years of childhood, the influence of the parent wields tremendous power, and in the case of Cornelia, deprived of a mother and even of much human company, her devotion to her father becomes confining and crippling. In what seems at first a paean to daughterly love, but which turns to implicit criticism of this claim of exclusivity, the text offers a telling dissection of parental and filial affections: There is perhaps in the list of human sensations, no one so pure, so perfect, and yet so impassioned, as the affection of a child for its parent, during that brief interval when they are leaving childhood, and have not yet felt love. There is something so awful in a father. His words are laws, and to obey them happiness. Reverence and a desire to serve, are mingled with gratitude; and duty, without a flaw or question, so second the instinct of the heart, as to render it imperative. Afterwards we may love, in spite of the faults of the object of our attachment; but during the interval alluded to, we have not yet learnt to tolerate, but also, we have not learned to detect faults. All that a parent does appears an emanation from a diviner world; while we fear to offend, we believe we have no right to be offended. . . . Ethel’s heart overflowed with love, reverence, worship of her father. . . . To love her father was the first law of nature, the chief duty of a child, and she fulfilled it unconsciously, but more completely than she could have done had she been associated with others, who might have shared and weakened the concentrated sensibility of her nature. (83)

Various critics have attributed the intensity of father-daughter relationships in Mary Shelley’s fiction to her devotion to William Godwin.33 But it is important to note how it is scrutinized in this text: Lodore seeks exclusive affection for himself, and his means of programming his daughter is indeed suspect. But his influence is indeed “awful”—exceptional and ultimately far from beneficial—since it makes his daughter insecure and dependent, most pointedly so when she is set beside her parallel figure, Fanny Derham.34 In writing a will that forbids his daughter from ever seeing her mother, Lodore constructs both a challenge to


71

Lady Santerre’s parental influence over her daughter and an audacious claim of his own authority over his daughter, extending even after his death. Ethel, then, is trapped between claims of responsibility to her father, which she has been trained to regard as inviolable, and, after she again meets her mother, to a primitive “filial instinct,” likened to an electric shock (178). An impulse as elemental as the force that gave life to Victor Frankenstein’s monster, the desire to be loved by her mother, comes to dominate her actions. The softening of Cornelia’s character described in the last half of the narrative, as she sheds her pride, and particularly as she falls in love with Horatio Saville, mitigates the guilt she had been assigned by her husband, making the narrative of the second half of the novel parallel to that of the first half, rather than being a linear result of it. The first narrative brought parental rule in conflict with marital bonds, leading to a defiance of the first that had the effect of destroying the second; the second pits the father’s will against restoring the bond of mother and daughter, leading to a conclusion that reunites all in various satisfactory marital unions. The similarities of the two plot lines are emphasized by repetitions. When Ethel and her husband face severe financial problems, her mother comes to take her away, just as Lady Santerre had taken her daughter away, and as Lord Lodore had taken his child as well; Cornelia emphasizes her maternal role: “Yes, call me mother. . . . I may, at last, I hope, be allowed to prove myself one” (249). But Ethel, unlike her mother, refuses, saying she “would rather live in an actual dungeon with Edward than in the most splendid mansion in England, away from him” (250). But here, as in the earlier plot, simple moral judgment is eschewed, as her response is problematized. Immediately Ethel ascribes her decision to her own weakness, even her cowardice. Furthermore, she is uncertain about her husband’s wishes, although in time he proves to be a model father and husband. The result of such disputation of motives is that in the closing chapters of the novel the conflict between two familial sets of responsibilities becomes increasingly irresolvable. When Ethel is searching for her mother, who has fled to seclusion, she concludes that her tie to her husband had made her irresponsible to her mother—an issue of contention identical with what her mother had been confronted. And in her assessment, filial responsibilities take precedence over marital ones: Ethel wept in silence, her heart was touched to the core, ‘the remorse of love’ awakened in it. How cold and ungrateful had been

72

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL all her actions; engrossed by her love for her husband, she had bestowed no sympathy, made no demonstrations towards her mother. The false shame and Edward’s oft-repeated arguments which had kept her back, vanished from her mind. She reproached herself bitterly for lukewarmness and neglect; she yearned to show her repentance—to seek forgiveness—to express, however feebly, her sense of her mother’s angelic goodness. (289)

In fact, when Ethel is reunited with her mother, she leaves no doubt of her priorities: rapturously she assures her mother, “I love you most of all” (311). Even allowing for the emotion of the moment, and for Ethel’s impulsiveness, which she admitted to, this constitutes a bold claim, a signal statement on conflicting familial relationships. Furthermore, there is an arbiter, a character whose devotion to Lodore and his daughter has been proven absolute: his sister, Elizabeth. It was her story that opened the entire narrative, as she awaited the return of her brother before his death. Living in the family home, Longfield, she is thus identified with the Fitzhenry bloodline, and living away from London she is granted a privileged position. In that place the young Ethel is educated in traditional values; to that place she flees in times of distress, and even the reformed Cornelia will determine to live her new life there. Ethel’s judgment of others has been constant throughout the narrative, and it is not until the concluding chapters that she changes her estimate of Cornelia, when in a scene of repentance she comes to admire Cornelia for her love of her daughter. In a sense, then, Cornelia earns the love of her daughter in a way that Edward Villiers’ father has not, making contractual those affectionate ties that might have been claimed to be products of natural law. Just as the narrative opened with an account of Elizabeth Fitzhenry, whose absolute commitment to her brother dictated the response to him—not only providing background information about the title character, but elevating him to heroic stature—she again becomes the focal character as the novel reaches its conclusion. While Ethel seeks reunion with her mother, having regretted that out of love for her husband she had neglected this deeper responsibility, Elizabeth learns that Cornelia is nearby and so seeks to prevent the mother from meeting her daughter. This overlapping of plots—two responses to Cornelia leading to two sets of actions—has the effect of contrasting them with each other. The daughter’s desire to aid her mother is natural, even elemental; the sister-in-law’s is no less based in familial ties: Elizabeth holds Cornelia responsible for the suffering and


73

even death of her brother. As a result, another set of contesting familial responsibilities is played out: mother-daughter ties versus those between a sister and brother. When Elizabeth relents and brings mother and daughter together, her action indicates the priority of maternal ties, and by extending it to an observer—related, but nevertheless a third party—her reversal carries particular weight in directing the sympathies of the reader. The final, unnumbered chapter provides a summary of the subsequent fortunes of the main characters. Elizabeth is steadfast in her love of Cornelia—even deeper than her love of Ethel, for her sister-in-law now reminds her of her brother, to whom she is faithful. Cornelia is happily married to Saville, but once again her parental love trumps her marital relationship: She respects, admires, in some sense it may be said, that she adores her husband; but even while consenting to be his, and thus securing her own happiness, she told him that her first duties were towards Ethel—and that he took a divided heart, over the better part of which reigned maternal love. Saville, the least egotistic of human beings, smiled to hear her name that a defect, which was in his eyes her crowning virtue. (312)

Ethel is described as happy, although the text stipulates that “death had done its worst when she lost her father,” making her current motherhood and wifely state matters of contentment rather than passion. Her father-in-law, the irresponsible Colonel Villiers, is properly punished by poverty. And, finally, Fanny Derham is praised and curiously disposed of. The narrative allows that “in after times” her story may be told, which may indicate that she might escape the repressive roles dictated for the other women in the narrative. But given the concentration on family ideologies, Fanny could not have a focal role in this text. Unmarried, the child of an apparent love match between a clergyman and an illiterate woman, although temperamentally alienated from her mother and sister, devoted to her father, now dead, and properly trained by her father to become both independent and considerate of others, the conflict of responsibilities is not played out in her. Lisa Vargo, a recent editor of the novel, goes further, arguing that Mary Shelley, in closing her narrative with these comments on Fanny offers a challenge to her society “to recognize the possibilities of social transformation,” a narrative turn that subverts the literary form of the romance.35

74


The conflict between parental responsibilities and marital ties, treated in the various plots and incidents, even takes on mythic overtones when the possibility of violations of both are considered: Lodore must leave London when he realizes that his wife may be in love with his son, and, even more pressing, when he faces a proposed duel with that son—thus facing possibilities of either filicide or parricide from the duel, and near incest should his wife pursue the affair with Casimir. Ultimately it is this action that leads to Lodore’s death, as he fights a duel in Illinois to defend his honor when he is challenged about this purported act of cowardice. When Lodore urges his wife to honor her duty to him rather than to her mother, she terms such an option a form of parricide (120). On the other hand, prohibiting his daughter from contact with her mother, which Lodore stipulates in his will, violates maternal relationships that are repeatedly elevated to a level of sanctity: women are proven more or less noble primarily as they manifest motherly love, so that Cornelia becomes more admirable as she admits to the love of her daughter that had been repressed by the unhealthy control of her mother. The tugs of conflicting responsibilities are depicted as elemental, not mere results of social custom. And violating parental responsibilities earns the most dire punishment: echoing the central narrative line is the account of Horace Saville’s marriage to Clorinda, a native of Naples. Despite his urgings, she resists leaving her home, largely because of her passionate jealousy, knowing of her husband’s earlier love for Cornelia. When the issue is brought to a head, when she is forced to choose her husband or her home, she relents, but almost immediately becomes so overwrought that she bursts a blood vessel and dies—proof of the dire results of violating a familial tie, and a crime for which her husband holds himself responsible. Within the narrative, the institution of the family is regarded as vulnerable. Almost all the characters are members of broken families: Lodore’s mother died in childbirth; Cornelia’s father died when she was a child; Edward’s family is in ruins due to his father’s dissipation; even Fanny Derham is alienated from her mother and sister; and, of course, Ethel suffers her father’s death and then the enforced separation from her mother. But the scarcity of intact families only intensifies the idealization of familial coherence. The fullest realization of self is consistently achieved in securing a domestic role: Cornelia is ennobled as she becomes a true mother to her daughter, and Ethel transcends the bliss of being Edward’s wife when she can openly serve as her mother’s daughter. Cornelia never apologizes or regrets her choice of remaining with her mother rather than leaving England with her husband.


75

The narrative is dominated by repressive parents: Lady Santerre, Colonel Villiers, even Lodore himself, whose influence extends throughout the written account, although he has died less than onethird of the way into it. Only when his will is absolutely violated, when Ethel rescues her mother and, reciprocally, when Cornelia can care for her daughter, can the narrative be concluded, as though his influence was malign, or at least so constricting as to deprive the women of fundamental needs for mutual love. Never does Cornelia contradict her judgment that her filial tie to her mother should take precedence over her responsibilities to her husband, and Ethel, at the end of the narrative, voices an identical priority. Only Edward Villiers is depicted otherwise, because his father has been so utterly irresponsible as a parent. Consistently domestic security and bliss are associated with life away from the city. Like the De Lacey family in Frankenstein, wellfunctioning families in this work reside in rural areas; to the extent that they expand into the world of commerce and fashion, they are corrupted. Lodore’s ancestor acquired his title for his achievements as an admiral, but he prefers to live far from the House of Lords. The aristocratic representatives are all new members of the nobility, a reflection of the contemporary political debates over awarding such titles.36 Lady Santerre’s name—without land, or perhaps sacred land—ironically suggests the material concerns that dominate her life. When the young Lodore leaves his family home, he falls into disreputable behavior and is trapped into a marriage arranged for material gain and, more corrosive, the fashionable world of London, which his new wife enjoys. When he flees that society, it is to Illinois, where he sheds his honorable title, returning to the old family name of Fitzhenry. The text attributes Ethel’s superior ethical values to her residence in America (257), and Ethel, like Miranda, with whom she is identified, is dignified by this seclusion from fashion. Elizabeth Fitzhenry proves her superior qualities by her residence in the country, and Cornelia seeks repentance by going there as well. Like the Primrose family, Ethel and her husband rise to the fullest realization of domestic values when they are removed from society into a kind of prison. On the other hand, Lodore’s decision to bring Ethel back to England seems to be motivated as strongly by a recognition that her education requires contact with the larger world. His motives in this instance are various and contradictory, and they include a sheer impulse to escape, specifically from Whitelock, Ethel’s potential suitor. Attractive as life in the country is, all of the characters are dependent on income derived in the city, and, as part of maturation and socialization,

76


young men and women require involvement in that world. The fourth chapter of the novel’s first volume has a curious epigraph from Paul de Kock’s novel, Le Barbier de Paris: “Les deserts sont faits pour les amants, mais l’amour ne se fait pas aux deserts [Wildernesses are made for lovers, but love is not made in wildernesses]” (20). This French novel treats incest between a father and daughter, thus suggesting a submerged theme of this work. But this claim initially seems oddly placed to introduce a narrative segment in which the young Ethel encounters her first suitor, the art teacher, Whitelock. On closer study, the implications are telling. In the chapter Lodore is described as beginning to doubt the wisdom of his retreat from active life and his concentration on his union with his daughter. The seclusion allows for concentrated attention on both parties, but in a paternal relationship such exclusivity is antithetical to the parent’s role in socializing the offspring, making the daughter or son independent. Worrying that secluding himself with his daughter away from others was making him indolent and hopeless, Lodore goes on an expedition with neighboring settlers to establish a line of communication with the nearest but far distant town. While he is away, in what may have been his only period of separation from Ethel, she is courted by Whitelock. His interest in Ethel is selfish: he hopes for social and financial advancement through marrying Ethel. But Lodore does not know this; his immediate reaction comes from his sense of abhorrence at his daughter’s attractiveness to another male. There is a hint of romantic, even incestuous concern. But confronted with a competitor for his daughter, Lodore decides to flee, just as he has done in leaving England. This time his flight takes on more ominous coloration: “governed by a fevered fancy and untamed passions,” and disregardful of the pleasure his sheltered life had given him, “he hastened the reach the stormier seas of life, whose breakers and whose winds were ready to visit him with shipwreck and destruction” (27). Lodore has become Dante’s (and a prefiguration of Tennyson’s) Ulysses, impatient but also disdainful of his life in Ithaca, and now perversely determined to set off on his final voyage, the one that will, he knows, result in his death. As a result, just as Dante’s Ulysses earned a place in Hell for his audacity and irresponsibility, Lodore may be held guilty for leading his daughter and himself to anticipated suffering.37 Had they remained within the placid seclusion of Illinois, domestic tranquility could have been preserved; even the contending attraction of Whitelock could have been combated and defeated by the mutual efforts of the patriarch and his submissive daughter. The well-being of the father would


77

be best protected by staying within the unchanging haven of the bourgeois family, the alternative to the world of commerce. But this novel interrogates such a claim by recognizing a contending aspect of family responsibilities: the need to train its offspring for both independence from their parents and for participation in the broader society. Attractive as the rural retreat of Illinois is in its presentation in this text, the return to the larger world of wealth and status strikes the reader as inevitable. Ethel needs to learn the ways of the world, if only to see through the appeal of predators such as Whitelock. When, after her father’s death, she returns to London, she comes to regard living in the city as comparable to living “in a desert,” an echo of the description of her life in Illinois, and of the inscription from de Kock. But by this point she can no longer endorse the prospect of moving back to rural seclusion. Edward agrees: “Are you to be entombed at Longfield, except when dying?” (133). They eventually decide on a move to Richmond, which provides proximity to the pleasures and social contact of London while allowing for seclusion: “Cut off from all habits of intercourse with their species, they had but to find trees and meadows near them, at once to feel transported, from the thick of human life, into the most noiseless solitude” (135). Richmond thus serves as a compromise between rural and urban, but also between domestic life as a secluded fortress and as a part of a community. It is, nevertheless, to the rural seclusion of Longfield that Cornelia flees and in which Ethel and Elizabeth can find solace in a time of distress. But at the end of the narrative, Cornelia has reentered social life, as the Viscountess Maristow, and Ethel, “surrounded by dear friends,” has attained a satisfying marital relationship, become a mother, and has been reunited with her mother. While this may appear to be a clear resolution, it has been attained by a series of compromises between unresolved conflicting considerations. The narrative of Frankenstein concluded with a termination of the cycle of reproduction—when Victor kills his progeny and the monster kills himself. The plot line of Lodore leads to a restoration of the family, a propagation of new families, achieved because the contesting claims of paternal and filial responsibilities have been reconciled—in favor of paternal and maternal bonds. Fanny Derham survives outside a family unit, but in her unmarried state, the priority of her ties to her father have not been tried; her story, the author adds, may be told “in after times,” but it would take the form of a quite different kind of novel, a kind of female Bildungsroman, perhaps, not one centrally concerned with the family.


CHAPTER 2

A Q UESTION OF S URVIVAL : D OMBEY AND S ON AND T HE N EWCOMES

I

n the 1850’s, amid the Crystal Palace celebrations of England’s domestic and colonial power, one detects the first stirrings of anxiety at the precariousness of its new position, and uneasiness about the rapidity of the changes not only in industry but in social relations. While the narrator of Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” revels in the exhilaration of the times, the same “ringing grooves of change” he attempts to extol are sounding the departure from a social and commercial system that had provided solace by its very predictability, so that he “clung to all the present for the promise that it closed.”1 To him discontinuity of past to present seems absolute: he can only hope to sustain some degree of confidence in the emerging world, making his “vision of the world” a discomfiting combination of international prosperity and intimations of war. He can only regard the titled estate in a valedictory manner, for he, like Ulysses, Tennyson’s other hero of this period, must, at the end, sail off into a dangerous and possible murderous sea. The fear of a violent social upheaval, triggered by the Chartist demonstrations and fed by the various revolutions on the Continent in 1848, made political and social stability seem precarious. But over the succeeding decades the increasing awareness of social inequities, a by-product of the campaign to relieve the most evident

80


social problems resulting from the factory system, made confidence in Progress and the benefits of the industrial system hard to sustain. Over successive generations there develops a perception of absolute severance from the past; Carlyle’s dichotomy of Past and Present, becomes for Matthew Arnold an irreconcilable division of two worlds, “one dead/ The other powerless to be born.” In this cataclysmic process the family in particular seemed to have been destabilized. In the set of reform acts, which literally transformed the governmental system, the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 and the Education Act of 1870 could be viewed as directly threatening the family. Granting legal rights to women for controlling their own property challenged the rule of the patriarch and the validity of patrilineal systems of inheritance; and removing responsibility for education from the family to the state drastically reduced the functions that parents had performed within the home. Not only were parents increasingly employed far from the hearth, but core functions were being passed on to the broader society. It was feared that the family was becoming only a vestige of a social system of the past. Such fears turned out to be excessive: the family proved to be resilient.2 Nevertheless, perceptions, more than realities, evoke ideological discourse and literary expression, so that fiction of the mid-century and the succeeding decades reflects inordinate concern about the status of traditional family forms and functions, expressed in extreme ways: both exaggerating the sacred nature of the home and in sensational claims of the imminent demolition of patriarchal rule and family stability. Domestic security was viewed as comparable to economic capital, and so subject to constant challenge by external pressures. In a period of rapid and disturbing change, the family came to be treasured for providing a sense of continuity, promoting respect for lineage and rewarding it through the inheritance system, reasserting the importance of maternal love in a world increasingly dominated by competition, and reaffirming the sanctity of family ties, both maternal/paternal and fraternal/sororal in a social climate that promoted self advancement and independence. Periodicals and books series dedicated to promotion of the family proliferated. Domestic celebrations became instruments of family self-congratulation, in which the glories of the “old fashion” were emphasized; at Christmas-time traditional meals, reminiscences of past events and generations, and multi-generational activities grew more important than the religious commemoration. Genre paintings of the period celebrated the special status of grandparents, a reflection of the revived concern for continuity and lineage.3

A QUESTION OF SURVIVAL

81

At the same time, public debate over reform legislation had advanced so far that the vulnerability of the family to the demands of the factory system had become an unavoidable issue of concern. Parliamentary and public debate over the “ten-hour movement” initiated by Richard Oastler and Lord Ashley, Earl of Shaftesbury had succeeded: the work day had been reduced—for women and children. But the debate had both revealed and fostered anxiety about whether the factory system was destroying the precious integrity of the family unit by removing the matriarch from the home and by separating children from essential parental guidance. Critics of the new Poor Laws feared that establishing workhouses which separated family members and so threatened the solidity of the working-class family, while Chartists attacked the practice of employing women and children as a moral flaw in the capitalist system.4 Such perceived threats to the family was set in even sharper contrast by the immensely popular image of Victoria’s household, a very model of apparent domestic bliss. By midcentury the royal family, which then included seven of her nine children, was so celebrated by the newly expanded popular press that they were regarded as the entire nation’s domestic unit, a kind of extended family which all classes could claim as their own. What some scholars term a “cult of domesticity” developed, spawning conduct books, inspirational verse and popular fiction which treated the family as a sacred institution. The heightened interest in domestic matters is evident in a list of new periodicals which appeared in this period: The Family Herald (1843); The Family Economist (1848); The Family Friend (1849); The Home Circle (1849); The Home Companion (1852); The Home Friend (1852); The Home Magazine (1856).5 The tone of such journals was often reverential, and their instructional intent was undisguised. The dominant effect of such redirection of attention was the view that the home was not only separate from the workplace, but absolutely opposed to it.6 Accompanying the tendency to bifurcate the world into contending spheres was a set of other separations: generational differences, reflected in contrasting presentations of a parent’s attitudes to the “modern” view of children; separations determined by gender roles, with responsibility for domestic life assigned to wives and daughters; and intensification of class differences, in which gentility could be defined by its exemption from having to work for profit. In all these moves, there is not only an assumption of difference, but an elevation of one over the other. A century and a half later, historians can see that the separation was not so absolute, particularly as it affected family roles and responsibilities.

82


But by mid-century the perception of separation and antagonism was regularly both revealed and scrutinized in literary works. Beyond the domestic sphere, imperial rule was coming under interrogation as a result of news from India. The Sikh Wars of 1845–1846 and 1848–1849—resistance efforts by the Sikh kingdom within Lahore—challenged the legitimacy of British colonial rule, and in entailed military and human losses that raised questions about the viability of sustaining the far-flung Empire. The decades to follow brought increased disagreement over these policies. As Empire had been characterized as another form of informed paternalism, the debate paralleled that concerning patriarchy in all forms of patriarchy. Clustered around the pivotal years of the century is a pair of novels whose titles and narrative structures indicate their intentions to anatomize the family: Dombey and Son (1848) and The Newcomes (1853–1855). Each reflects terms of the contemporary discourse regarding the survival of the family; considered as a group, they embody that discourse, responding to each other, as each reveals the complex effects on narrative and novelistic structure resulting from the intensified interrogation of ideologies of the family within which plots have been fashioned.

Dombey and Son: “The Shadow of a Dream” The extent to which mid-Victorian society promoted the ideology of the family as the ideal social unit is most evident in its celebration and domestication of Christmas. The Christian holy day was transformed into a self-conscious worship of family bliss, replete with traditions that underscored familial relationships. The most important event of the day was the family dinner, presided over by the father and accompanied by toasts and special roles for family members in the celebrations. The Yule log suggested the warmth and comfort of the enclosed family, and the house was decorated, as an altar might have been. Gift-giving among parents and children became an important part of the traditional customs, with an extending gesture to servants, members of the extended household, who were awarded gifts on Boxing Day. In the popular mind Christmas came to be associated with the fiction of Charles Dickens, whose yearly stories for the season were enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of readers.7 However, for all his skill in portraying rosy Yuletide scenes of family harmony, Dickens himself hardly enjoyed many such pleasures. Biographical accounts record his early suffering at his mother’s lack of affection, his father’s improvidence, his feelings of


83

loneliness, and, later, his own marital discord. He may have exaggerated the suffering of his childhood, particularly the lack of familial affections on his psychological development, fictionalizing for the same reasons that he wrote his narratives. David Musselwhite argues that Dickens constructed the “notion of the exceptional and exclusive intimacy and intensity of familial relationships” upon his own experiences, even though such evidence as the autobiographical fragment records so many other, more important influences that “familial determinations shrink into insignificance.”8 However, although lacking parental love and familial harmony, Dickens constructed in his narratives a world in which family stability is a dominant goal. Dramatized scenes of family life appear early and late in critical episodes, and the reunification of a once-threatened family often provides thematic closure to the novels and stories. Of such examples, A Christmas Carol is most explicit, both in its glorification of simple intimate family life, and in the manner in which the narrative is concluded in celebrating that family unit. Memorable as such the scenes of the Cratchits enjoying familial bliss are, happy families are rare in Dickens’s novels; his is a world of orphans, absentee parents, immature and irresponsible fathers, and negligent mothers. Sometimes unified, supportive families appear in the margins, serving as contrasts or even ideals by which the imperfect social units may be measured. Often members of such blissful families are depicted as broadly comic figures, or they appear only as “familiesto-be,” units that emerge only at the end of narratives, but which promise to be enduring. This, as Sylvia Manning points out, shows not only how persistent and important the ideology is, but how unattainable it is: “a vision which Dickens can promise but not render dramatically.”9 Several generations ago Lionel Trilling set the agenda for subsequent critics of Dickens by exposing the dark aspect of Dickens’s representations of home life as “terribly bitter—he specializes in the depiction of inadequate parents and no one knew better than he how truly the Victorian family could be . . . a hell.”10 In recent years Dickens critics have seen his fictions as more complex texts, more revelatory of contemporary social attitudes, but also more ironic. While confirming the textual elevation of the family as an ideal social unit, a number of critics have explored his participation in the formulation as well as the criticism of the ideology of family and socially conditioned depictions of family members—of fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters. In doing so, they have offered such revelations about the texts that Dickens is seen more than ever as a participant in the formulation of Victorian culture in general, and specifically of the family.11

84


Early novels such as Oliver Twist and Martin Chuzzlewit posit the order and mutual support of an ideal family as a means of interpreting and assessing actions and characters, and in later novels the theme of family relations is so meticulously explored that it becomes the central concern, a prominent, complex subject for narrative and ideological discourse. Hard Times offers an array of exploitative, cruel parents, but it also offers a domestic model: Mr. Sleary’s circus troupe is bound together by bonds of affection and support that makes it a model, if only a surrogate, family unit. The shape of the narrative is determined by domestic considerations to an extent that exploration of family relations and functions overshadows the attention given to schools, workplaces, and larger social institutions. Likewise, in Great Expectations, domestic harmony serves as the ultimate goal, embodied in Joe and Biddy’s final appearance sharing a family meal. In that thematic context Pip’s pursuit of wealth and position is established as misguided, while family loyalties motivate his and others’ best actions. In both of these novels domestic bliss, while a functional ideal, is nevertheless nearly inaccessible. Sleary’s circus troupe resembles a gypsy tribe, so different from the world of Gradgrind as to seem unattainable.12 And in Great Expectations Wemmick’s family, the consummate representation of intimacy and bliss, must seek a haven far from urban commotion. He must marry in secret, surround his house with a moat and drawbridge, and conceal his home life from the world of commerce. It might seem that only through subterfuge can he, Jaggers, Pocket, or even Pip sustain a harmonious family life. The novel in which Dickens most fully presents and interrogates the ideology of the family is also his first truly mature work in terms of narrative techniques and complex treatment of themes.13 Dombey and Son is his most thoroughly domestic novel, both in the extent of the attention given to various familial relationships and concerns and in the dominance of those matters in shaping the narrative itself. Its examination of the conflicting ties, complex and intense emotions, and challenging responsibilities imposed by the family are much more thorough, although perhaps no more conclusive, for the narrative acknowledges their inconsistencies, incompatibilities, and even inadequacies. As Lyn Pykett concludes, this novel reveals the “fault-lines of mid-Victorian constructions of gender, and, in particular, of the ‘separate spheres’ ideology.”14 In this, more than any of Dickens’s other novels, the ways in which the terms of ideology determine narrative form are most evident.


85

The novel’s four-part structure is determined by the stages of his family’s history and the declining fortunes of the firm of Dombey and Son, resulting in an integrated identification of the domestic unit with the commercial one. Given perceptions that the two spheres of activity, workplace and hearth, were regarded as antagonistic, many critics of the novel read the text as elevating domestic relations over the crass concern for money and power associated with the world of commerce. John Lucas, for instance, citing John Stuart Mill’s argument that engagement in commerce destroys familial feeling and delicate emotions, sees Dombey’s love for his son as distorted by his financial and social ambitions. In such a reading, Dombey is allied to the emerging world of the railroad, in contrast to the feminized and humane values of Florence, associated with domestic life. However, recent critics have noted how evident Dickens’s ambivalence or even attraction to the new industrial world is.15 Dickens’s original plans for the novel made the domestic plot central and determinate: Dombey’s failures as a father and his eventual restoration through the positive influence of Florence are presented as the plot’s main strand, while his marriage to Edith, with the dramatic narrative effects it adds to the narrative, is only hinted at.16 But the published text reveals how the contemporary anxiety about industrialization, investments, and the exploitation of labor had infiltrated thinking about families. Dombey and Son is not alone in being both a domestic group and a business enterprise; so is the group of individuals located at the Wooden Midshipman, the enterprising Toodles family, and even the profit-seeking Mrs. Skewton and her daughter. The title clearly identifies the narrative’s central concern as the parental relations of Paul Dombey senior. He is, at the start of the narrative, what Malcolm Andrews terms a “new-fashioned man,” that is, one whose identity, and particularly his masculinity, is determined by his occupational status.17 His education in the role of paterfamilias, from the opening scene in which he becomes the father of a son, to the closing ones in which he basks in the pleasure of being a grandfather, determines the narrative contours; the incidents that compose the narrative all focus upon his functions as a parent; of his role as a husband or as head of his firm the reader is given little information.18 The question of whether the relationship of Dombey and Son can become one between Dombey and Daughter is the issue, as is specified at the conclusion of the first number of the serial publication when Walter Gay proposes a toast to “Dombey—and Son—and Daughter” (47). The narrative opens with a scene showing Dombey’s

86


pleasure at becoming the father of Paul, for with the birth of a male heir he can feel assured about the continuation of lineage of the blood and fortune line, an important aspect of patriarchal responsibility. He seems ready for the subsequent responsibilities of training that heir for a profitable life in society so that he can ultimately enjoy the fruits of his efforts in that time in which the heir can care for the parent. The association of Dombey and Son with God the Father and Son, accompanied by the wry claim of AD signifying “Anno Dombei” is more than ironic and audacious. Despite the overt ironic application of the metaphor, it does elevate concern for lineage to a divine level of importance: “He had risen, as his father had before him, in the course of life and death, from Son to Dombey.” Thus much more than the transmission of wealth and status is entailed in continuation of the family lineage, as it would effect an identity that transcends time. Son becomes father, who in turn becomes father, and so on, and the identities of each member are as interrelated and inseparable as those among Persons of the Christian Holy Trinity.19 Of course, the same references expose an ironic implication: Dombey’s pride in family is audacious and even sacrilegious. The ironic aspect of this ideological presentation must be emphasized, for only by seeing through the claims of the characters, and often the narrator, can one discern the underlying dialogical project underway. Dombey’s pride in the family name encompasses the business establishment as well as his bloodline to the extent that he does not distinguish between his roles as father and head of the firm. Accordingly, he regards a female descendant, who cannot participate in the management of the firm, as practically useless: she is only “a base coin that couldn’t be invested” (3). But the narrative as a totality does not subscribe to Dombey’s facile identification of firm and family as synonymous. The commercial enterprise does fail, at the same time that the family line is most threatened and when he has proven himself an utterly unworthy father. And when it does fall, when bankruptcy is reported, the narrative cites his refusal to listen to the advice of anyone as the prime cause of his commercial as well as familial failure. Chapter Three, “In which Mr. Dombey, as a Man and a Father, is seen at the Head of the Home-Department,” offers an anatomy of his paternal failings. Dombey insists on distance from his son, viewing him like a medical specimen or a figure in a theatrical tableau to be observed from a distance in the glass conservatory within his darkened home. Only rarely are direct interactions of father and son reported, as the child’s daily care is provided by his nurse, and later by teachers. If a


87

divine union were the model earlier proposed, the connection between father and son posits the latter more as an object of religious veneration. Dombey’s inadequacies in his prime role of fatherhood are more extensive and deeper: he has been indifferent to his daughter Florence, who is mentioned in his reverie only as an afterthought: in ten years of marriage, he muses, he and his wife “had had no issue.—To speak of; none worth mentioning. There had been a girl some six years before” (3). His lack of regard for her counterbalances any possible sympathy that might be elicited for a new, proud father, and it subsequently becomes the narrative’s central concern, in which parental love is perverted into jealousy of the daughter. The death of Paul adeptly shifts the narrative’s focus to Dombey’s relationship with his surviving child, Florence. The Preface of 1848 refers particularly to the scene of Paul’s death with an amplitude of metaphor that underscores the inevitability suggested from the start of the narrative. If for Dombey the event exposes his own subjection to the malign forces of nature, the same event is presented for the reader’s consideration as inspirational. Death is the “old fashion,” coming as inevitably as the waves of the sea, but in such a way that awe and confidence in a divine order are evoked. Like a popular genre painting of the period, intended to inspire the viewer with the consolation of Christian belief in immortality, the scene is painted in highly colored references and language. Brother and sister hug each other, as golden light streams in on them. The dying child speaks of going on a sea voyage, carried by the waves to a place of bright flowers and beyond . . . to a shore on which a mysterious, unidentified figure stands. The vision reminds even little Paul of a religious print in his school, but here the halo around the figure’s head is even brighter. But the narrative comment allows that the confidence inspired by the moving scene might not be universally so interpreted. “Oh Thank God, all who see it, for that older fashion yet, of Immortality!” (240–41). For those “who see it” the consolation of belief would indeed relieve suffering, but the narrative proceeds with no assumption or claim of that sort; in fact, Dombey’s extended grief suggests that he cannot find solace in such a religious belief, an assumption earlier established in the deflated description of Paul’s christening. That event is not dramatized, but referred to only as pouring warm water for “taking the chill off; which millions of gallons boiling hot could not have done for the occasion” (62). Dombey’s identification of family with firm merely acknowledges the dynastic concern—that family lineage be extended. But his

88


identification of self with firm, and his imposition of such identity on his son are not the causes of his subsequent suffering. While the expansion of railroads is held responsible for disruptions in urban life, Dombey and Son is not established as a destructive entity. Indeed, the functions of the family firm are hardly explored in the text. Dombey desires to preserve his lineage through the family enterprise, honor its name and assure its continuity—motives not questioned in the narrative. Identifying family with firm is no more surprising than associating it with pieces of property, which was the case in preindustrial society. Throughout the narrative, various embodiments of supportive and outreaching families appear, constituting an ideal, and constructing an ideology in which those relationships are posited as ultimate values. The ideal is sustained through direct presentation, metaphoric associations with a divine order, contrasting subplots and, most consequentially, by the workings of the narrative itself, progressing toward the creation of one integrated model family unit which is presented in the last chapter as a narrative and thematic conclusion. In the various representations of coherent family units, the components of an ideal unit are established: manifested love, open communication, mutual dependence of members, adaptability, and concentration on the constructive responsibilities of training the young. The Toodles family constitutes the model of an integrated, functional family, characterized by self-sacrifice and love: parents show concern for children and love for each other. Mr. Toodles, in fact, sets his family above all other concerns and reminds Dombey of that priority on several occasions. Unlike Wemmick’s family, the Toodles participate in the larger economy, particularly in their financial dependence on the expansion of the railway system. The union of family members is so strong that it can withstand strain and even separation imposed by the new industrial system: when Polly is taken from the household, the family adapts to the constraints, and later allows Rob to be enrolled in the Charitable Grinders. The father works as a railroad stoker, exploited by an industry that from its description in the text seems brutal and even diabolical, associated with roaring flames and noxious ashes. But the railroad in this text serves more than a single symbolic function, representing social progress as well as a threat to social life at the same time.20 And in this identification of Toodles with the railway, the metaphoric implications are those of energy in the form of fire. The fire imagery with which Toodles is associated is extensive: Toodles regularly appears covered with coal dust and ashes; his son is named after a boiler; he even acts at times


89

like a locomotive, shoveling in food, “as if he were stoking himself” (564). But the imagery of fire, a strong contrast to that of the waves of the sea, has in this narrative positive, constructive associations. Toodles’s fire is that of the domestic hearth, a benevolent and unifying force. There is no evidence that his employment on the railroad has corrupted his character or limited his ability to function as a responsible father. When Rob the Grinder reveals his fear of meeting his father, he corrects Carker’s assumption that he has a “bad father”: “‘No, Sir!’ returned Rob, amazed. ‘There ain’t a better nor a kinder father going, than mine is’” (329). Strict as he is, Toodles is loved by his son for his unquestioned love and support.21 The Toodles household, while the model of a functioning family, is not set against the commercial world, but almost comfortably within it, and in the end it even prevails, underlining the contrast with the Dombey household in its financial prosperity.22 A second manifestation of the ideal is as well integrated into the system, although its products or wares are so out of fashion as to make it seem an anachronism; the surrogate family unit of Solomon Gills and his nephew Walter Gay, identified with their commercial enterprise, the Wooden Midshipman. This surrogate family is remarkable for its inclusiveness, embracing Captain Cuttle and eventually Florence. And no matter how unlikely it is to succeed, Solomon Gills’s attempts to preserve his shop is presented as worthy, so the financial strains on the owner and nephew do not weaken its internal family ties. The metaphoric associations of the sea, nautical commerce and travel are no more positive, nor negative, than those of the railroad; they are forms of industry compatible with, not opposed to healthy social relationships. Anachronistic though the enterprise may be, the world of the Wooden Midshipman functions effectively in providing support for its members. Appropriate though the rule of the father may be, it is weakened or made questionable when abused by such as Dombey, indicating an implied ideological shift in support of mutual or contingent parentchild relationships. And in the absence of supportive, loving patriarchal concern, brother-sister relationships are elevated to a higher level of value. In fact, the most complete and satisfying instances of love presented in the text are those between brothers and sisters. Florence’s love for Paul, occasioned by their father’s aloofness, is depicted as sacred, more intimate than any other relationship in the narrative. And during Florence’s period of flight from her father the relationship with Walter, whom she called her brother, becomes more precious than

90


that with any substitute parent. Other brother-sister relationships reflect similar views: Dombey’s sister dutifully reflects his pride in the family name and lineage; John and Harriet Carker represent mutual love and the benevolence of siblings even to their miscreant brother. The narrative does not explore the limits of these relationships, as the most important two are transformed by the narrative—the relationship of Florence and Paul terminated by his death, and that between Florence and Walter becomes one of marital, not sibling, love. While in these sibling relationships questions of authority do not arise, the absolute standard of mutual love is insisted upon, opening the possibility that the imperative of loving and forgiving the parent is not necessarily related to authority, rule or power. While to social critics of Dickens’s time, and many family historians of this century as well, the family was viewed as adversely affected by the industrialization and urbanization of mid-century England, this narrative does not regard them as adversarial. The association of individuals with their commercial enterprises or their roles of employment is presented without judgment, acknowledging a tendency as natural as identification of the landed gentry with their estates. It is not Dombey’s identification of himself and his descendants with the firm that brutalizes him, but his own insecurity and jealousy that drive him to exclude all but father and son from his consideration. In reality, a separation of work from family life was underway. Within the nineteenth century in England there occurs a process of accelerated seclusion of the family from servants, members of the extended family, and neighbors, as revealed in the drastic changes in domestic architecture. There was a clear transfer of work from the household to the factory, mill, or office. Such developments lead some historians to conclude that the family was increasingly seen as separate from its society, a haven from the world of work. In such interpretations, the traditions of the hearth, the structure of authority, and the pleasures of family life, came to be endowed with enhanced value by their discrepancy from the larger world. As mentioned above, in surrounding his house with a moat, and secluding his home life from his work, Wemmick of Great Expectations may reveal a perception that the home needs be a haven. But to generalize from a comic situation that this view characterizes all of Dickens’s work, or this text specifically, is unwarranted. In fact, it is Dombey’s own attempts to separate and seclude himself and his family from social contacts that reveal his most grievous flaws. Before the narrative of this novel begins, Dombey has shown an extreme degree of privacy from even his own family. He did


91

not allow his first wife into his private domain, and he resented any indication that she might impinge on his closed world. That same set of selfish but insecure impulses motivated his cruel treatment of Florence, and his attempts to dominate his second wife. Destructive and self-destructive as these acts are, they are not simply ascribable to his commercial interests. Even his disastrous marriage to Edith is less likely to be motivated by his financial ambitions as to his interest in securing his family line and his own material comfort. Dombey insists on his privacy, his separation from most of the world. When approached by Toodles, who expresses concern for his wayward son, Dombey seethes not so much at the worker’s effrontery as at his invasion of the world that Dombey hoped to reserve as his own. Toodles wears a piece of black crape on his cap, a sign of his mourning for a dead son, and Dombey is insulted by the implied claim that such an experience might be shared (297). The shift of resentment from Toodles, for his invasion of the private realm, to the dead Paul, for allowing in outsiders, if only by his death, reveals Dombey’s near paranoia. The hubris of which he is guilty is a familiar Victorian concern, the seclusion of self from common bonds that is the subject of Tennyson’s “The Palace of Art.” In that poem, and in such others as “Locksley Hall” and “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After,” rapidly advancing commerce and technology to varying degrees expose personal greed, an argument that Carlyle might have promoted. But nowhere in the texts are such commercial concerns proven to be causally linked to personal failings. What Dombey aspires to is a degree of exclusion that precedes his longing for wealth or social status, one that manifests insecurity rather than a conviction of social superiority. When Dombey is brought low by the failure of his second marriage, the narrator provides an extended analysis of the warring partners, accusing them both of overweening pride. Pride, Dickens had told Forster while working on the text, was to be the book’s subject, and the title character is clearly driven by this sin from the start. But the judgment rendered of Edith’s actions is more severe than that of her husband—surprisingly so. He was driven by a single idea, which the narrator insists was not truly “an unnatural characteristic.” Also, an extenuating circumstance is mentioned: Dombey was “cooped” from human company that might have challenged his obsession; he was surrounded by sycophants because he had rejected so much normal human contact. She, on the other hand, focused only on hatred of her husband, and no qualifying explanation is offered in the text, although the reader could cite her financial vulnerability and the

92


continuing victimization by her mother. But even the fact of her miserable past is not offered in the text as any justification of her elopement with Carker, which the text makes explainable not as sheer impulse, despair, or self-defense, but as an act of pure destruction and revenge. Joseph Boone regards this as Dickens’s “unconscious” undermining of “the legitimacy of Edith’s rebellion against her husband Dombey—and hence against the larger social systems he represents.”23 To sustain his own “idealizing vision of marriage and of woman,” Boone asserts, the narrator makes her escape with Carker “morally reprehensible.” The authorial disquisition on pride as the master vice of these two characters is extensive and detailed, and even includes a claim that human depravity and moral failings are infectious in the same way that industrial pollution affects human health (683–85). Again, it is tempting to read the florid paragraphs describing the poverty of London as productive of moral ills or as metonymic of a broader corruption of life. But syntactically the text makes the two forces separate and only occasionally metaphoric. The pride that drives Dombey is described as related to his selfconfinement, which itself was caused by his resentment of others. In this circular argument pride becomes both the cause and the manifestation of a curious personal insecurity. On this occasion, his pride is nearly excused by referring to it as caused by his early experience, and it is presented metaphorically in terms of a captive bird: Coop any son or daughter of our mighty mother within narrow range, and in the people standing round, and what is Nature to the willing captive who has never risen up upon the wings of a free mind—drooping and useless soon—to see her in her comprehensive truth. (683)

Images of caged birds appear frequently in this text. The exploitative Carker, described as “feline,” keeps a caged parrot in his home, a bird that is given prominence in several scenes and in the illustrations. In his office Carker is attended by a Mr. Perch, whose strange motions and gestures (“bending his body at every step as if it were the delight of his life to bow,” 319) are birdlike; before being employed by Carker, Rob the Grinder had been a bird catcher; and even Cousin Feenix, as the agent reuniting Florence with Edith, functions like the mythical bird of his name, enabling a rising from the destruction of previous lives.24 Edith has suffered the confinement and degradation of a caged bird, first by her mother, then by Dombey and finally by Carker, a process she describes in her final confrontation of that final traducer


93

(800–809). And Florence has been caged in her father’s home no less than her brother was, and even after she flees from him to the Wooden Midshipman, she is still described as acting like a caged bird. The narrative, then, presents a series of characters and situations figured by birds, establishing and amplifying human tendencies to restrict the freedom of others and to confine one’s self from participation in society. Themes of confinement and exploitation occur frequently in Dickens’s works; prisons, poor houses, and jail-like schools are common settings, and the advancement of central characters is usually constrained by the selfish control of malign figures. But parents are often deceased or virtually absent due to their own incapacities. The oedipal theme dominates the narratives, provoking Anny Sadrin to call him the “great father-killer.”25 The elevation of the intimacy and intensity of family relationships is itself a construct, one that David Musselwhite has regarded as a lamentable one, homogenizing what had been dissimilarities, straining parallels of character and action (such as the comparison of Carker with Dombey) and relinquishing observation for neurotic introspection.26 One could assume that taking on a subject so vested with importance by social critics and already so loaded with emotional coloration, any author would run the risk of sentimentality. But the problems with this text are not specifically those. The scene of Paul’s death is presented in poetic and exhortative fashion, like the death scenes of many of Dickens’s novels; but within the narrative it is effectively placed. On the other hand, the plausibility of the narrative’s conclusion surely strains credibility: the recovery and reformation of Florence, the accelerated fall of Edith, the surprising lack of sympathy for her as a suffering wife, and the reliance on contrivance to transform Walter from brother to husband and father. Strain there is in the account of such events, particularly at the conclusion, but such is the case in all of Dickens’s novels. If we approach this text using Bakhtinian assumptions, if we proceed from the premise that the narrative sets up a subject for comprehensive exploration, if we acknowledge the function of the narrative as dialogic (seeing its subplots and counter-examples as being as indicative as the main plot line), and if we merely admit the unlikelihood of any purportedly objective account of a subject so emotionally charged and so much the subject of social dispute, we can accept the contrivances of the concluding chapters as logical, although not dramatically satisfying. The entire series of incidents, most causally related to form a narrative and others serving to expand its significations, constitutes an

94


ideological text of historical importance specifically as it explores contending perceptions of the nature and limits of fatherly rule. Dombey’s incapacity as a father to Florence is easily enumerated: he regards a daughter as inherently inferior and less valuable than a son; he resents her health after his son’s illness and death; for most of the narrative he regards her as an intruder, an unpleasant reminder of her dead sibling. His most heinous impulse is pure jealousy: he resents his daughter for attracting the affections of his dying son, and, once he remarries, for diverting his new wife’s affection. Concentrating on protecting and enhancing his status in the eyes of his offspring, Dombey could look to the future when Paul would become his source of pleasure; he could forestall the receipt of affection from his infant son, treating him as a valued specimen and sending him away to school to enhance his capacities to become a true Dombey. But ultimately, he looks forward to being the sole recipient and sharer in the attentions of the son. When Paul expends some of that valued attention on his sister, as when Edith manages to show a humane side to his daughter, affection from which he has been excluded, Dombey’s claim as father is threatened. Only once does the narrative acknowledge the presence of any normal paternal affection, in one of those “yielding moments in the lives of the sternest and harshest men,” when he recognizes her as the “spirit of his home” and the potential source of reciprocal love and harmony. But even in that moment, Florence might only remind him of his lost favorite: she “became blended with the child he had loved, and he could hardly separate the two” (532). The climactic turn of the narrative is contained in the chapter entitled “The Thunderbolt,” in which Edith flees from Dombey, and when Dombey, approached by Florence, who wishes to console him, strikes his daughter. The chapter is climactic, terminating the course of Dombey’s aspirations to secure respect and even love. Furthermore, it concludes the struggle of Edith to resist the manipulation by a husband she does not love, and it constitutes the most explicit realization by Florence of her own forsaken state. But in all three instances, the narrative resists opportunities for sentimental embellishment, directing attention instead to more subtle narrative themes. When Dombey breaks into the room and discovers that Edith has fled (703), he notes the discarded clothes and jewelry only, indicating that he views her primarily as a material possession and ornament. Discarding them, she has rejected his attempts to make her into a creature that could love and sexually please him. Her expression of disdain for him, recorded in the mirror, is what most offends him, triggering his own sense of


95

foolishness at having expected something so different. His reactions are expressions of only his self-concern. The exposition of Edith’s motivations at this point raises a serious question about the text’s authority. While the chapter begins by noting that she, like her husband, is trapped—by a “manacle that joined their fettered hands, and straining that so harshly, in their shrinking asunder, that it wore and chafed to the bone”—her pride, strong as her husband’s, does not dominate her nor adequately account for her actions. When she tells Florence that she will break off communication with her, she does not add that Dombey had ordered such a break, nor that he had threatened to harm Florence if she did not do so (687). Although she attempts to preserve a relationship with her stepdaughter through secret embraces and silent gestures, while sustaining a civil but hostile relationship with her husband, she tells her husband that she has lost respect for herself (695). Thus, when Dombey delivers his final challenge to her, she initially resists, solely to protect Florence from discovering her father’s cruelty. But when Dombey persists in ordering her submission to his will, she specifies the reasons for her resistance. Enumerated in mounting order of seriousness, they are his continuing oppression of her, his insistence that she participate in hurting Florence, and, finally and that his forcing of his daughter to witness this ultimate act of degradation (694). Reduced to the level of self-loathing, Edith rebels out of concern for her vulnerable stepdaughter; this rebellion might be justified as resulting from a choice between contending responsibilities—to the husband or to the stepdaughter. However, this justifiable and even admirable act is narrated as though she is acting improperly. Such authorial judgment is conveyed obliquely through the image of her diamond tiara, which failed to warn her about the threat to her “tarnished honor” (694–95). Subsequently such moral disapproval is articulated more explicitly: “She had better have turned hideous and dropped dead, than have stood up with such a smile upon her face, in such a fallen spirit’s majesty of scorn and beauty” (697). Edith has fallen to corruption, and is even compared to “some lower animal.” Such absolute denunciation offered by the narrative is extreme and unwarranted, given the degradation to which she has been subjected. In striking contrast is the judgment of the third affected party in “The Thunderbolt” chapter, Florence. She is struck both by the sudden realization of her father’s hatred when he accuses her of being in league with Edith, and physically by him when he strikes her. Her immediate response is stolid and determined, and again the narrative

96


eschews sentimentalizing of the scene in favor of a stark statement that she has thus lost her father: She did not sink down at his feet; she did not shut out the sight of him with her trembling hands; she did not weep; she did not utter one work of reproach. But she looked at him, and a cry of desolation issued from her heart. For as she looked, she saw him murdering that fond idea to which she had held in spite of him. She saw his cruelty, neglect, and hatred dominant above it, and stamping it down. She saw she had no father upon earth, and ran out, orphaned, from his house. (704)

Florence is exonerated, while Edith is condemned. Florence’s escape, unlike Edith’s, is described not in terms of desertion but as refuge from a house of horrors: she goes into “the unexpected glare and freedom of the morning” (705). Cruel as they are, the authorial judgments are unambiguous: Dombey’s failures as a parent and as a husband are judged because of his immense selfishness; Edith, although conceivably justified to leave a spouse who has so abandoned his parental and marital responsibilities, is denounced, nearly demonized; and Florence retains her high principled status while being freed from filial obligations because of her father’s cruelty. The contradictions are striking: the wife is castigated for resisting her husband’s tyranny, but the daughter is authorized to do so. A plausible explanation for this contradiction is the narrative’s overall focus on the patriarch, making these two affiliated figures secondary in function. Dombey is the worst of Dickens’s parents; he is not merely negligent or irresponsible but malign. In his daughter’s words, he is guilty of “cruelty, neglect, and hatred dominant above it, and stamping it down” (704). Despite his expressed concern for his son, he was always disqualified by his vanity from being a responsible patriarch. The title, and the reminder near the novel’s end, indicates that the issue of concern has consistently been patriarchy. Yet in its closing phase, the text attempts an exoneration of this irresponsible parent by claiming what had been initially hinted at: the identification of the human patriarch with the Divine Father. The positive disposition of Dombey and the others in the concluding chapters strains credulity, but repeats the convention of imposing some degree of redemption and satisfaction on what has been a disturbing narrative account. The virtuous Florence finds solace in the


97

cozy atmosphere of the Wooden Midshipman and eventually attains to happiness as Walter’s wife. In doing so, she chooses a kind of brother as her spouse, thus relegating her father to a dependent position, rather than that of a patriarch. Dombey is redeemed after suffering bankruptcy, miraculously cured of his selfishness but tamed, chastised and submissive. In the last few chapters nearly the entire series of negligent and exploitative parents are forgiven, in scenes that suggest such a response is imperative or biologically determined. Edith forgives the aged Cleopatra, Mrs. Skewton, when the latter appeals to her daughter: “For I nursed you!” (619). And Alice not only forgives her mother, but exonerates her from blame, ascribing responsibility for her failings not to society, nor on her mother, but on herself (870). The implied application of an absolute moral standard that requires submission to fatherly rule recalls the prodigal son motif, so adapted as to direct attention from the patriarch’s forgiveness and the potential resentment among siblings to the appropriation of authority by the son, or in this case the daughter, who becomes the reconciling, reunifying force, while insisting on continuing some level of obedience to the rule of the father. While the preceding narrative focused on tracing the decline of Dombey in his role as father, the denouement turns its focus to the succeeding generation: Florence begins a new family with Walter, Toots marries Susan, Mr. Feeder marries Miss Blimber, and even Bunsby marries Mrs. MacStinger. Prodigal children are reunited: Florence, regarded as a prodigal by her own admission of guilt, is reunited with her father, and Rob the Grinder returns to his family. However, in doing so, the narrative succumbs to melodramatic effects and unconvincing strings of causalities, a shift noted by many scholars. In one sense, the entire narrative has defied expectations: the death of Paul so early in the narrative challenges conventions, and the rapid shifts among the various subplots makes for a less than continuous, harmonious account throughout the text. But in imposing such a set of plot contortions and unbelievable reformations of character strains the reader’s credulity to the point of pain. Florence’s self-accusation of violating a rule of filial responsibility to her father is so inconsistent with the narrative that precedes it that it demands attention; it cannot be dismissed or invalidated. It and the other concluding statements of the imperative of loving and honoring the parent constitute an endorsement of a central tenet of the ideology of the family. Dombey does not gain redemption by changing his ways; he is granted it because such behavior is mandated by reverence for the rules of the family. If seclusion from others had so corrupted him

98


(“cooped” him from corrective elements, the text phrases it), he remains secretive at the end: he is said to “hoard” his granddaughter, the new Florence, and even attempts to keep her to himself: “He is fondest of her and most loving to her, when there is no creature by” (925). Even at the end, seclusion from the larger world is sought, despite the demonstration that no individual and no family can operate independent of the world of commerce and social activities. How, then, can the presentation of the previous narrative line be validated? For the first three-quarters of the narrative, Florence is subjected to such disregard and then cruelty by her father that in the crucial episode in which she reacts by walking out, the action is described as legitimate. Yet at the end she repents, implying that no matter how badly he has treated her, she has an obligation to honor and love him. If that is the operative moral code implied by the narrative, then was Edith right in marrying Dombey, for she was only obeying her mother, as the commandments she reads on the altar instructs her? Yet the narrative presentation of that event imposes a negative judgment on her. Furthermore, earlier in the narrative, both Mrs. Skewton and Good Mrs. Brown make similar claims, defending themselves with feeble appeals of their maternal rights, claims that are presented as ludicrous, if not despicable. In this instance, adherence to the strict moral dicta of love for parents, a vestige of ideological claims voiced in support of strict patriarchy and absolute monarchy, requires that the narrative end with actions that strain credibility and challenge sympathy. Having earlier questioned the benevolence of patriarchal rule, the narrative must twist itself painfully to assert endorsement of it, leading us back to questions of why Florence’s actions seemed justified, while Edith’s did not. It is true that for Florence an issue of self-protection would be raised, for the text has made clear how much parental love was needed; but a nearly identical argument could be made for Edith, who was, after all, escaping a cruel husband. But in mid-century discourse regarding the family, the matter of defining newly constrained functions was contentious. Just as children were increasingly educated outside the household, the mobility required to seek employment forced interrogation of the very limits of parental rule. Furthermore, the emerging arguments in favor of protecting the property rights of women and even allowing for divorce brought patriarchal rule under scrutiny, prompting discourse in which religious analogs had been offered. In a text in which spousal abuse is exposed, the inadequacy of such a defense of patriarchy remains striking. The motif of the prodigal son prescribes


99

forgiveness for the child who has strayed, and that motif underlies much of the action of the concluding episodes; but the Prodigal Wife is offered no such remission of guilt in the ideology of the period nor in this text. Instead, Alice and Edith are exiled so as to provide the opportunity to elevate Florence as the new matriarch. But doing so exposes a problematic issue in family ideology. As Catherine Waters argues: The removal of Alice and Edith from the narrative paves the way for Florence to restore harmony through a reconstitution of the middleclass family; but the very failure of the narrative to assimilate these “dark women” indicates the limits of familial ideology even as their 27 deviance serves to highlight the virtues of the domestic woman.

At the narrative’s conclusion parents have either died or been displaced; Dombey remains, but disarmed of power and unworthy of respect, although still worthy of pity or filial affection. There is no one left who will wield patriarchal power; in the next generation, Florence and Walter will replicate the previous one with their own children, the next Paul and Florence, and she promises they will teach their offspring to love and honor Dombey. However, there is no controlling force setting standards of behavior, no figure of authority against which a daughter or son would be inclined to offer resistance. As a result, there is nothing left to narrate, except a tidy list of unions and reunions among minor characters. Dombey survives—but emasculated, drained of power and unworthy of respect. Edith has been banished, never to see Florence again. Brothers and sisters remain, and they aspire to a new order in which the family, the firm, and even the society may prosper, but as to accounting for human life, Cousin Feenix supplies the conclusion: citing Shakespeare, he terms it only “the shadow of a dream” (919). Denying causality, and even questioning the possibility of understanding human actions perceiving actuality, precludes the possibility of constructing a narrative. The dream world in which the reader is left resembles those which conclude Bleak House and Great Expectations, which are also facile escapes into fantasy from a cumulative acknowledgement of disorder and impotence.28

“Wishes and Secrets Quite beyond the Parental Control”: The Newcomes Intensifying perceptions of the threat to patriarchy by a menacing commercial system elicited an old defensive position in addition to the

100


moral and religious imperative to honor parents: the claim of tradition—of lineage. Pride in one’s genealogy had long been promoted by the aristocracy, for the obvious purpose of affirming their power and status. In mid-century England, when changes in property ownership and limitations of full participation in civil government had reduced some families to a level financially inferior to comparable members of the new mercantile classes, one’s bloodline became the sole remaining quality by which the upper class could be defined. The long-emerging and now dominant middle class came to evince the same pride in family lineage to support a claim that their newly recognized status had been long deserved. A Scottish family might advertise its noble connections by wearing the clan’s tartan—a nineteenth-century construction; modest urban dwellings might be given grand names that suggested some degree of continuity of lineage. Class-conscious families could scour church and town records to find illustrious ancestors so that Durbeyfields could become d'Urbervilles. Even the custom of citing the eldest son as “Junior” or, better yet, listing his name as the Fourth or Fifth of that line became common practices of a class that wanted to prove that its status was not just recently acquired. The longevity of a family firm might be acclaimed in its storefront, implying that its survival over generations indicated its reliability or integrity. Consonant with professing claims of noble lineage was the determination to advance into a higher class by means of an advantageous marriage: the practice of hypergamy. Although the frequency of such marriages between members of different classes has been debated by historians, by the mid-nineteenth century hypergamy had become a solid convention of the emerging British novel, with a particular twist that it is more often the woman than the man who succeeds in securing an advanced social position.29 In such texts, for a man to marry above his class seems crass and exploitative; for a woman to do so is considered prudential. The blatant desire for advancing social status in this way was an easy target for satire. The attempts of anxious middle-class families to advance in this way had been mocked by Fielding and Richardson a century earlier, but in a century in which the economic system promised easier mobility among classes, the novelists of the mid-Victorian period had not only greater raw material for fictionalizing, but an audience well aware of the attempts at gaining respectability all around them. Dickens and Trollope offer colorful and amusing examples of social climbers, but it is William Makepeace Thackeray, the most astute


101

social critic among the novelists of the period, who most thoroughly examines the phenomenon. The Newcomes traces the social and personal progress of a family over three generations as it aspires to advance its standing from a set of newcomers to a family line of noble ancestry. Its most frequent tactic is hypergamic matches, resulting in a social system imputed by Thackeray to be so widespread as to be termed a marriage market. The claimed prevalence of this practice underlies the entire narrative, appearing in multiple plots, but focuses primarily on a single patriarch, Colonel Thomas Newcome, and his dealing with his son, Clive, who is destined to continue the family’s name. But the practice of arranging marriages extends to allied family members, the courses of which form the heart of the narrative. As in the other texts under consideration, the structure of this novel is determined by a series of threats to a family’s continuation, extending from an initiatory set of events that establishes the grounds of contention and concluding with a markedly qualified resolution in which its fortunes seem to be secured. The gross architecture of this family novel is clear and solid: the narrative is composed of a series of events that threaten the survival of the Newcomes during a period in which authoritarian control, attained by claims of financial power and a distinguished family line, is threatened by financial loss, scandal, and dissipation through the integration of family members who do not make the same claims on class distinction. Although the family’s decline from eminence is so severe as to threaten its survival, in the end it emerges intact and possibly strengthened, supported by affective ties more than by financial acquirements. The account of the fall from fortune and the eventual rescue of the crucial, focal character, Colonel Thomas Newcome, provides the pattern for the narrative: his return to England, reunion with his son, and return to active participation in the family opens the narrative, and his death concludes it. The Colonel is depicted primarily as a father, but a reformed one who does not seek the usual expressions of patriarchal respect; he is also a husband who was unhappy in his marriage, a business man whose gullibility made him responsible for an immense financial failure, and a once-revered military leader who is reduced to a childlike passivity, responding the divine roll call with a humble “Adsum.” He is, in other words, the figure in whom the conflicting ideological positions are acted out, rather than an idealized embodiment of any type. And in him the relationships among those various roles are also established: his behavior as a parent reflects his military stature and qualifies

102


it, while his failure to resist the machinations of Rummum Loll reflect his inadequacies in domestic management as well. In the account of his fall from fortune, the insidious influence of the mercantile world on family structure and function is exposed, and his failure as a parent parallels the erosion of the imperial power of the nation. He is in many respects the opposite of Paul Dombey, and the parallels in the narratives of these two figures reveal the mid-century ambivalence about numerous aspects of patriarchy. In the process of tracing the fall and rise of the family and of the patriarch, the narrative examines a set of ideological issues of contention that come to the surface in a period of family stress—particularly concern for distinction of lineage, sibling relationships, and the family’s concern for assuring its survival through controlling or at least affecting the marriage decisions of the young. However, the association of the family with the larger and increasingly materialistic society makes any final assertion of the family’s resumption of power and integrity problematic, an effect that is most evident in the peculiarities of the narrative’s conclusion. Although the question of whether the Newcome family, and the family as a social institution, is not, at the end of the novel, resolved, the text offers a comprehensive discourse on a subject of contemporary importance: the perceived need for intensification of family relationships as a defense against growing threats from commercial society. As a means of securing the prime social institution, both claims of historical continuity and internal coherence are commonplace. At the point at which the narrative opens, the Newcome family name has only recently claimed genteel attention, and the claims of aristocratic or heroic ancestors have been exposed as shams: the elder patriarch may have been a foundling, and was surely employed as a weaver. Nevertheless, the issue of assuring the continuity and advancement of the line is of prime concern. But, as is usual in the conventions of the novel, such unions of advantage are set in opposition to love matches, and in this text they usually appear as pairs. Thus the elder Thomas Newcome is reported to have married first a woman he loved; when she died in childbirth—the birth of Thomas, later referred to as the Colonel—he married the wealthy Sophia Hobson, sister of his employer, and thereby advanced his and the family’s status. His son’s pursuit of his first love was insufficiently advantageous and so blocked by his stepmother, and he subsequently married the widow of one of his military colleagues in India. Their marriage was unhappy: they “lived but indifferently together,” and she died when their son, Clive, was young. The Colonel’s stepbrothers marry for social advancement,


103

although it is ultimately revealed that one of them had earlier had fathered two children by a poor factory girl. The Colonel’s son, Clive, loves his cousin Ethel, but he marries the weak and dominated Rosey Mackenzie. Ethel, in turn, rejects Clive’s suit for more socially advantageous ones, although her father’s financial disgrace leaves her unwed at the end. In all of these cases, parental pressure overrules romantic love, a manifestation of the mass marriage market against which the narrator inveighs. Most of the marriages are unhappy, making courtship appear to be more than usually hazardous, and the unions given fullest attention involve abuse by one or the other party. Unlike the players in the usual courtship plot, the focal pair of young lovers, Ethel and Clive, are left unwed at the actual narrative’s end. The concluding chapter of the novel reports that the two are “living comfortably together . . . and a great deal happier now than they would have been had they married at first when they took a liking to each other as young people, and when she was a mere young lady of fashion.”30 The narrative account begins at the point of Colonel Newcome’s return from India, a subject that is not incidental to the text. Thackeray’s birth in Calcutta made him particularly attentive to that country’s culture and its immediate discords, as his biographers have pointed out. The Sikh Wars of 1845–1846 and 1848–1849, while proving England’s military dominance, nonetheless raised questions at home about imperial designs. The 1849 Battle of Chillianwala entailed huge human losses—500 British officers and men—so that imperial rule, which had been proclaimed and defended as an instance of benevolent paternal responsibility came to be interrogated for its costs, particularly in human counts. The specific references in this text to investments in India, particularly the Bundelcund Bank, reveal a concern with the fragility of the Empire and the hazards resulting from the commercial reliance on a culture that was so visibly being exploited. The Colonel becomes a director of the bank, and a major part of the Newcome family fortune becomes dependent on the security of the institution, so that the failure of the bank constitutes a financial disaster for the family. Patrick Brantlinger points out how the depiction of Rummum Loll, the Bengali tycoon who formed the bank, reveals Thackeray’s imperialist disdain for and mistrust of the emerging entrepreneurial class of Indians.31 But echoes of and allusions to another figure of the British Empire are more revealing. In numerous details, the Colonel is depicted as resembling the complex Charles Napier, known for his heroic military leadership in India, but also for

104


his denunciation of English commercial exploitation of that area. Among early accusations was the following: Our object in conquering India, the object of all our cruelties was money . . . a thousand millions sterling are said to have been squeezed out of India in the last sixty years. Every shilling of this has been picked out of blood, wiped, and put into the murderers’ pockets, but, wipe and wipe the money as you will, the “Damned spot” 32 will not “out.”

His military experiences in India even strengthened his aversions to the East India Company and to English colonial policies. Napier, who died in 1853, remained in the public eye, and his series of achievements was overshadowed by the mounting turmoil and civil rebellions that were to culminate in just a few years in the Indian Mutiny of 1857. A controversial figure in his time, he had earned respect from the Indian ruling parties as well as popular acclaim for his military leadership. While Thackeray’s depictions no doubt reveal imperialist attitudes, Colonel Newcome nonetheless reveals a sympathy for India and its welfare that is benevolent, if nonetheless paternalistic. And this analogy between imperial policy and domestic management echoed the ongoing discourse questioning not only paternalism but patriarchy. The novel’s subtitle, Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family, immediately undercuts its significance by its redundant, insistent adjectives, thus establishing a satiric tone that is maintained throughout the text. But it proceeds further, into a disputation of the very notion of respectability. The family’s claims of a distinguished lineage invite satiric deflation, and many features of this narrative point to its comic effects. Richard Doyle’s caricatures tend toward the grotesque, exaggerating the flaws of the worst characters, but they as often do just the opposite, elevating figures such as Ethel and Colonel Thomas Newcome and qualifying hearty satire by the inclusion of more gentle figures, often background figures, such as figurations of Thackeray himself or sentimental reminders of happy family life. Framing the narrative as a fable provides it with a comic distance—a separate space, quite similar to that of a theater, in which human dramas may be acted out—and with the moral claims of the traditional Aesopian animal tale. The overall effect is to sustain, beneath the level of social satire and sociological exploration, a statement of indomitable hope that ideal family relationships—even parental authority and filial loyalty—will survive.


105

Preservation and continuation of the family line are controlled in this narrative predominately by female characters, a set of determined and skilled women who so treasure social advancement that they exploit the younger generation to that end. Thus a key responsibility of the patriarch is already assumed to be made minimal. Lady Kew is the principal manager of the commerce in marriageable young virgins, and she is candid in proclaiming that advancing the family’s social status justifies controlling the next generation in the important business of matchmaking. Likewise the elder Thomas’s second wife, Althea, accustomed to ruling so completely that her husband will not oppose her even when she mistreats his son, decides on the suitability or unsuitability of potential partners for her stepson. The wives of both the Hobson brothers are given free reign in the social affairs that affect the advancement of their families. Worst of all is the Campaigner, Mrs. Mackenzie, who not only and abuses uses her daughter to satisfy her own material desires, but ultimately drives her daughter mad. However, Pendennis’s summary comments on this villain reveal the moral standard that permeates his account: “The wretched woman, whose Self was always predominant, . . . though she loved her daughter after her own fashion, [she] never forgot her own vanity or passion” (II, 359). “Her own fashion” would seem no more than some vestigial impulse, for the actions described in the narrative establish her as a selfish, materialistic monster. Manipulating minor characters such as Madame d’Ivry amplify the message. Contrasting model women appear, but in marginal positions. Lord Kew’s mother, Lady Walham, makes a brief appearance; she imposed her strong religious convictions on her son, against his inclinations, but at his deathbed “even more for herself than for him, implored forgiveness” (I, 354). Again, vanity is set against parental love, indicating that a better model of behavior would be concentration on the child’s needs. But her effect on the plot is in her open opposition to the manipulations of Lady Kew and her social set. When she is dismissed from a major part in the narrative; we are told, “Our history has had little to do with characters resembling this lady. It is of the world, and things pertaining to it. Things beyond it, as the writer imagines, scarcely belong to the novelist’s province” (I, 353). Clive’s friend J. J. Ridley, an accomplished painter and a morally principled individual, appears in the text only to provide a model of real artistic talent and solid friendship to the more superficial Clive. But his mother is afforded a fulsome tribute for her maternal qualities and sensibility (I, 108–10). Sarah Mason, the sister of the Colonel’s first

106


wife, makes several appearances, representing the simplicity and integrity of the world of the common folk, contrasted with the fashion and strife of the Mayfair families.33 She serves as a measure by which other characters, particularly the Colonel and his stepbrothers may be judged. On the margins of the narrative one proponent of domestic virtue appears, but in so exaggerated a manner as to deflate the moral certitude of her position. Although Laura Pendennis enters the narrative over halfway through, she comes to serve the most determining function of offering direct evaluative commentary on characters and action. Her judgments are based exclusively on her domestic values and are expressed in such an absolute manner as to elicit the reader’s independent judgment, and even possible resistance. Her first such judgment is of Lady Clara. Her forced and loveless marriage has established her as a sympathetic victim. But Laura’s first pronouncement on Clara is unsympathetic, specifically claiming that she does not exhibit sufficient maternal love (II, 106). Here and subsequently, Laura preaches—the word surely applies to her—a creed of family sanctity. Although Pendennis, one of the narrators, effusively praises her virtue, an estimate echoed by the unnamed narrator, the very hyperbole of their encomia in a novel so infused with satiric commentary elicits dispute. Her judgments are indeed suspect. On the subject of Clara’s marital situation, even when it is clear that she has been physically abused by her husband, Laura is adamant in insisting that responsibility to one’s children is the primary consideration. Using Christian references, she intervenes to plead with Clara not to separate herself from her children (II, 183), while making it clear that she regards Clara’s protector, Jack Belsize, as the malign party. Laura’s moral authority is even questioned within the text. Florac, Clive’s friend and the son of his father’s first love, admonishes Pendennis: “One sees well that your wife has made you the sermon. . . . You are hen-pecked, my pauvre bon!” (II, 186). When Laura’s severe judgment of Clara is juxtaposed with the more generous and sympathetic interpretation offered by Belsize and others, the entire issue of this woman’s innocence or guilt becomes an open, unresolved matter of discourse, albeit with manifest sympathy for this woman. The courtship plot involving Ethel and Clive invokes the same kind of polarization of responses between those offered by the sanctified Laura and those implied by the action of the plot. Lively and flirtatious though she is, Ethel is aware that she is treated only as a commodity on the marriage market, or even worse, as a slave; yet


107

despite her protests, she participates, offering the explanation that it is what is expected by her family (I, 310–11). But when she agrees to marry the vacuous Lord Farrington, the text offers conflicting motives for her decision: duty to her parents, compliance with their wishes, or sheer desire for wealth. The narrator offers several such explanations before admitting that he vacillates: “See! I began by siding with Mrs. Grundy and the world, and at the next turn of the seesaw have lighted down on Ethel’s side and am disposed to think that the very best part of her conduct has been those escapades which— which right-minded persons most justly condemn” (II, 138). Such uncertainty contrasts with the decisive conclusion of Laura Pendennis that Ethel is innocent because her parents never taught her how wrong it is to marry for wealth or status, and so she had to learn it on her own, as she did (II, 203–4).34 Throughout the narrative other unresolved questions of culpability are raised, and consistently the multiple options offered are debated in terms of family responsibilities. Duty to parents drives the actions of all the main characters in the generation of Clive; but the abnegation of responsibility on the part of their parents is equally evident. There is a single subject on which the moral judgments of the narrator confirm the ethical conclusions overtly determined by the actions: the horrors of arranged marriages—mariages de covenance, as most of these speakers term them. Both Pendennis and his wife abhor the practice, and their denunciation is amplified by Richard Doyle’s illustrations, in which the metaphoric associations of such manipulation are depicted as cruel play with puppets. The victimized characters do indeed function only as such wooden toys. Ethel, the victim of the most relentless assault on her autonomy, describes herself as not more than a figure in a tableau vivant, a commodity like a painting to be sold to the bidder willing to come up with the greatest price (I, 265–66). The point of her protest is understood, and denounced, even by her family. The “selling of virgins,” the text terms it, and associates it with the practice of slavery, pointing out sarcastically that some of the very exploiters of their children had endorsed Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery efforts.35 The narrator goes further, comparing it to the Indian practice of arranged marriages, in a passage revealing in its colonial pride, but more vivid in its description of the human exploitation involved. It is a scene of lurid cruelty: When the parents in that fine house are getting ready their daughter for sale, and frightening away her tears with threats, and stupefying

108

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL her grief with narcotics, praying her and imploring her, and dramming her and coaxing her, and blessing her, and cursing her perhaps, till they have brought her into such a state as shall fit the poor young thing for that deadly couch upon which they are about to thrust her. (I, 267)

So crass is the society described in the narrative that it regards such activity as one of the “amusing games” played at such fashionable places as the German spa, Baden, a mere “jeu de societé.” The satire is direct, even accusatory, when the narrator addresses the reader directly: “You proud matrons in your May Fair markets, have you never seen a virgin sold, or sold one?” (I, 264). He goes on to cite Hogarth’s series, “Marriage à la Mode,” as accurate: Have you taken your children to the National Gallery in London, and shown them the Mariage à la Mode? Was the Artist exceeding the privilege of his calling in painting the Catastrophe in which those guilty people all suffer? If this fable were not true: if many and many of our young men of pleasure had not acted it, and rued the moral, I would tear the page. (I, 301)

The reference to the narrative message of Hogarth’s paintings as a “fable” provides a key for accounting for the peculiar framing of the entire narrative as a Aesopian construct. Its very opening section, entitled “The Overture,” consists of a version of the tale of the wolf in sheep’s clothing, a narrative of stealth, deceit and killing, culminating in a scene of wild confusion in which most of the animals suffer or die. Immediately, the text is ridiculed by “the critic,” who rejects it as unoriginal and unrealistic, in that all the characters are represented as villainous. He resents the implication that the satire is directed at such as himself, and having done so, may proceed to “indulge in some fine writing regarding the holy beauteousness of maternal affection” (I, 4). The narrative to follow, he indicates, will be a Fable, but it will be accurate, despite its exaggerations, and it will lead to a Moral.36 The imposition of several layers of narration ultimately subverts the stated moral intention of the account; the series evokes resistance as each one claims moral certainty. The unnamed narrator calls attention to his own arbitrary power when he admits to being highly selective in deciding what to include and what to withhold in this account. Then he in turn employs another speaker, Pendennis, who, like his wife, imposes more insistently moralistic interpretations. Pendennis exercises his discretion so


109

deliberately that he reminds the reader repeatedly about the arbitrary nature of his account. Early in the narrative he mentions that he will not tell much about Clive’s childhood, as it would be of interest only to such as a grandmother, and “shall we weary our kind readers by this infantile prattle, and set down the revered British public for an old woman?” (I, 31). Such mocking of the reader feeds suspicion that he is evading full disclosure. He omits so many scenes that might have elicited emotional responses, particularly in elevating characters in the minds of the readers, that his intention can be discovered simply through considering the scenes that are not presented. He does not present those scenes of departure or reunion between the Colonel and his son that would have been emotionally charged (I, 48; I, 54; II, 329). The railroad trip to Brighton, in which Clive and Ethel have an extended conversation about their relationship, is not part of the narrative, although after it Ethel begins referring to him as a kind of brother rather than as a lover (II, 27). To account for these peculiarities of the narrative as the result of Pendennis’s limited knowledge of what happened would not be plausible, for he includes copious information about incidents at which he was not present, with the result that the bulk of his account is based on what Clive told him. The most plausible explanation for the omission of such crucial pieces of the narrative is that they do not serve his purpose and that his intention is primarily moral, rather than mimetic, albeit so moralistic as to be disputable. In a curious digression early in the text Pendennis imagines himself touring a stately home with a “melancholy friend” who asks the guide to show them the skeleton in the closet, for, he insists, every family, every home, every individual hides such a secret. Addressing his imagined female reader, he intimates that her husband has one; he even pictures a man in a railroad carriage gazing at his wife and child as a hidden Othello harboring thoughts, we are to conclude, of hatred and murder (I, 106–7). An undercurrent of violence and frustration pervades the text, set up at the start with the animal fable, serving as the subtext for the narrative concerning the selling of virgins, and amplified by Richard Doyle’s caricatures that portray many of the figures as grotesques. However, as though to disclaim the effect of such a sober reflection, Pendennis nearly apologizes for the digression and then reverses himself by accounting for it by claiming that even the pious Charles Honeyman had such a “grisly night-haunter.” By such circuitous tactics, the narrator can simultaneously reveal the dark underside of his account, and disclaim responsibility for it. This narrative

110


technique parallels the broader use of the fable, which posits a moral while insisting on the artifice of the account. Consistent with these techniques are the admissions of the narrator that he is manipulating reality, that the version he presents is fabricated. He describes his account as one written long after the events it recounts, and constructed of events that in actuality may not have been causally related with each other. Admitting the inadequacies of his narrative, and those of the illustrator, Pendennis boasts of his freedom to “dress up the narrative in his own way,” offering conjectures when needed to develop his narrative. But announcing that he is not bound by reportorial standards, the narrator draws attention to the dialogic nature of his own composition, and the arbitrariness of claims of authorial reliability. The result of these multiple exposures of artifice is a destabilization of all forms of authority, including those of the patriarch/author. These frequent disclaimers—reminders of the artifice of telling this story, reduction of the narration by regarding it as no more than an animal fable, and playful reminders that the account being offered is only a selective one—undercut and even subdue the urgency of the satiric narration. Similarly, the employment of a highly colored narrator, Pendennis, who applies to the text his own moralizing tone, reduces what tended to broad social criticism to personal and even 37 smug moral judgment. By the end of the novel, Pendennis’s narrative has become not only self-effacing but sentimental and coy. In one of his effusive addresses, describing his wife and newborn child, he gushes over the sacred nature of domestic life: Would you ask what the husband’s feelings were as he looked at that sweet love, that sublime tenderness, that pure Saint blessing the life of him unworthy? Of all the gifts of Heaven to us below, that felicity is the sum and the chief. I tremble as I hold it lest I should lose it, and be left alone in the blank world without it. (II, 182)

Pendennis’s sentimental account is repeatedly qualified by reminders of the presence of the first, unnamed narrator, whose laconic tone makes Pendennis’s earnest voice sound comic. Toward the end of the novel that colorless reporter comments that he regrets coming to the end of his long process of narration; but, he adds, referring to the events that have been narrated: “I hardly know whether they are not true: whether they do not live near us somewhere” (II, 365). The narrator he has employed, Arthur Pendennis, along with Clive and Ethel,


111

has faded “into fable-land,” leaving a critical questions unanswered, particularly the disposition of the courtship plot, a matter that the narrator calls a “sentimental question.” Yes, Clive and Ethel did marry, he concludes, offering the evidence of a series of letters, and the portrait of Mrs. Clive Newcome that resembles Ethel rather than Clive’s first wife, Rosey.38 If Pendennis, in his mention of Clive and “his family,” had indicated that the pair had children, this narrator feels otherwise, and he is free to make real whatever he wants . . . he and the reader: But have they any children? I for my part should like her best without, and entirely devoted to little Tommy. But for you, dear friend, it is as you like. You may settle your fable-land in your own fashion. Any thing you like happens in fable-land. (II, 366)

Concluding the account in this manner, the narrator minimizes, nearly denies his responsibility for the narrative he has constructed. In the standard reading of Thackeray’s novels, the force of his exposure of human greed and social pretense are estimated as so effective as to make them models of satire.39 Recent critics have reassessed his satiric project in addressing some ideological issues of the time, particularly the critique of slavery and reaction against the exploitation of women. But the pervasive undercutting of the conventions of narration and the denial of authorial agency suggest a more nuanced reading of this and his other novels. If George Eliot elaborated upon her narrative account by direct thematic expositions, and if Dickens similarly underscored his social criticisms through exaggerations, caricatures, and even direct commentary, Thackeray goes further, reminding the reader of the fictive nature of what the text contains, the arbitrariness of its conclusions, and the fabulous unreality of the entire set of events. The novel’s focus is clear—the fortunes of a family, assumed to be representative of the time—and its content includes substantial ideological discourse on various aspects of the family as a social institution is offered. The form of the narrative account is a series of claims and counterclaims, ideals, desires and harmonies, presented as inviting but finally both unattained and unattainable. The happy conclusion of the stereotypical courtship plot cannot be offered, and even the advancement of the Newcome family cannot be assured. As Barbara Hardy concludes, we are left with “a reminder of the unreality of novels and of the reality of unhappiness or content outside of novels.”40 The multiplicity of narrative voices, with their striking dissimilarities, undermines the believability of the account presented. The playful

112


reminders that the characters are mere playthings, lacking agency and autonomy, further reduce the possibility of regarding their actions as responsible. And the theatrical tendency to reduce the narrative to a fable further colors the account. In such a contrived, fragile and playful construction, moralistic interpretation is obviated, a point that the narrator admits: Now, will you have the story? Worthy mammas of families—if you do not like to have your daughters told that bad husbands will make bad wives; that marriages begun in indifference make homes unhappy; that men whom girls are brought to swear to love and honour, are sometimes false, selfish, and cruel, and that women forget the oaths which they have been made to swear—if you will not hear of this, ladies, close the book, and send for some other. (II, 163)

The ideological issues concerning internal relationships and social functions that appeared in the earlier family novels are treated not only ironically but dismissively. Continuation of the family line remains the prime consideration, and endogamy seems to be allowed without objection. The Hobson brothers object to Clive as suitor of Ethel not because he is her cousin—that is not even mentioned—but because of his perceived inferior social and financial status. As it advances, the love between that young pair is referred to as reaching the heights of brother-sister ties (II, 28–29 and II, 116). However, the unconcluded narrative makes their eventual union only a matter of speculation— they may have married, but no assurance can be given. Patriarchal influence is generally viewed as weaker than matriarchal, and the most developed figure in the narration, the Colonel, proves to be more a son than a father, reluctant to wield power, impractical in business affairs, and submissive in marrying out of pity and then cowering under the rule of this daughter-in-law’s parent.41 The role of the family in preparing children for roles in the larger society has been corrupted into a marriage market in which daughters as sold into a kind of slavery. There are almost no harmonious families, and the intensity of the suffering of spouses and children is staggering: the esteemed family of the Duc d’I’ry is exposed as so miserable that his daughter is driven to escape from her mother; the Campaigner, Mrs. Mackenzie, exploits and abuses her daughter, Rosey; Barnes Newcome beats his wife Clara; both the Colonel and his son Clive marry women they do not love and regret their choices; Clive’s wife dies in childbirth, never having overcome the crippling control of her mother. The narrator


113

even offers a “long parenthesis” cataloguing such horrors, leading to the statement, “If you were acquainted with the history of every family in your street, don’t you know that in two or three of the houses there such tragedies have been playing?” (I, 343). And, as if to make this total picture even more oppressive, the account is delivered by one narrator who coyly reminds us of his own domestic bliss and his wife’s sanctity and another who reduces the account to a joke. The disjunction cannot be sustained, and the end of the novel offers only fragments and nonconclusions, reminders of happy endings that cannot be offered. The motif of the prodigal son appears frequently in the text, but in a nostalgic tone, offering reminders of past intense value of parentchild ties, but with little application to sibling relationships.42 The workings of the marriage market are seen most clearly as they apply to daughters, but it is worth noting that even the Colonel’s participation in encouraging the disastrous marriage of his son to Rosey Mackenzie is deemed morally wrong. Clive married a woman he did not love to “fulfil the wish of his father’s heart, and cheer his kind declining years” (II, 227). This is a generous account when compared with Ethel’s version of his motivation: “This marriage was my uncle’s making— another of the unfortunate marriages in our family” (II, 269). Once again questions of culpability are evoked: Was Clive wrong in entering a marriage that he knew was loveless? Even if he married Rosey out of pity for her, was he wrong in doing so? In encouraging the marriage did the Colonel act with insufficient regard for his son? Later, was Clive justified in separating himself from his wife once the interference of Rosey’s mother became intolerable? Clive’s friends support him in this action, but the moralistic Laura insists on his marital duties to his wife (II, 319–29; II, 323). Within this narrative such provocative questions are frequently raised, but with no expectation that they will be answered. As though there is no one who could settle such moral choices (and obviously the commentators most frequently cited in the text—Pendennis, Laura, and the unnamed narrator—all prove themselves either unreliable by their own excesses or reluctant to reach conclusions) the narrative is so unconvincingly twisted as to stand outside the entire debate. Clive rejoins Rosey and her mother, but only just before she and her newborn child die. The narrative ends with a series of such strained resolutions that have the effect of evading the very moral questions that the preceding account proposed. Furthermore, the conclusion paints a world in which human agency is so constrained by financial forces that no one is substantially responsible for what happens. Everyone participates in the marriage

114


market, and even the victims, such as Ethel, have come to view hypergamous matches as so desirable that they become complicit and submissive. This makes the villainous Sir Barnes Newcome no more guilty than any businessperson in the kingdom or any prelate participating in the marriage market (II, 195). On the other hand, protagonism is similarly constrained. Clive no more assertive than Ethel, both are regularly acted upon rather than initiating even self-defense, which makes their eventual marital union problematic. The narrator, Pendennis, treats the union as little more than a piece of fabulation. If one has to assign primary guilt to any party, it is to the parents who perpetuate the cruel exploitation of their children, thus obviating the function of parental judgment in defending the family’s integrity.43 Parental relations with children are, in fact, exposed as corrupted by selfishness: There is scarce any parent, however friendly or tender with his children, but must feel sometimes that they have thoughts which are not his or hers; and wishes and secrets quite beyond the parental control: and, as people are vain, long after they are fathers, aye, or grandfathers, and not seldom fancy that mere personal desire of domination is overweening anxiety and love for their family; no doubt that common outcry against thankless children might often be shown to prove, not that the son is disobedient, but the father too exacting. . . . Ah, be sure, it is not youth alone that has need to learn humility! By their very virtues, and the purity of their lives, many good parents create flatterers for themselves, and so live in the midst of a filial court of parasites—and seldom without a pang of unwillingness, and often not at all, will they consent to forego their autocracy, and exchange the tribute they have been wont to exact of love and obedience for the willing offering of love and freedom. (I, 194)

In this statement, the ways in which discourse about family parallels that of empire becomes most clear: exploitation of the colonial victims originated in an exercise of social control on the part of the ruling class that seemed benevolent and as natural as parental rule. However, the text exposes the hypocrisy of such familial claims: they were based on paternalism, as it was being voiced in discourse on the “weaker races,” the “weaker sex,” and on dependent family members as well. But it goes further in spreading culpability so broadly across society that patriarchal rule has become inadequate to the task. In this narrative, the demise of the Newcome family results primarily from the dereliction of Colonel Thomas Newcome, the prime representative of patriarchy as well. His brothers are even more irresponsible because they


115

are so excessively concerned with wealth and social status. But their involvement in the plot is slight compared to the Colonel’s. And yet the narrative applies moral accusations far beyond that single man, making most members of bourgeois society responsible for the exploitation of the young. Having disclaimed patriarchal authority and having extended culpability so broadly, the narrator challenges the possibility of devising a position of integrity and omniscience from which to convey this narrative account. An objective reporter could conceivably comment on this from a position removed in time: a comprehensive retrospective account could be constructed. But this text is devised by a set of contemporary reporters—one unpersonified, and the other, Pendennis, whose moral stance is so undercut by evidence of his own weakness and hypocrisy that it evokes resistance. Mere reportage of social behavior and misbehavior can be conveyed by such figures, but not the kind of moral, satiric statement promised by the model of the Aesopian fable. And so at the end the account cannot be concluded. Once family members range very far beyond parental control, the viability of patriarchy is undermined. Likewise, when a narrator spreads moral culpability so broadly that no single person is regarded as effectual or responsible, his or her entire account is deprived of coherence. Refusals to judge or even to account for behaviors comes to appear only as playful. In the process, the possibility of expressing judgment on a question so fundamental as the viability of patriarchal rule is precluded and the innate authority of the text is undermined. Patriarchal rule cannot be adequately replaced by adherence to traditional moral codes. Effective expression in the form of the novel cannot be achieved by merely amusing observations and audacious paradoxes. If the social world of this novel exists “beyond parental control,” the narrative, the novel, becomes fragmented as a scrapbook of caricatures: some amusing, others edifying, some even shocking. But it remains a miscellany beyond the control of a narrative voice, beyond the constraints of plot, which in itself requires concurrence that events are causally related to each other. The strain is seen most clearly in the contorted, dismissive closure of the text.


CHAPTER 3

T HE T HREAT OF E VOLUTION : T HE M ILL ON THE F LOSS AND T HE D AISY C HAIN

T

he ebullience of the Great Exhibition of 1851 was soon shattered, as confidence in material progress and in England’s international preeminence was increasingly called into doubt as there appeared troubling indications that the wealth and power on display were not widely accessible. In 1849 Henry Mayhew’s accounts of poverty in London had begun to appear in the Morning Chronicle, uncovering the underside of that seemingly prosperous city, and further exposés dominated the press in following decades. The Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny raised fundamental questions about the benefits of the Empire; and the financial decline coinciding with the American Civil War suggested that England’s hegemony was also declining. Benjamin Disraeli’s 1845 warning about the growing separation between classes spurred intensified concern abut the suffering of the lowest class. In such a troubled atmosphere religion offered for many a channel for consolation and even ameliorative action; with it came reassertions of the need for moral standards. Some turned back to the model of the early Christian church, extending the issues of the earlier Tractarian Movement into a taste for the medieval; others, influenced in large part by the “higher criticism” of earlier German scholars, questioned fundamentals of the Christian faith. Confidence in religious orthodoxy was already far from secure, as Tennyson’s In Memoriam indicates, but

118


the assault on Christian belief was intensified as theories of evolution were broadcast. Darwin’s 1859 publication, provocative though it may have been, was the culmination rather than the initiation of a debate that had begun a century earlier. In the intellectual journals of the time, as in the religious periodicals, appeared a complex discourse regarding the viability of religious belief in light of scientific evidence that contradicted literal accounts in the Scriptures, as well as the teaching and fundamental authority of religious organizations. Two works written during the years of the most intense debate over evolution reveal the different ways in which novels participated in discourse on ideological issues centering on the family in this critical period. One not only offers a perceptive analysis of issues under contention but reveals the intensity of the debate; the other is in ways more revelatory of attitudes of the time but offers only a defensive response to perceived challenges. Equally important, consideration of this pair of novels reveals the ways in which shifting ideological discourses were reshaping the form of the novel.

“Clasped Hands of Sister and Brother”: The Mill on the Floss In an early episode of The Mill on the Floss, nine-year-old Maggie Tulliver appears standing on a chair, studying a series of prints representing the return of Sir Charles Grandison as the prodigal son. She sympathizes with the errant hero of Richardson’s novel because at the time she is fearful of her brother’s wrath when he returns from school to find that she has not fulfilled her promise to care for his pet rabbit. She wishes the narrative suggested by the prints were concluded: “that the subsequent history of the young man had not been left a blank.”1 Eliding Maggie’s situation and the visual narrative she reads, this formative scene casts Maggie in the role of Richardson’s hero, making her the Prodigal Daughter, and it sets up expectations of a development that will be played out to a climactic scene of reunion within the family. The parable of the prodigal son proclaims the benevolence and parental justice of the father who forgives his son and even celebrates his return, and at the same time it reflects the fragility of familial relationships: the potential for competition within the family unit, which can violate the ideal of internal harmony. Furthermore, the final phrase cited above positions Maggie as a reader—or the reader—seeking the completion of a narrative, particularly one that evokes dialogical exploration of issues of family responsibilities.

THE THREAT OF EVOLUTION

119

By 1860, when George Eliot’s novel first appeared, industrialization had transformed the nation—but at the cost of disturbing changes. In the preceding half century London’s population had doubled, but the construction of railroads and other kinds of infrastructure had caused the razing of entire neighborhoods and a concentration of population in a small number of districts. The contrast between overcrowded, unhealthy urban centers and the open country, which represented the ideal of England, fostered sentimental longings for older, traditional ways of life. The competitive spirit fostered by the industrial system was viewed as infiltrating private lives, corrupting common feelings by aspirations to advance one’s own status, even at the risk of abandoning domestic responsibilities. Social roles were changing, especially as women and children were afforded recognition as subjects of government protection—as they went about securing that protection, inequities were revealed, particularly their mistreatment in the home. Patriarchy was under threat, as was the once sanctified family, and the menacing force was modern science and technology.2 In a work force that was moving from villages to cities, following employment opportunities as they developed, kinship ties had become tenuous, even to the point of giving way to more advantageous commercial connections. Honored in their absence, connections among kin became associated with the past, and so were likely to be cherished as no-longer-attainable ideals of relationships. It was concluded that traditional functions of the family, such as responsibility for the socialization of maturing children, had to be adapted to new ends, fostering qualities of initiative and independence that might even run counter to the family’s goal of ensuring its own continuation. The struggle for existence, which scientific evolutionist theorists claimed to be fundamental, provided a vocabulary that was quickly adopted in articulating the threats to which the family was subjected. “Survival” required “adaptation,” resulting in a continuous “struggle.” The need to educate the young for advancement in this new technological society was recognized as urgent and difficult. With the development of public schooling, a good share of this responsibility was transferred to the state, putting it beyond the family’s control. At the time she was writing The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot was reading Darwin’s famous text of 1859, and her husband, George Henry Lewes, was composing The Physiology of Common Life, which deals extensively with inherited traits.3 She not only recognized the transformational challenges of evolutionary theories but adopted their methodology and vocabulary in her own writings, offering narratives

120


as experiments and viewing characters and plot in terms of transcendent, inexorable forces. Gillian Beer points out how Darwin’s familial terms, such as “one Parent,” “the Great Family,” and the “Tree of Life” reveal his assumption of a traditional structure deriving from patriarchy.4 The influence of such thought was widespread, determining modes of expression for social observers and political thinkers, as well. In 1861, while reflecting the Victorian creed of individual initiative, the eminent legal historian Sir Henry Sumner Maine described the legal system of the time as one in which the family’s role had diminished as a result of market competition. The movement of the progressive societies has been uniform in one respect. Through all its course it has been distinguished by the gradual dissolution of family dependency and the growth of individual obligation in its place. The individual is steadily substituted for the Family, as the unit of which civil laws take account.5 Similar assumptions underlie the theories of Auguste Comte, another influence on Eliot’s work, and those of an intellectual figure even closer: Herbert Spencer.6 In the writings of the early sociologists the family was considered as subject to the same pressures to change and adapt as was the state. Using the new quasiscientific methodology, one could question the most sacred beliefs of social structures; the religious community could be seen as the opposite of cohesive when, in its division into sects, it polarized communities and spread hostilities. So also kinship alliances could be viewed as fostering social fragmentation in an industrial society that required the mobilization of masses of workers. Herbert Spencer was at this time writing in defense of the claims of patriarchal authority. And if the social theories of the nineteenth century, methodologically based on Lamarck and his followers, were far from becoming orthodox, the method of inquiry, dispassionate and scientific, had been adopted in common discourse. Accordingly the novelist could participate in the investigation, constructing “experiments in life,” employing methods of narration that might aspire to the objectivity of science, but that would also reflect its inherent skepticism.7 Sibling relationships had been a prominent feature of the ideology of the previous century, and narratives had celebrated the supposedly presexual intimacy of brothers and sisters as bonds that sustained family members through their lives. But when the security of those relationships was perceived as being threatened, they were endowed with infused value, elevated to the stature earlier enjoyed by the roles of patriarch and matriarch. While in literary expression paternal and


121

maternal care continue to dominate narratives, the aspect of sibling relationships seems even to displace parental roles, although they also are depicted as being under threat. For George Eliot the subject of sibling relationships had particular resonance because her alienation from her brother, which extended though most of her adult life, tortured her. Her biographers report on how she treasured being addressed as “sister,” and particularly while she was composing this novel, when she received news that her sister, Chrissey Clarke, was near death, she was conscious of the rift in her own relationship with her brother.8 But the evident autobiographical background for the narrative, the subject of extensive critical commentary, should not lead to reading the novel as an account of her family or life, a practice that Eliot denounced. Objecting to interpretations that Adam Bede contained a portrait of her father, she wrote to friends, “There is not a single portrait in the book, nor will there be in any future book of mine.”9 Precious as sibling relations were in her life, in The Mill on the Floss they are dialogically treated so as to provoke contrary and even contradictory responses. The ideal of brother-sister relations is established by the narrative and then examined, critiqued, and finally questioned by the events of the narrative and by the authorial commentary, which in the case of this novel is generous. The ideal of mutually supportive relations between siblings, forged in childhood experiences and enduring over a lifetime, is conveyed through the narrative and amplified by the authorial commentary. However, that ideal is ironically treated: posited as existing in the past, if at all; being largely imagined; and even as fostering inhumane exclusivity in its practice. The inscription on the novel’s original title page provides the issue that is contested most extensively in the novel: “In their death they were not divided.” The biblical passage from which it is taken, (2 Samuel 1:23), refers to the relationship of Saul and Jonathan, father and son, a bond challenged by the son’s affiliation with Saul’s enemy, David. Thus it is a variation of the prodigal son motif, culminating in the restoration of paternal relationships. But the pair reunited at the end of Eliot’s novel are Maggie Tulliver and her brother Tom, who endured the course of separations and sufferings that constitute the narrative plot. What seems to be a heroic tribute poses a paradox and posits a set of questions that drives the narrative but that cannot be resolved by it. Is the ideal of continuing and sustaining mutually supportive relationships among siblings attainable, particularly in an industrialized world? Can firm patriarchal rule be replaced by the gentler ties of sibling relationships? Or are sibling relations no stronger

122


nor more durable than parent-child bonds, inevitably contentious? And for what reasons can sibling bonds be elevated to become identified with undying, spiritual entities? Halfway through this account, the narrator labels the task at hand: “writing the history of unfashionable families.” (291) But the depiction of domestic life is far from idyllic: the narrator repeatedly calls attention to underlying strains within the family unit. Furthermore, the account is admittedly, insistently subjective. At times the personal coloration becomes distracting and intrusive. In the climactic scene in which Maggie and Tom are drowned, their death is elevated to a blissful communion, greater than anything they had ever enjoyed in their life together: The boat reappeared—but brother and sister had gone down in an embrace never to be parted—living through again in one supreme moment, the days when they had clasped their little hands in love, and roamed the daisied fields together. (521)

The funerary symbolism of clasped hands, characteristic of the period, implies a belief in a bond that continues beyond death. However, such an avowal of belief in an afterlife seems awkwardly placed in a text solidly rooted in a secular present. From the earliest reviewers on, readers have noted the discrepancy between what seems a cliché, a sentimental and unconvincing picture of fraternal love, and the incidents of misunderstandings, cruelties, and sufferings that constitute the account of their childhood in the first half of the novel. Eliot herself saw the structural flaws of the novel, saying the “epic breadth” of the first five books was followed by “a proportionate want of fulness” in the final books.10 Even more perplexing to the reader is the narrative’s embrace of death in the concluding pages, which may contradict the earlier-stated promotion of responsibility to others. While it may be argued that these discrepancies reveal Eliot’s rejection of the traditional family plot and even constitute a refutation of claims of existential, organic continuity, the fact remains that this surprising, contrived ending prevents the kind of dialogical inquiry that was promoted throughout the previous narrative. The principle of selection implicit in the text is concern for the relationship between sister and brother, Maggie and Tom. The titles of the seven books that compose the novel describe stages in their relationship: from the initial “Boy and Girl”; to the stage of education, “School-Time”—which applies as accurately to Maggie learning


123

through her own experiences, as to her brother studying at the Stellings household; to the experiences that most seriously sever their familial bond in “The Downfall”; into “The Valley of Humiliation,” where both suffer without each other’s support; to an analysis of their separate but potentially similar roles in “Wheat and Tares”; and finally to “The Final Rescue,” which culminates in the siblings’ shared death, paradoxically offered as a rescue from temptations and divisive motives that had been the subject of the penultimate book, “The Great Temptation.” But while brother and sister at times enjoy moments of mutual love, such as the scene following their father’s death, which concludes the fifth book, the narrative account of their times together is primarily a history of Tom’s bullying or negligence of his sister, and her gradual growth to establish the limits of his attacks on her autonomy. Until the closing episode, the fraternal pair, the focal subject of the narrative, is divided, not unified. Early on they seem to embody polar and stereotypical dominant and submissive sex roles. Michael Ragussis argues that they are divided along lines of discourse as well: Tom is educated to literacy so that he can defend the family by operating in a world of legal discourse; Maggie, through her reading and her command of language, “brings words, the symbolic entity that ruins the father and confounds the son. . . . It will be the daughter’s success at words, and the father and son’s failure at them, that will determine the ultimate contour of this family plot.”11 Compelling as his interpretation is, the divisions between Maggie and Tom extend beyond the linguistic, as their roles within the family are transformed by the ill fortune of the Tullivers. Like most of Eliot’s novels, The Mill on the Floss is set several generations in the past, at that transitional period of the first Reform Bill, when social accommodations of the new industrial system were being forged. However, the retrospective narration does not, as it does in the works of many writers of the nineteenth century, claim for some past generation a greater degree of coherence or integrity. From the start her account recognizes the partiality of memory, the human tendency to color and sentimentalize, and particularly the desire to order and conclude narratives, the very aspirations voiced by Maggie at the start. Accounts of the past may be inherently nostalgic: longing for a return home, the literal derivation of the term, assumes a circular pattern that may be unattainable in a world in which places, relationships and even human agents are being destroyed or drastically changed. Such an attractive conclusion is, however, repeatedly questioned and even denied in novels that assume evolutionary adaptation to be inevitable. Patriarchy, in particular, is subjected to scrutiny and even challenge.

124


In this context, the thematic pattern of references to the prodigal son evokes conflicting responses: the desirability of such a return home, the longing for sustaining sibling relationships that are not tested by resentments, and yet the impossibility of both. The Victorian fascination with orphans, seen most clearly in Dickens’ novels but reiterated in popular art, makes the empathetic viewer or reader himself or herself an abandoned figure, struggling alone, and longing to return to the stability of home. In Eliot’s novel the parable’s roles are reassigned: the patriarch dies and is replaced by his son; in resisting this supplanting, the daughter becomes the prodigal. Narrative details imply from the start of the written text that Tom will not be as welcoming as the forgiving father, but rather he will remain as resentful as the prodigal’s brother. And while Maggie takes comfort in knowing that the father took his errant son back, because, as she says, “He was very sorry . . . and wouldn’t do wrong again,” even her friend the miller, Luke, doubts that consoling conclusion: “Eh, Miss, . . . he’d be no great shakes, I doubt, let’s feyther do what he would for him” (32). Such ironic interpretations of the prodigal son thematic line are reiterated later when Maggie returns home and is denied haven by her brother, who by then has secured his position as paterfamilias. Although her mother does take her in, the rift between siblings, established in their first dramatized scene together and reiterated often, has become practically irreparable, save by the kind of miraculous intervention of the final flood scene. If the commentary of the narrator tends to nostalgia, it insists upon the irretrievability of the past, as well as its formative influence. A incident reported early—the sister and brother’s fishing expedition through the “daisied fields”—and recalled at the story’s end, foreshadows the eventual eruption of the Floss, as well as establishing the norm against which subsequent actions are judged. Tom treats Maggie kindly, even handing her the catch (40–42). But the narrator intervenes to deflate the air of confidence: Life did change for Tom and Maggie; and yet they were not wrong in believing that the thoughts and loves of the first years would always make part of their lives. We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it,—if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass. . . . What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known? (41)


125

Novelty is not to be prized over early experiences, even if they involve “sweet monotony,” because in the childish assumption of universal knowledge one can love without reservation, the term deserving its italicization. With maturity and worldly experience such spontaneous and unselective responses become unsustainable, and the narrative voice in its own selectivity and even cynicism reminds the reader of that bleak fact. The commentary in this text hardly resembles the philosophical, wise observations, and disquisitions offered in Eliot’s other novels, particularly in Middlemarch. To this commentator, the course of life, seen even in childhood experiences, is one of increasing cares and sorrows: “They had gone forth together into their new life of sorrow, and they would never more see the sunshine undimmed by remembered cares. They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had for ever closed behind them” (191). The prodigal son parable endorses traditional patriarchy: the kind father forgives both his children, the undeserving as well as the compliant one. However, Mr. Tulliver is far from a model of Christian forbearance, either in his attempts to retain control of the source of his livelihood or as a model of virtue for his children. From the start he is revealed as ineffectual in his business dealings, given to fits of temper and impetuous behavior. His intellectual inadequacies make him vulnerable in the post-agricultural economy, and in particular, they make him a ready victim of the world of law, a world of words.12 Worse than such weakness, Mr. Tulliver abuses his parental authority in forcing his son to swear revenge on those who have harmed him, an action that Maggie recognizes as improper and morally reprehensible (266–67). Nevertheless, while she is called upon to do nothing but observe Tom’s compliance, she does not urge him to resist, and subsequently even complies with demands she knows are unjustified. Her responses thus verify parental authority, but with the imposition of indications and commentary that expose it as arbitrarily exercised. Tulliver fails in the prudential care for his family, engaging in ill-conceived and unsuccessful lawsuits to retain what the family has enjoyed for generations, and being reduced to bankruptcy.13 His resistance to recent commercial and statutory changes, particularly regarding the redistribution of land, make him represent a futile protestor, and a vestige of the past. Because the narrative focuses upon the responses of the generation that succeeds him, their attitudes are explored and generally endorsed: the resistant arguments of the Gleggs, Tullivers, and even the Wakems are not likely to be adopted by the next generation. On the contrary, the older generation’s customs and principles are usually depicted as comic

126


or even destructive. And in Maggie’s refutation of her father’s vindictive acts, the most serious inadequacies of the now-outmoded principles are revealed. Nevertheless, she grants the father her obedience. To some degree Mr. Tulliver earns Maggie’s compliance by such loving acts as protecting her from the punishments of her aunts when she is rebellious and even by prohibiting his wife from punishing her when she runs away with the gypsies. But if his authority is validated primarily by his affections for his “little wench,” how does it follow that at the death of the father his successor, the brother, should be granted such authority? Tom repeatedly claims compliance from his sister on the basis of his role as preserver of the family, and his actions do parallel those of his father. Mr. Tulliver takes pride in his conscientious brotherly concern for his own sister, although he admits to himself the complexity of interrelationships and even a selfish advantage in this behavior: by acting benevolently to his sister he hopes to be seen as a paternal model by his children, and, conversely, concern for his daughter might be making him a more responsible brother (84). In forbidding Maggie to see Philip Wakem, Tom no doubt acts as his father would; but even in this case, Maggie makes it clear that she rejects her brother’s claim of authority. She lists his faults, going so far as to say she despises and detests his behavior, before, once again, consenting to his demand with this stipulation: “So I will submit to what I acknowledge and feel to be right. I will submit even to what is unreasonable from my father, but I will not submit to it from you” (347). Eliot’s love for her father was so intense that in 1849 she reported to a friend her dream that if he were to die, then she would become “earthly sensual and devilish for want of that purifying restraining influence.”14 However, as Dorothea Barrett has pointed out, there is a “conspicuous absence of fathers from George Eliot’s fiction” so that “her fiction was both the fruit and the defining feature of the life that began for her after her father’s death” (Barrett, 95). Because the mill of the novel’s title metonymically represents the family—threatened by industrial change, compromised by the development of dams that marginalize its functions, and ultimately put into a form of receivership at the bankruptcy of its owner—Tom’s attempts to rescue the mill constitute an effort to preserve the family. In this endeavor he is partially successful, although in the final flood the mill is destroyed, possibly because of the modern material interventions on nature, such as dams. Whatever thematic implications may reside in the violence of the Floss at the narrative’s end, its effect is the destruction of the mill, and the family—the entire next generation of the Tulliver family.


127

Tom’s claim of supplanting his father are disputed from the start, when his stern judgments of his sister are set in stark contrast with the forgiving, loving responses of his father. Once Mr.Tulliver dies, Tom’s claims of authority might be validated, particularly because the father had, on his deathbed, exhorted his son to take care of his sister as he had cared for his own sibling. Concluding the book entitled “Wheat and Tares”—aligning a process similar to sorting grain from wheat with distinguishing authorized claims of responsibility from spurious ones, or in this case paternal from fraternal demands—is the emotional reunion of Maggie and her brother, in which she utters “‘Let us always love each other,’ and they clung and wept together.” However, she does not subsequently regard him as invested with the rule her father had, insisting instead on a mutuality of love and dependence, which raises another set of questions: Can the family survive without patriarchal rule? Can the father be replaced by communal agreement of family members? If Tom’s claims of fraternal authority are undercut by the narrative, Maggie’s responses to her brother seem undiminished by his unsympathetic treatment of her. In fact, his very power over her derives from his cruel withholding of regard for her: as Dorothea Barrett summarizes it, “Tom has all the power in the relationship between them because he loves less.”15 Graced with a loving father who forgives her childish transgressions and even seems to relish the rebelliousness of his “little wench,” Maggie seems all the more desirous of the approval of her brother. The first part of the novel is composed primarily of scenes in which brother and sister contend, followed by scenes of reconciliation, which occupy concluding positions in the text. Later the tenuous restoration of sibling mutual concern following the disagreements over Maggie’s relationship with Philip Wakem is provided similar narratorial amplification. The narrator ascribes much of the evocative and even moral claim of fraternal ties to the fact that they extend from infancy. In its earliest stage, the bond between Maggie and Tom is associated with sheer animal behavior: they nuzzle cheeks and brows and noses “with a humiliating resemblance to two friendly ponies” (39). As sister and brother mature, their difference in temperaments becomes more pronounced, particularly after Tom’s school experiences. And when he tries to take on his father’s mantle and control her life, he exhibits a superiority and insensitivity that are opposite to his sister’s qualities. And yet she persists in caring about him and even goes so far as to dissuade Philip Wakem on the grounds of her ties to her brother, suggesting there are deeper psychological motivations for her actions, perhaps even incestuous impulses.16

128


In the extensive analysis of the Dodson sisters and their families, and in implicitly contrasting them to the Tulliver clan, the narrator seems to offer deterministic categories for analyzing the characters of the youngest family members. The principle of “standing by your kin” espoused by the Dodsons affirms the high standard of the prodigal son parable, promoting the taking in of one of the family. However, the Dodsons’ pride in kinship bonds is questioned in the narrative itself: they protect each other, but only to an extent, and what they proclaim as sacred bonds of mutual support do not operate when it comes to facing the financial problems of the Tullivers. After Maggie is disgraced for going off with Stephen, Mrs. Glegg does come through, at least to the extent of defending the family name against accusations of outsiders. Nevertheless, in the narrator’s exposition of the complex motives of Aunt Glegg, Tom, and Mrs. Tulliver, regard for kinship is distinguished from the more insidious pride into which Tom has fallen: There had arisen in Tom a repulsion towards Maggie that derived its very intensity from their early childish love in that time when they had clasped tiny fingers together, and their later sense of nearness in a common duty, and a common sorrow: the sight of her, as he had told her, was hateful to him. In this branch of the Dodson family aunt Glegg found a stronger nature than her own—a nature in which family feeling had lost the character of clanship in taking on a doubly deep dye of personal pride. (500)

He hearkens back to the same childhood scene that will be recalled by the narrator at the novel’s close, but uses it to claim absolute allegiance in all matters from his sister. But the claim that his repulsion sprang from the very intimacy that is evoked at the end of the text— the clasped hands of sister and brother—interrogates the very ideology it seems to espouse. Of specific adaptations of the family prompted by the social changes of the newly industrialized rural society of The Mill on the Floss, the issue of schooling is given priority. The narrative opens with scenes reporting on the family’s consideration of how to educate its male child, Tom Tulliver. On such an important decision, Mrs. Tulliver argues the extended kin should be consulted, although her husband consults a business contact instead, an early indication of the transitional nature of relations between kin and commercial contacts. Tom is provided an education suitable to his role in a society perceived


129

as far different from that of the past, and his experiences point to the terms of debate on the nature of education, which was the subject matter of canonical texts by Matthew Arnold and Thomas Huxley. But if the content was to be redefined, the experience of being schooled was dramatically changed as well. Dickens would anatomize the new scientific methods in such works as Hard Times, but he also noted the effects of formal education on the products of the new system, in Dombey and Son, for instance, and those effects were not altogether beneficial. The provision of education, a form of benevolence, could, it was feared, alienate the educated from their parents. And in transferring responsibility out of household, public schooling was perceived as further threatening the unity of the family, as well as traditional parental roles. State-provided education for the middle and lower classes opened to them new opportunities, entry into new occupations created by the industrial system, a level of wealth and the prospect of entire lives unknown to their fathers—for the young men, but not often for their sisters. While Pip might be offered great expectations of the independence gained by wealth, Estella is granted only the prospect of luxury gained by marriage into wealth, without the independence made available to men. Mr. Tulliver disdains the closed adjudication by members of the extended family in deciding on such important matters as the program for Tom’s education, even when his wife urges otherwise, and in fact persists in seeking their counsel on the matter. He seeks the advice of a business associate instead, an indication that the commercial interests have invaded the domestic sphere. In this and other incidents he even exhibits attributes that are more consonant with the new industrialized society rather than the rural, closed society of the past. Differences between generations are underlined in parallel plots. The Wakems, father and son, resemble the Tullivers in specific ways: Mr. Wakem wants to acquire the mill so as to assure financial support for his son; he tries to impose his will, even to the extent of seeking vengeance on his enemies through that son. In relenting to the appeals of Philip, who insists that his father had always acted out of motives of indulgence and even love, Mr. Wakem stands up against the stubborn Tulliver. But in this parallel domestic unit, Philip announces that he is acting like many in his generation—in other words, far differently from his father’s generation. Mr. Wakem employs the familiar, and familial, argument that most sons would share their father’s feelings in this case, an appeal to which Philip responds:

130

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL I know these scenes are often happening between father and son. If I were like other men of my age, I might answer your angry words— we might part—I should marry the woman I love and have a chance of being as happy as the rest. (425)

It is assumed that social changes emanating from the Industrial Revolution have been so transformative that the young generation is free to act differently, to reject the codes of behavior of their predecessors. Remarkably, Stephen Guest, who is criticized for his pride, is not held guilty in the narrative by familial association, although it is his father’s firm that attempts to take ownership of the Tulliver mill. He may or may not be worthy of Maggie on the basis of his personality, but the fact that his family employs Mr. Deane and seems likely to dominate the economy of St Ogg’s is not presented as a fault. In fact, Stephen Guest is the only person to whom Maggie feels an erotic attraction. Despite his insouciance and vanity, Stephen grows in her mind as a nearly irresistible suitor, and a specifically masculine one. He insists his love is different from that of a woman—more decisive, unqualified; and she does not refute that line of argument. His invasion of her life forces her to weigh the likely satisfaction of her sexual drive against familial, specifically fraternal, responsibilities. To describe Maggie’s love of Stephen as essentially sexual is to disagree with those early and formidable critics, such as F. R. Leavis, who regarded Eliot as shrinking from or even denying the elemental drive. Her responses to Stephen reveal impulses that overcome her rational powers: she is often speechless, she blushes, she doubts her own powers to resist. His appeal is entirely different from any attraction she has previously experienced. The narrative development has brought her to the stage of maturity at which such a choice must be made; the stage at which one breaks from parents described in traditional texts has become in this case the stage at which one moves to the next level of familial ties, those between siblings. On the other hand, the relationship of Maggie and Philip Wakem is essentially that of siblings. When they are children, she compares him favorably with her own brother, and he in return wishes she were his sister. The narrator attributes Philip’s attraction to Maggie to his mother’s early death and his father’s failure to manifest love for his son (331). Years later, when Tom attacks him for persisting in his suit, Philip replies by declaring that he loves and honors Maggie more than Tom does—that he is, in effect, a better brother (345). Pressed by Stephen on two occasions to admit she loves him in a way she does not love Philip, she cannot respond (448, 476). Thus, Philip’s character is


131

developed in this narrative in terms of a comparison with Tom as a surrogate brother, not as a potential romantic suitor. Maggie insists that she complies with her brother’s demands that she stop seeing Philip out of her obligations to her father; and that interpretation of her motivation suffices through half the narrative. But when her father dies, Maggie must confront her brother’s claim of equivalent authority over her. Although she is conscious of his faults, and aware of how little he understands her, she refrains from rejecting his argument and only assures him that she has kept her word to him. Although they refute her brother’s claim to Maggie’s compliance—Philip explicitly and Stephen Guest implicitly—she never reverses herself. Submission to familial authority, while honored by Maggie, is not unequivocally endorsed by the narrative, however. Shortly after Maggie accedes to her brother’s argument that she should obey him because he has always been a good brother to her, Philip Wakem rejects a similar arguments by his father. Mr. Wakem speaks as a man of commerce: “And this is the return you make me for all the indulgences I’ve heaped on you?” To this Philip rejects the claim using similar financial terms: “I don’t regard it as a return. You have been an indulgent father to me—but I have always felt that it was because you had an affectionate wish to give me as much happiness as my unfortunate lot would admit of—not that it was a debt you expected me to pay by sacrificing all my chances of happiness to satisfy feelings of yours which I can never share” (424). To another familiar argument that “most sons would share their father’s feelings in this case,” Philip counters that such quarrels between generations are commonplace, and that sons of dominating fathers often break completely with them. Philip’s arguments prevail; his father does come around, and the parallel illustrates clearly the propriety of reacting against the selfish demands of parents or claimants to their authority, such as brothers. At this point in assessing the validity of Maggie’s responses to arguments of both patriarchal and fraternal authority, one must acknowledge the entire issue of individual freedom as it is treated in the text; and in many senses the novel can then be seen as an acting out of classic theories of liberty espoused in another contemporary Victorian work, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. Mill specifically denounces the abuse of power by parents: “It is in the case of children that misapplied notions of liberty are a real obstacle to the fulfillment by the State of its duties [to limit or control the exercise of power by any individual over others]. One would almost think that a man’s children were supposed to be literally, and not metaphorically, a part of

132


himself, so jealous is opinion of the smallest interference of law with his absolute and exclusive control over them.”17 His “Harm Principle” succinctly states the limits of the exercise of power: “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”18 He stipulates that this principle applies to adults, not to children, whose welfare must be assigned to the care of others. The dilemma Maggie faces is between a set of conflicting goods: self-realization and obligations to others. It is a classic conflict, an elemental one, but it is none the less torturous because of its familiarity. At the point of facing this problem Maggie is an adult, and the father to whom she exhibited absolute obedience has died. She recognizes that her brother’s impositions on her liberty do not emanate from his desire to protect her; rather, he acts to protect the interests of the family and to sustain an old hatred. Even Tom admits his authority over her is limited: “While my father was living, I felt bound to use the utmost power over you, to prevent you from disgracing him as well as yourself and all of us. But now I must leave you to your own choice. You wish to be independent. . . . If you think of Philip Wakem as a lover again, you must give up me” (392). But Maggie does not wish to do so, or perhaps she is not able to accept that increased degree of individual responsibility. Facing conflicting, irresolvable claims of responsibility, Maggie reverts to dreams of childhood, telling Philip, “I think we are only like children, that some one who is wiser is taking care of. Is it not right to resign ourselves entirely, whatever may be denied us? I have found great peace in that for the last two or three years—even joy in subduing my own will” (327). The vehicle for her retreat into submission is, of course, absolute espousal of the teachings of Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ. Thomas is called by the narrator “a brother,” albeit from a past age, and so another instance of fraternal authority supplanting patriarchal rule. A journal entry of 1859 records George Eliot rereading this text in which she had found comfort and instruction at the time of her father’s death.19 But biographical evidence of Eliot’s reverence for Thomas à Kempis does not limit the expression recorded and encoded in the text, nor our interpretation of it. In fact Maggie’s motives in surrendering self to some undefined greater force are explicitly questioned by the narrator: From what you know of her, you will not be surprised that she threw some exaggeration and willfulness, some pride and impetuosity even


133

into her self-renunciation: her own life as still a drama for her, in which she demanded of herself that her part should be played with intensity. . . . That is the path we all like when we set out on our abandonment of egoism—the path of martyrdom and endurance, where the palm-branches grow, rather than the steep highway of tolerance, just allowance, and self-blame, where there are not leafy honours to be gathered and worn. (292, 293)

Philip, whose judgment seems consistently to accord with the principles of the narrator, also disagrees with her submission to the will of others, in terms that echo Mill: “It is not right to sacrifice everything to other people’s unreasonable feelings. I would give up a great deal for my father, but I would not give up a friendship or—or an attachment of any sort, in obedience to any wish of his that I didn’t recognize as right” (302). The submission that she espouses during the stage of her enthusiasm for Thomas à Kempis is transformed in Stephen Guest’s arguments that she should succumb to the greater forces of instinct and love that are amplified in the image of the river’s current. Their love cannot be resisted, he insists, much as they might try: “It is come upon us without our seeking: it is natural.” And she feels the attraction as well: “If it were not wrong—if she were once convinced of that, and need no longer beat and struggle against this current, soft and yet strong as the summer stream!” (448). Soon it is precisely such a current that transports Maggie and Stephen, as he stops rowing and lets the river take them away, and again she is tempted to believe “that the tide was doing it all—that she might glide along with the swift, silent stream and not struggle any more” (465). This is intoxication, the narrator insists, and the entire passage has the drugged atmosphere of Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters” or the suicidal implications of his “Ulysses.” Like those contemporary poems, the passage raises thematic questions of individual responsibility and even family ties, but its effect is more audacious: it leaves contradictory impulses in abeyance and yet invites scrutiny of them, thus eliciting dialogical consideration. Maggie does overcome the impulses to escape or to submit; she rejects Stephen’s claim that their love is a current “too strong to be overcome: that natural law surmounts every other.” Her speech proclaims the absolute claim of personal responsibilities “to those whom the course of our lives has made dependent on us.” No one is justified in harming those to whom one has a longstanding relationship; one can never say, “They shall suffer, that I may have joy” (475–76).

134


Maggie is portrayed in this scene as uncharacteristically assertive, responsible, and triumphant over what she calls a temptation. But the events recorded in the final book of the novel raise the question of how applicable that stated principle is in the case of those affected by her temporary failing. Philip has been harmed, although he is willing to forgive Maggie; Lucy has been even more severely scarred. Tom, already alienated, has been afforded further justification for rejecting his sister. The tendency to believe the worst has turned the whole community against her, requiring that even her ally Dr. Kenn turn her away. The ethical system pronounced by the narrative’s heroine has immobilized its agents. She has espoused a system so absolute that she must be isolated from a world that cannot live up to its standards. Furthermore, it is a system associated with the past—ideal perhaps, but no longer practicable. The principles of the heroine cannot be sustained, and it is even questionable whether they can be honored in theory, given the multitude of personal responsibilities each person carries. But most ambiguous of all, her choice is treated in the narrative as life-denying. When she receives a letter from Stephen pleading with her to come back, she regards it as an invitation back to life from a place of death: At the entrance of the chill dark cavern, we turn with unworn courage from the warm light; but how, when we have trodden far in the damp darkness, and have begun to be faint and weary—how, if there is a sudden opening above us, and we are invited back again to the life-nourishing day? (514)

Rationalizing that he will recover from the loss, as he seems to do, she vows to “conquer love” (which appears in the manuscript as “conquer delight”). In other words, the narrative manipulation that drives Maggie to isolation is highly qualified, even problematic. The dissatisfaction with the denouement of the novel voiced by many readers and critics results from a presentation of actions that evoke such ambivalence as to prevent subscription to what is offered. Read as a narrative about the Tulliver family, in which the title is metonymic, the course of events that constitute this plot trace a gradual depletion of the family of many of its functions. The death of the father, in this narrative including the manifest ineffectuality of the patriarch in protecting the family from those commercial forces that threaten its continuity, removes from the family its most essential function, what Robert Caserio calls its “genealogical function.” And if the


135

novels under consideration, family novels of the nineteenth century, are essentially, definitively based on filiation, as has been argued above, the effect on narrative is profound. Caserio goes on: without the genealogical function, “the parts of a fictional discourse become adjacencies, juxtapositions. These adjacent parts are fraternal, but they are without parents. And since in their mutuality they do not either couple with or sire one another, they are figuratively celibate, even sterile.”20 What remains, then, are residual functions, and even they are under threat: responsibility for education has been largely surrendered to formal schools, and even the role of preparing the younger generation to attain independence has been compromised. Jenni Calder calls it a paradox: “It is the family that provides the continuum, the necessary human context of the larger movements of society and history. At the same time it is the family, and the community that sustains it, that stifles individual endeavour.”21 In Eliot’s novel, the claims of the family are decidedly rooted in the past; it can still provide stability by restraining its members from dangerous behavior, but its entwining bonds may also disable them from profitable and independent action, manifestations of a natural break from parental controls intrinsic to the process of achieving maturity. It follows, then, that in responding to the urgings of Philip and Stephen to act independently, Maggie would be immobilized from autonomous action and prompted to rationalize by giving priority to claims of the past. But her clutching the floating debris on the flooded Floss is desperate, reactive, and ultimately futile. From the time Maggie finds herself with Stephen on the river far from Lucy and Philip, she is often speechless, nearly catatonic, so that the lure of succumbing to the current of the river or the exhortations of lovers can hardly be resisted. She does mount the effort to reject Stephen’s appeal that she leave with him, but when he writes to urge her to come to him, she is again weakened. In time, she hopes, Stephen will feel otherwise, and so she temporizes. She seems immobilized, choosing to stay where she is rather than seek employment elsewhere, until social attitudes form a different response. At the moment immediately preceding her final renunciation she sits quietly, “without active force enough even for the mental act of prayer: only waiting for the light that would surely come again” (515). It does come, in the form of appeals from “the long past,” to renounce and to suffer, and in the specifically Christian terms offered by Thomas à Kempis: “I have received the Cross, I have received it from thy hand; I will bear it, and bear it till death, as thou hast laid it upon me” (515). But the course

136


she has taken is associated with death, the opposite of a life in action and effort. The flood that takes her she regards as a rescue from such an existence: In the first moments Maggie felt nothing, thought of nothing, but that she had suddenly passed away from that life which she had been dreading: it was the transition of death, without its agony—and she was alone in the darkness with God. (517)

Only after a time does she seize an oar and begin to paddle the boat “with the energy of wakening hope” (518). Her final actions—taking command, steering the boat first into the current of the Floss and later out of it in order to rescue her brother—are regarded by Tom as constituting “a story of almost miraculous divinely-protected effort” (520).22 The title of the novel’s last book terms this a “final rescue,” which it is, if the rescuing force is a divine one. But considering the skeptical view of human efforts to counter the forces of nature or even of industrial progress, the narrative has been driven into a corner in which only through miraculous intervention, a true deus ex machina, can the narrative be concluded. And in terms of novelistic structure, this constitutes a failure in a form driven by strings of causalities. If the final actions strain credibility by relying upon divine intervention, it is accompanied by a reversal of time and a reversion to childish behavior that is no more appealing. Tom says only “Magsie,” as he had called her when they were happy children, and the narrator offers a sweet scene of their reunion as children. Both Philip and Stephen are reported as sustaining their love: “their keenest joy and keenest sorrow were for ever buried there” (522), but that deprivation of their joy must indicate that Maggie did not, could not, avoid harming them both. Any redemptive interpretation that reasserts the sanctity of the fraternal bond is made problematic by the fact that in the end, brother and sister die, achieving reunion with each other only in an afterlife.23 At the narrative’s close the reader is left with a series of unanswered questions and irreconcilable issues. Is the flood, which reunites and transports brother and sister to their blissful union, the same force that Maggie resented as it led her and Stephen away from home? Can it be considered a force of Providence when it was earlier regarded as destructive? Does Maggie achieve in death the kind of union with her brother that was forbidden in life, allowing in an afterlife a kind of


137

incest that was taboo on earth? Does she earn from her brother a new level of personal regard when she steers the boat to rescue him, or has she only succumbed to the wishful longing that has dominated her life? Does the report that the surviving parties, Philip, Stephen, and Lucy, visit Maggie and Tom’s grave in any sense valorize a narrative that ends in death? Paradoxically, this very open-endedness serves to engage dialogical reading of the text. The even-handed presentation of opposed moral principles (the dramatization of a choice among responses to conflicting family responsibilities, rather than the stipulation that one course of action is to be preferred) and the suspension of concluding judgment (shifting the interpretive burden to the reader) elicit responses that participate in the ideological discourse of the time and, in fact, the continuing consideration of ideologies of the family that have not yet wholly disappeared. In testing the implications of extending familial authority beyond that of a father and positing in its stead the notion of the sacred nature of sibling relationships, the narrative in the end hits an impasse. Arguments of fraternal authority prove to be so complex and so debatable, sibling relationships are so subject to erotic influences, and the whole remaining set of family responsibilities that follow the death of the father are so tenuous that they cannot withstand the competing claims of sexual attractions and finally cannot be accommodated in the neat, circular structure of family novels of the early part of the century. Within the set of ideologies of mid-century, return to the consolation of a cohesive family unit is impossible, and so the main character, responding to conflicting responsibilities, particularly those espoused by a brother (Tom) or a brother figure (Philip), cannot be reconciled with what are clearly powerful elemental desires to realize self and to acknowledge sexual desire. The conflict has become so extensive and powerful that it cannot be resolved in the traditional form of the narrative that calls for a return of the prodigal son or daughter and a restoration of order. As industrialization and social reform advance in the first half of the nineteenth century, the family is perceived as more remote and isolated; in its defensive position it must resist incursions on its authority and ultimately even struggle to continue its very existence in a world perceived as hostile. The desire for self-enclosure of the family was prominently embodied in the circular patterns of narrative, in which the unity of the family is restored and it prepares to replicate itself in a succeeding generation. Strong, unequivocal closure of the narrative

138


reasserted the authority of the narrator, the rule of the father, and the entire patriarchal system. However, by mid-century the shift of ideology is reflected in the stress on the structure of the novel that makes strong closure difficult to justify in terms of mimetic art. In this text, the refutation of patriarchal authority, the refusal to substitute fraternal authority, and the reservations against endorsement of a feminist ideology lead at the end of the narrative to a dramatically irresolvable conflict. The expected restoration of family order can be achieved only by a reunion of brother and sister that is regressive at least, and hazardously close to the taboo of incest.24 In a world in which the rights of children were being acknowledged, seen in the factory reforms and legislation associated with Lord Shaftesbury, and in which the rights of women were being at least proposed by writers such as Harriet Martineau and John Stuart Mill, the family’s attempt to maintain seclusion, exemption from participation in contemporary exchanges, could only be regarded as increasingly problematic. Given the deterministic limitations imposed on women in mid-Victorian society, the reversals of the narrative’s conclusion that culminate in the death of the heroine may be offered as a defensible, or even inevitable conclusion.25 Eliot’s adoption of evolutionary theories, resulting in an attempt to replace a discounted patriarchy with affective fraternal ties, was not the only, nor a typical ideological response. More vehement was the opposite reaction: a reassertion of patriarchy in the form of religious affirmation. The fragility of such a defense now seems evident when one looks at a novel of the same period in which dialogical scrutiny and formulation are sacrificed to an unquestioning endorsement of conservative Christian orthodoxy.

“The Iron Chain” and The Daisy Chain The Enlightenment disputation of church power and the aggressive attacks on established religion in the French Revolution not only lingered, and even spread; it provoked a counter-movement of Evangelicalism, growing in intensity as scientific and political challenges grew. An important part of its program was the promotion of a religiously-infused ideology of the family, in which it serves not only as the model of an orderly society, but as a support for Christian belief and even an analogue to the ideal of Christian life. In Evangelical teaching, the mother was infused with sacred resonance, and the family was considered the prime vehicle for pursuing salvation.26


139

The defensive reaction against such threats to domestic ideology, and no less to invested institutions of power, took the form of intensified idealization of the family—not only as an essential formative and protective institution, but as a divinely ordained social unit, a reflection of divine relationships of Father, Son, and even Holy Spirit. Biblical accounts traced history back to the first parents, Adam and Eve, and constituted a narrative of primarily familial relationships. Paintings of the period combined traditional religious subjects with a strong domestic emphasis; John Everett Millais’ “Christ in the House of His Parents” (1850) presents Jesus as a boy of nine or so, being kissed by his mother and ministered to by his father after he has cut his hand. The wound is on his palm, blood drips on his foot, another boy stands by with a bowl of water, a dove perches on a ladder of the sort that appears in many depictions of the Crucifixion, the light that illuminates the mother’s face seems to come from no natural source, and so on. The painting is replete with insistent Christian imagery designed to tell a story and proclaim a set of values. If the narrative elements seem too overt for modern tastes, the painting does represent English art of this period in its facile merging of religious and domestic themes and components. Here a piece of religious art, the subject of inspiring depictions for centuries past, has been made in a narrative of contemporary family life in which an English-looking mother, father, and grandmother attend a rosy-cheeked, red-haired boy, in a cozy scene in which parents care for a child, even while predictions of ultimate bloodshed and sacrifice are implied. The debate over emerging theories of evolution that threatened orthodox religious beliefs elicited responses promoting the family as a stalwart of religious constancy. Seeking evidence supporting the integrity of the family, the Royal Family became an object of adulation, which in some cases came to be associated with the Holy Family, making domesticity, according to Anthony Wohl, “a creed,” and a “dogma.”27 Ironically, such elevation of a human institution to divine status became the most vulnerable of claims because the most tenuous. As religious orthodoxy was questioned—in a process that extended over a long period, but which reached a level of intensity at the time of the debates in response to Darwin’s 1859 bombshell, and as the German Higher Criticism of the Scriptures attracted subscription of intellectuals such as George Eliot—this pious claim was easily deflated. The residual sentimental praise of the family as a miniature version of the church was in time dismissed by G. K. Chesterton as “worship of the hearth without the altar.”28

140


After mid-century, profession of the sacred nature of the family was both at its height and starting to evoke questioning at the same time, particularly as the institution of the church, the family writ large, was seen as losing popular subscription. Statistical evidence that church attendance was declining, particularly among the poor and working class, inspired efforts to promote Christian education and practice. But in such efforts one can see how the ideology of the family, particularly in its regard for the rule of the patriarch and the submissive roles of wives and daughters, was being challenged and revised. In this discourse on the family in its relation to religious practice, Florence Nightingale’s Suggestions for Thought (1860; composed in the ten preceding years) and Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Daisy Chain (1856) are particularly significant texts, as each reveals the terms of the reconsideration of family forms and functions through reference to a perceived decline in religious adherence, leading to problematic conclusions that test the rules of straightforward narrative. The full title of Nightingale’s essay, Suggestions for Thought to the Searchers after Truth Among the Artizans of England indicates its place in the dialogue on working-class religious education, but the rhetoric is not as modest or theoretical as the title might suggest.29 In specifying her audience as working-class members, and addressing them in the opening words as “Fellow-searchers,” the author acknowledges an ongoing dialogue about the pursuit of religious truths, or as she terms it, “Truth.” And she assumes at the outset that the authority of religious teaching has been, and will be questioned, which is not to say that she does not profess belief in a divinity and support for religion. Her question is epistemological: how can we know the existence of God and the validity of Christian teaching, and she argues that neither logic nor inductive reasoning (what she calls the “Baconian way”) nor even Scriptures will suffice. What is sought is authority, a rationale for religious belief. The book’s arguments are presented in a clear, succinct manner, as various supports for faith are analyzed and usually discarded, but always with reiterations of the need for religious faith. Prominent among the practices proposed for seeking religious truth is that Victorian favorite: the sacred nature of Work. But concurrent with this disquisition is a more energetic analysis of the institution of the family, specifically as it mistreats is female members. The lack of opportunities for unmarried daughters and wives to pursue meaningful work not only frustrates them, but undermines the integrity of family. After claiming that idle unmarried adult daughters take to “governessing [their] parents,” the author offers an


141

analysis of filial responsibility. Here Nightingale’s refutation of traditional claims of patriarchal authority most clearly resemble earlier questioning of religious authority, as for the remainder of the threevolume text the two subjects are set as parallel and interrelated topics. Authority derives from an act of creation, in which power is acquired when a person or an artifact is created; but while this argument was used to justify the use of power, she argues that it is outmoded: What was the original meaning of authority? Does it mean the tie between the Author and those of whom He was the Author? The author has power over what He has created—God over the universe—man over the family—and might, as we have said, was right, in early days. Was this the pedigree of “authority”? But reflection brings into view that might is not right. Is there any permanent power, any real power except what arises out of wisdom, truth, goodness? (159)

In making authority contingent on virtue, and attributing it to specifically modern ways of thought, Nightingale echoes Enlightenment views of the sources and limitations of political power. However, she directly rejects the contemporary argument that the family is divinely ordained: “God makes the family.” So it is often said. Perhaps it is just the contrary. God makes attractions, and the principle of the family is not to go by attractions. There may be one tyrant in the family, and the tyrant may go by attraction, but the others do not. In an amiable family, the common course of things is for every one to give up just enough to prevent such collision as would make it intolerable. (69)

Filial responsibilities must be recognized, then, as voluntary, as predicated by needs of self as much as by the rule of a patriarch. Children owe love and gratitude to their parents, but “they can’t be grateful to people for making slaves of them” (67). It is the vehemence of Nightingale’s rhetoric, the intensity of the metaphors employed, that make this work such a historically rich document, for it discloses the desperation wrought by inequities that Victorian convention sought to deny. Dethroned from its privileged status, the family is attacked as a place of exploitation, and as an institution outmoded by the current social advances. The rhetorical force of her argument is indicated by the terms employed: women are “robbed and murdered” by the system of confining them to the home; the family is

142


called a “prison,” in which “people are chained up together for life, so close in the same cage”; and the entire system is outrageous: As long as the iron chain is drawn tight round the family, fettering those together who are not joined to one another by any sympathy or common pursuit, it must be so. It is often disputed what kinds of character like society. It is probable that those like it who can say aloud the things which they would think to themselves, if they were alone. But how few can do this at home! There is no tyranny like that of the family, for it extends over the thoughts. (121)

It is not only the patriarch who imposes rule on the daughters of a family; mothers are complicit in the system of exploitation: “Daughters are now their mothers’ slaves . . . they are to have no other pursuit, nor power, nor independent life, unless they marry; they are to be entirely dependent upon their parents—white slaves in the family, from which marriage alone can emancipate them. Mothers acknowledge this, even while feeling that they are the daughters’ slaves too” (139). In training daughters only for marriage, just as in imposing quiet compliance on them, both parents share the guilt of the entire social system that perpetrates such injustice. The once-treasured claim that authority derives from creation— God’s formation of the universe, the parents’ procreation of a family— is denied. Patriarchs in both political and family life are not granted unlimited power; but they may earn it: “In proportion as the parent has wisdom and goodness to fulfill the part he has undertaken, he will, naturally and essentially, have the affection, the respect of his children” (162). Such an argument begs a question that is later acknowledged: if patriarchal rule is not absolute, who establishes rules of order? She answers as John Stuart Mill might: “A true understanding of the nature of God and man, of our relations to God and to our fellow-creatures, depends upon, requires the right exercise of, the whole nature of all mankind” (172). In this process women must participate as fully as men. Ultimately the essay becomes a tract for reform; appealing for the provision of education and professional opportunities for women, and even proposing a less binding model of the home, in which parents and children are bound together by sympathy and respect, but one that “would not involve that the parent and child should live together, work together, or that they should not” (177). In entitling one key section of her disquisition “Cassandra,” Nightingale reveals the anxiety that her protests will go unheard, and


143

so she appropriates a mythic, prophetic voice of exceptional force. Personalized as one who has awakened before the mass of mankind, the voice can declare with gravity her challenges, such as, “Why have women passion, intellect, moral activity—these three—and a place in society where no one of the three can be exercised?” (205). She recognizes the ideal force of the novel—not only as a vehicle for revealing current attitudes, but as a means of evoking and embodying a more complex discursive set of intellectual activities: What are novels? What is the secret of the charm of every romance that ever was written? The first thing in a good novel is to place the persons together in circumstances which naturally call out the high feelings and thoughts of the character [sic], which afford food for sympathy between them on these points—romantic events they are called. The second is that the heroine has generally no family ties (almost invariably no mother), or, if she has, these do not interfere with her entire independence. These two things constitute the main charm of reading novels. (208)

Fiction, then, is seen as providing an imaginative relief from social oppression, and so constitutes a protest against ideologies that frustrate individual realization. Just as this non-fictional discourse interrogates what had been claimed as irrefutable (the divine ordinance of familial obedience), the novel can implicitly dispute such pious claims through positing a world freed from such oppression. Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Daisy Chain fits Nightingale’s description of a discursive text in many respects, and it offers a rich summary of mid-century contributions to the discourse of the sacred nature of the family and its present challenges. An ardent disciple of John Keble, Yonge promoted the missionary and catechetical efforts of the Church of England in over one hundred and sixty books, which enjoyed immense popularity over the entire second half of the century. The Heir of Redclyffe (1854) first earned her popularity, but it, and the dozen or so novels that followed, reveals a novelistic intelligence that acknowledges complexities to such an extent that they embody ideological discourse of a high level. Yonge’s continuing concern in her novels, as in her essays and editorial efforts, is the integrity of the family, and specifically filial obedience, which she allies with Anglican teaching and practice. But in The Daisy Chain she presents her most extensive defense of family ideology as analogous to Christian orthodox doctrine.

144


The full title—The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations: A Family Chronicle specifies a scope and form that Yonge described as unusual: “an overgrown book of a nondescript class, neither the ‘tale’ for the young, nor the novel for their elders, but a mixture of both.” It is “a domestic record of home events, large and small, during those years of early life when the character is chiefly formed” with an articulated moral: “that the young should take one hint, to think whether their hopes and upward-breathings are truly upwards, and founded in lowliness.”30 But the novel is not as idiosyncratic as Yonge assumed, for it is representative of a great deal of Victorian fiction. It is a domestic chronicle, tracing seven years in a family’s history following the death of one parent, during which family roles are defined, redefined, interrogated, and ultimately brought to resolution. The May family first appears as harmonious, controlled by the benevolent, even saintly influence of the parents, a conscientious doctor and his wife, who is killed in an accident in the very first section of the narrative. Given the number of children in the family, the twenty-year range of their ages and the differences in temperament, the centrifugal impulses become challenging following the death of the mother, whose “gentle power” has prevented “outbreaks of restlessness to which even at such times the wild young spirits were liable” (5). The narrative treats a period in which the integrity of a family is most vulnerable, when it is tested by deaths, separations, and other crises, and it closes with a transformed, stable family that is offered as exemplary of Christian behavior. The respect showered upon Dr. Richard May by his children establishes him as a model patriarch at the very beginning of the narrative. We are told that he might have made a large fortune in London, had not “home attachments” prevailed; in this and recurrent references to life outside the rural community, the contrast of family life to that of commerce is emphasized. But the plot is generated by actions within the domestic unit. The accident in which his wife is killed and his eldest daughter is crippled is due to his reckless driving of the horse carriage (33–34). As the narrative progresses, instances of absolute submission to paternal rule are counterbalanced by admissions or less overt indications that father is not always right. Nevertheless, in all cases, compliance to his wishes is prescribed, the very kind of submission that Florence Nightingale denounced. Dr. May’s permission is sought by his children in all incidents of importance, whether to join the navy, to enroll in the university, to seek academic honors, and, of course, to marry. He is consistently fair, devoid of selfishness, in making decisions and giving advice, and even capable of strict punishment,


145

going so far as to prevent a son from making his Christian confirmation for what seems a minor misbehavior. But that action, and other like ones, is subjected to interrogation by the children, and thus by the reader. Like Goldsmith’s Dr. Primrose, he is on occasion stubborn and inflexible, but his benevolence and expressions of affection earn for him the filial love and gratitude that Nightingale indicated could be earned. And precisely as the children come to recognize the ways in which, after his wife’s death, he comes to fill traditionally maternal as well as paternal familial roles, he gains a more exalted position. His son Norman recognizes the change in his father: Dr. May was a parent who could not fail to be loved and honoured; but, as a busy man, trusting all at home to his wife, he had only appeared to his children either as a merry playfellow, or as a stern paternal authority, not often in the intermediate light of guiding friend, or gentle guardian; and it affected Norman exceedingly to find himself, a tall schoolboy, watched and soothed with motherly tenderness and affection; with complete comprehension of his feelings, and delicate care of them. (108)

Specification of the son’s adolescent masculinity underlines the implied interrogation of ideological identifications of male and female as playing distinctly different roles: as the father has become “motherly” he earns more than compliant respect. This development parallels a more telling turn in the narrative: it is precisely when the father is weakened, confined to bed after the carriage accident for which he was partly responsible, that his children are able to advance to mature roles. Dr. May has been severe in his judgment of the eldest son, Richard, for failing a school examination. However, once the father is made physically dependent, Richard moves easily into a paternal role, providing the support for his sister Ethel to develop a school in a neighboring village, the narrative concern that underpins the entire remainder of the novel. The novel’s title suggests not only the beauty of domestic relations but the vulnerability, the tenuity of the family bond. It is explained in the narrative as deriving from Dr. May’s dream, in which his wife awarded him the prize of a daisy chain after a tournament in which he has been wounded. But the chain, identified by him as his family, comes to be regarded as a precious gift, a stay against adversity. This fragile link of flowers, the prize of the courtly tournament, is all the more valued as it is threatened by a world of alien values.

146


In this narrative, as in Dombey and Son, it is the world of commerce and concern with social class that is most often cited as antagonistic. Meta Rivers, who eventually is morally educated by her encounters with the May family, ultimately marrying into the family, is initially criticized for her concern about wealth and status, as is the neighboring family that “wants to set up for gentility.” To amplify this moral instruction, references to a negative example are provided: the recurrent mentions of a neighbor, Granny Hall, who earns reproach for failing to discipline her children. In one instance, when she fails to carry through on her threat to punish her children for disobedience, the May children scold her: “Just suppose you were to try for once really punishing them when they won’t obey you; perhaps they could do it next time. . . . I think it would be kind to do it for once. What do you think they will do as they grow older, if you don’t keep them in order when they are little?” (90). The May children are subjected to a generally responsible paternal rule, to which they not only comply but that goes unchallenged. However, the absence of challenges to the prescriptions offered, seen in the transparency of the incidental references and the compliance of the characters to traditional claims of patriarchy disqualifies this text from the category of works that not only reflect ideology but substantively participate in its formation. Even decisions about courtship and marriage, typically examined and contested in nineteenth-century novels, are resigned, without objection, to paternal authority. When Margaret, the crippled daughter, is proposed to by a sober, responsible young man, Alan Earnescliffe, the young couple defer to Dr. May on whether marriage would be advisable, given her medical condition. And when he consults a medical specialist on the case, his children object, admitting to being “swayed by the habit of thinking that papa must know best” (272). His judgment is sought in all such cases, and proven to be sound as well. As accidents and childhood crises occur, parental authority is tested, but always its absolute rule is reasserted: “It is our duty not to question our father’s judgments, says one of the children, and compares him with a ship’s captain: even a slight disobedience would constitute mutiny” (239). In many such respects, The Daisy Chain offers a view of the family to which Florence Nightingale’s would seem antithetical. However, telling formal features of the novel reveal substantial shifts in ideology by this period. First, the central figure is not the patriarch, but his daughter. While the novel’s narrative scope is the experiences of the family of Dr. Richard May, in the few years after the death of his wife,


147

the subtitle indicates the more limited focus: the coming to maturity of Ethel, one of the eleven May children. Ethel fits Nightingale’s definition, offered above, being orphaned by her mother’s death, but she is far from the autonomous heroine of romantic fiction that Nightingale noted, for with the crippling of her elder sister and the quite different career opportunities afforded to her brothers, Ethel’s position is circumscribed by the need to care for her siblings, ranging from the newborn Gertrude to the twenty-year-old Richard, as well as her father—the idealized patriarch, but one emotionally dependent on his children. And within the broad family scope described above, the narrative of Ethel’s advancement determines the actual contours of the novel: where it opens and where it ends, as well as its thematic focus.31 In the very first episode of the narrative Ethel proposes a walk to the neighboring village, Cocksmoor. That excursion results in making plans for establishing a school and church in that impoverished community, a project that is formulated by Ethel, and one for which she has to work to earn her father’s support. Ethel is intelligent—more so than her closest brothers—but she is denied the opportunities offered to them, and she resents it. On this occasion her responsibilities as a daughter are articulated as being superior: her older sister advises her that pursuing academic studies could not match the importance of her daughterly role: “And for that would you give up being a useful, steady daughter and sister at home? The sort of woman, that dear mamma wished to make you, and a comfort to papa” (163). Her expressions of frustration when her reliable judgment is set against the irresponsibility of her brothers provokes dialogical inquiry into such a claim, the very sort of contestation that Florence Nightingale hoped for. And the solidification of the family after the effective removal of parental authority may represent a contemporary advancement as the family might function in the newly expanded market economy.32 From the start, Ethel is established as free from undue concern about self: her mother had so described her in a letter that serves as a guide to distinguishing among the May children. She exhibits the greatest concern for helping the poor and acts most consistently in supporting her invalid sister and her father. She even rejects a suitor to whom she was clearly attracted because of her sense of responsibility to care for her father and siblings. As the narrative approaches its conclusion, she is the character against whom others are judged, and her summary comments acquire particular weight in determining the reader’s response. In talking to her sister Flora while she is recuperating from near fatal illness, she reminds her of her duty to resume family life with

148


her own husband and child: “They are your duty. . . . Duty brings peace” (588). And in determining what duty is, she consistently defers to the judgment of her father and to the religious instruction contained in the prayer book. So dependent are others on her guidance that she becomes indispensable to them, in many ways replacing her father, who himself, we are told, cannot go on without her. She is described as a precious object: The pearl of their home might be missed every hour, but they could thankfully rest in the trust that she was a jewel stored up in safety and peace, to shine as a star for evermore. (592)

In that description the assumption of spiritual value is evident: her influence will guide others, and her virtue will be rewarded in eternity. Just as the narrative opened with a trip to Cocksmoor, it closes with Ethel standing in the porch of the church now built there. Ethel’s project is completed, particularly in overcoming her father’s reservations about it; indeed, in the last words of the novel she welcomes her father to the church, to which he has come to hear her brother preach. She has “fixed her lot in life. . . . Home and Cocksmoor had been her choice.” She has become an ideal matriarch, caring for dependent siblings, although recognizing that they will grow to leave her in pursuing their independent lives. And her entire conception of self merges religious belief with practicality: “The unmarried woman must not seek undivided return of affection, and must not set her love, with exclusive eagerness, on aught below, but must be ready to cease in turn to be first with any. . . . To love each heartily, to do her utmost for each in turn . . . but never to count on their affection as her sole right and inalienable possession” (593). She has displaced her father not only in the operations of the family, but as the symbol of enlightened authority. Nevertheless, her advancement, as presented in the narrative, comes too easy: the patriarch gives way to the noble sister, but only by way of appealing to orthodox Christian practice. Absolute submission to the parent is, in this text, authorized by the consistent identification of the family with the established church. The Christian injunction to lead the young to the kingdom of heaven is applied to the family, another institution necessarily hierarchical but benevolent. In addition to developing the moral and spiritual sensibilities of its members, the family works in helping the poor and sick of the neighborhood. The professions selected for the children reflect such a benevolent mission: the world of commerce is eschewed, while


149

work as a priest, doctor, teacher, or even political leader, are allowed. Like the church, the family provides not only sustenance to the faithful but conversion of the wayward: the May family converts the materialistic Meta Rivers to the higher life. And when Ethel looks toward her mission in the years ahead, she finds comfort in knowing that she will enjoy “Communion” with her family, the extended church, the Communion of Saints. Within the activities of the family the May parents and children act out the most important parts of their lives, for within the family they pursue salvation. Thus the family, in this novel, becomes much more than a model of propriety and order, but a sacred institution: the living church on earth. The narrative preaches unrestricted authority of the father as earnestly as would a Tractarian, and compliance as insistently as would an Evangelical preacher. Through the identification of the family with the institution of the church the narrative becomes a tract promoting familial virtues. In turn, the narrative structure is shaped by its didactic intention: the plot serves primarily to preach subscription to religious teachings; and characters are reduced to mere agents in a morality play, or puppet-like exemplars of family members, like the characters in Defoe’s The Family Instructor. The entire narrative has the shape of an instructive sermon, a tale in which the stability of the church on earth, the May family, is tested by the death of its matriarch, the personal trials of its young members, and the incursions of a hostile, materialistic world. At the end it endures through the efforts and devotion of its wisest members, who sacrifice their material gain to the cause of its support, and who consistently support its hierarchical rule. This allows for little exercise of individual judgment, so that the characters appear in the novel only as figures in a religious tract: exemplars of strength or weakness, sanctity or folly. No manifestly evil characters appear, as this is a world of religious instruction in which everyone is reclaimable: all can be elevated by the instruction and example of the May family. The entire narrative has taken the form of a parable. The didactic, morally edifying thrust of the narrative restricts the psychological exploration of characters, results in a strained, heavyhanded conclusion, and nearly precludes dialogical participation by the reader. One reason for this disqualification is that there is no second party to whom the reader might respond or even disagree. There is virtually no authorial commentary offered; the text consists primarily of dialogue, with accompanying summaries of what the characters themselves perceive. Such perceptions are often edifying, but they derive from the characters, not from an established narrator. Only

150


rarely is any more detached commentary or description inserted, and then it is no more substantive than “It was pleasant to see that large family in the hush and reverence of such teaching.” Paradoxically, this absence of a narrative voice militates against dialogical response by the reader, for no summarizing or interpreting consciousness is established as ordering the events into a statement of ideological import. On the other hand, although one might expect such an absence of an asserting agent to reduce the sense of its persuasive force, its effect grows in strength rather than being diminished. The quasibiblical parable is elevated to a level of commanding veracity by its presentation as an uncolored, uninterpreted, and thus unassailable account, albeit one that may be so perplexing as to demand interpretation.33 The absence of a narrative voice does not disqualify this account from being an instructive tract—on the contrary, it reinforces the moral theme enunciated in the Preface, one directed at daughters and sons and promoting piety. The employment of an established narrator would have enabled ironic commentary, or at least elicited dialogical response by the reader, effects antithetical to the implied intention of this text. The narrative focus on Ethel makes the instructive message evident and conclusive. She serves as the moral arbiter as well as agent whose judgment is informed by the highest values, which are those of orthodox, even Anglican, religion. In her compliance to parental rule, she does not resemble the prototypical protagonist Edward Said regards as characteristic of the classic English novel. Ethel’s pursuit of “celibate” activity is limited: she pursues her project of establishing a school and church at Cocksmoor over the objections, or at least reservations of her father. But these projects do not constitute substantial resistance to parental authority nor family roles. Her plot line dominates the novel, accounting for its opening and closing; and her position within the family is hardly threatened by such activity, nor by her relations with prospective suitors. And, most important, filiation, in the form of endorsing patriarchal authority, sibling relationships, and family security is not interrogated. Dr. May is not always right; in fact, after his wife’s death, for which he is assigned some degree of culpability, he becomes progressively weaker, and his judgment becomes more questionable. However, Ethel, like all her siblings, does not challenge his ultimate rule: to the offspring he is, as one of them had said, the ship’s captain, who must be obeyed. And the association of the human family with the church is not explored, but rather amplified: religious faith becomes reified in family devotion so that both institutions may resist


151

the threats of materialism. In their elevated positions, both are regarded as impervious to intellectual analysis or critique. The desire of the family not only to protect some degree of autonomy from the infectious outside world but to replicate itself prescribed the kind of closure found in The Vicar of Wakefield: the formation of a new generation. But in this novel the protagonist remains unwed at the end, having sacrificed herself to care for her family, and so she does not participate in assuring the replication of the family in the next generation.34 Yet in the very last pages of the text, even protection of and care for the family is dismissed by Ethel when she concludes “earthly homes may not endure, nor fill the heart.” Realizing the loneliness of the solitary life she faces in the years to come, she turns to the reward of peace in an afterlife, and the consolation of memories of her lost family members. She will, she is confident, have happiness above. In the prospect of eternal life, self-abnegation for its own sake, as a purifying enterprise, takes precedence over earthbound responsibilities to others. But the thematic concern for the survival of the family is minimized and, in the narrative, subsumed into a vast context or abandoned at the end. And so on the concluding pages of this novel, attention is directed upwards, away from the May family. The domestic concerns that have dominated the narrative are reduced in scale of significance to trivial secular distractions. As a conclusion to a narrative this is unsatisfying, leaving the impression that the rules of the reader/writer contract have been changed, in that what seemed to be worthy of attention is now dismissed. Disagreement, even consideration of different interpretations of the text, are precluded when supra-rational claims are proclaimed as indisputable. The disallowance of ideological contestation, particularly in the arbitrary closure, so restricts the responses of readers as to put this work outside the pattern of the great novels of the period. The conflict of the developing individual’s pursuit of identity and the patriarch’s determination to protect authority, the fundamental thematic pattern of the novel noted by Said, is not allowed to develop in this text. Ethel is comfortable in her role within the family, consistently supportive of her father and her siblings, and she concludes, as she started, in asserting her role as remaining within the family, while moving on to higher concerns. Written in the same decade as Suggestions for Thought, the novel seems to ignore the pressing issues of enslavement and oppression so urgently raised by Nightingale. But reading the novel in the historical context of ideological debate, one can see how the appropriation of religious value is a response to perceived threats to the family and how

152


identification of the family as an embodiment of the church is a response to perceived threats to that institution. While less nuanced or ironically explored than the episode in The Mill on the Floss in which Maggie considers absolute submission as proposed by Thomas à Kempis, this novel’s subscription to the appeal of withdrawal from the world reflects one response perceived as available at the time. In fact, the proposed utter obedience to the patriarch, human or divine, constitutes a defensive strategy against forces that threaten both institutions, a tactic similar to Tractarian arguments of apostolic succession and contemporary claims of papal infallibility.

CHAPTER 4

T HE E ND OF THE S TORY : THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE AND ERNEST PONTIFEX

I

n the last decades of the century ideological discourse regarding a set of fundamental national institutions was well under way, an indication of how vehemently the validity of each was being contested. The steadily growing support for Home Rule in Ireland raised questions about the viability of the Empire, a subject that had already led to disputation about the tradition of recognizing an established church. The financial costs and programmatic difficulties of a steadily expanding program of protection for workers and care for the indigent population was becoming evident, provoking calls for protecting the national economy. In such debates, the family continued to serve a metonymic function, so that policies are discussed in terms of familial relationships and functions. Such legislation as the Married Women’s Property Act of 1881 and the various extensions of public education and factory reform had in substantial ways affected family functions, although not to the extent that some had feared. Anxiety over the rapidity of social change elicited a longing for a stable order, in which the family could be deployed as a template—but it was a model that could serve for both sides in the debate. In arguments over the welfare system, paternal rule could be held up as requiring care for orphans, the elderly, and the sick, if they were viewed as members of a vast national family; at

154


the same time, paternalism could be exposed as a specious appeal to domestic sentiment to conceal social control. The debate over land reform in Ireland was conducted in familial terms, in which the landlords claimed to represent an ordained family lineage, while the tenants and reformers characterized them as errant guardians or interlopers in another imputed system in which family integrity of the native Irish was threatened by their negligence and exploitation. The Irish nationalist iconography proposed the figure of a matriarch with four sons whose land holdings have been divided and usurped. The unionist response was no less familial, arguing for maintenance of a social system and land holdings as a family inheritance to be protected by paternal care. So common was the claim of familial protection in debates over expanded provisions of health care, job security for workers, and care for the impoverished, that by the last decades of the century, the term paternalism emerges as an accusation, imputing a claim that the family narrative that had been employed was no more than a devious, specious attempt to gain or maintain social control.1 By the end of the century, in celebrations of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, the strain on an Empire and a political system that had been assumed to be benevolent has become evident. The embarrassments of the Boer War, the mounting support for political independence in Ireland and accelerating domestic discord called into question the nation’s cohesion and begin to intimate its approaching decline as a world power. At the end of the century, a dramatic shift in ideology of the family becomes, in similar ways, manifestly clear. The bourgeois family has come to be perceived not only as vulnerable but as outmoded, irrelevant, or even destructive. The same institution, which had in preceding generations been claimed to be the source of social order, a highest model of probity, and the most important socializing power, now appears not as a shrine, nor even as a haven from an alien culture, but as a ruin from the past. Although the specific functions and practices of actual families in England had not substantially changed, discourse on those functions and on the entire institution had developed to the point that the ideological representation was almost completely inverted. In novels of the period that both concentrate attention on the survival of a single family unit and contribute to the discourse about ideological issues under contention, the family represents the opposite of the consoling model of an orderly society. Claims of patriarchal authority had always been disputed, but in the last decades of the century, and continuing into the twentieth century, an era that celebrates individualism, paterfamilias comes to seem an anachronism.

THE END OF THE STORY

155

The increased knowledge of human psychology, pre-Freudian but acute, made contention and discontent within the household seem natural, thus contradicting earlier claims of privileged sibling relationships and fidelity to parents. The rapid technological and societal changes made it ever more likely that parents would not understand children, and, of course, that the new generation would regard the older one as retrograde. But the revision of ideology is more drastic yet: the family, which had been promoted as a model of order, or at least a haven from the materialism and savage contention of the world of commerce, now appears as a prison, from which children must struggle to escape.

“There’s No Place like H——, You Know”: The Master of Ballantrae The fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson is replete with references to poisoned relations between fathers and sons and corrupted, dying families. It is not surprising, then, that biographical information reveals that his familial relationships were strained. Writing to Fanny Sitwell, he described his anguished dealings with his father as “just the old story, only sudden revelations of a whole Hell between people. . . . There’s no place like H—-, you know—which you may understand as you will.”2 Orphaned children, malevolent parents, confining and repressive familial influences appear not only in his most serious works, such as The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Weir of Hermiston, but even in his adventures and romances. Within the corpus of Stevenson’s novels, The Master of Ballantrae (1889) earns eminence as the most ambitious in philosophical scope, the most polished and experimental in literary technique, and the most subtle in psychological exploration. It is, as well, the most powerful in its presentation of fundamental discourses on the nature of family. In fact, it constitutes an assault upon family ideologies so bold as to represent the concluding phase of a century of fictionalizing about “the family.” The experimental nature of the narrative is indicated in the Preface in its employment of a contrivance that points to its own artifice. Revisiting his home, the narrator (identified as a novelist) visits an old friend, Johnstone Thomson, in his law office, where he is offered the opportunity to go through a set of papers left by a now defunct family—the Duries of Durrisdeer and Ballantrae. The documents, deposited with a provision that they be disclosed no sooner than a

156


hundred years later, contain various pieces of information regarding the demise of a once-prominent family, apparently left by its last members: the last lord and his unmarried sister, “a quiet, plain, poor, humdrum couple it would seem—but pathetic too, as the last of that stirring and brave house—and, to the country folk, faintly terrible from some deformed conditions.”3 The name Johnstone Thomson is an amalgam of two fictional characters Stevenson had earlier employed in his correspondence with Charles Baxter; not incidentally, it was Baxter to whom Stevenson had confided his most private anxieties, including his hostility to his father. Likewise, the narrative that is constructed out of these papers has the features of a confessional account, presented in a tone of intimacy and shame. Thomson proffers the cache of papers as a valuable literary source for his friend: “Here . . . is a novel ready to your hand: all you have to do is to work up the scenery, develop the characters, and improve the style.” But the narrator/writer replies, “they are just the three things that I would rather die than set my hand to. It shall be published as it stands” (8). When Thomson objects that the account is “so bald,” the narrator defends candor as noble, adding “I would have all literature bald, and all authors (if you like) but one.” Ignoring the amusing personal reference, one must note the stated intention to eschew traditional narrative form and techniques: to aim at accuracy and unelaborated accounting, particularly in the presentation of setting and characters. To underscore the documentary basis of the account, chapters are, by the author’s instructions, unnumbered, and the section titles underscore the miscellany of sources from which the story is constructed. The lacunae in critical reports, particularly the omission of information about the Master’s survival after the duel that seemed to have ended his life and about the ultimate disposition of his treasure, are not incidental omissions, but deliberate indications of how partial the accounts remain. The narrative account is built on coincidence and delivered in a devious, partial manner. Thus the deceit practiced by the Master in his use of his accomplice Secundra Dass is, in a sense, echoed in the narrative: the reader is led to desire information that is often withheld and is forced to depend upon the accounts of narrators who cannot be trusted. But the total effect is to undercut authorial command so as to encourage resistance and skepticism in the reader. Each of the accounts emanates from a character explicitly involved in the action, with the result that each account is slanted to reflect favorably on its author. The first, most extensive reporter is the steward of the Durie family, Ephraim Mackellar, whose account opens with


157

a curious claim: “The full truth of this odd matter is what the world has long been looking for, and public curiosity is sure to welcome.” This is a surprising boast, given the obscurity of the family, the imposed distance of a hundred-year delay in telling it, and the stated aspiration to provide an exhaustive representation of “reality.” Mackellar cites his long association with “the house,” and professes to be unbiased and accurate in his account, but even the substitution of “the house” for “the family” is indicative of his private view of the Duries as a quasi-commercial entity, one that serves him as a financial investment rather than being a unit composed of biologically interrelated human beings. Early in his account it becomes evident that his very involvement in the affairs of the Durie family have exceeded the limits of proper service: he has inserted himself into private deliberations of the family, has sought to become an equal to its members, and has even foisted his judgments and own selfish desires on the weakest members of the family. He is so complicit in the fall of the family that his claims of fairness in fact reiterate the duplicity of the title character and the disingenuousness of the entire set of texts. Beyond the self-serving and biased nature of Mackellar’s version, its consistent moralistic content is equally suspect. He presents himself at all times as a pious Scot, scrupulous in his honesty and so morally worthy. He claims that his intention in telling this story serves such an admirable end: because of his long service and high respect for Lord Durrisdeer, he says, he owes him a debt that can be repaid by revealing the facts of what happened to his sons. But in Mackellar’s account the patriarch is the most morally culpable. His preference for one son over another and his dereliction of parental duties in allowing the brothers to partake in a division that they recognized as being probably disastrous ultimately results in the destruction of the family. Mackellar’s repeated moral outrage against almost every member of the family only underlines his hypocrisy and duplicity. No one is exempted from his criticism and even condemnation, and it is absolute: at one point, after disclaiming his power to tell his story, he spurts out: “The fault, to be very blunt, lay all in Mrs. Henry” (25). It should be admitted that Mackellar’s own anxiety in dealing with women affects his judgment, but his pontifical tone exceeds even an explanation based on his neuroses.4 He accuses Henry of irresponsibility and weakness, and disparages the character of any potential rival among the household staff for the family’s favor. Mackellar is most severe and absolute in his judgment of James, whom he regards as no less than demonic: he is an “insidious devil,”

158


one to be compared to Milton’s Satan. Although the Master’s villainy is beyond dispute, the steward’s absolute condemnation of him from the start is so overstated that one is led to question his motives. In first introducing James, Mackellar strikes a familiar Puritanical pose: “One very black mark he had to his name; but the matter was hushed up at the time, and so defaced by legends before I came into these parts that I scruple to set down. If it was true, it was a horrid fact in one so young; and if false, it was a horrid calumny” (10). Noting the omission by Chevalier Burke of some comments that might have reflected badly on Mackellar’s character, the latter comments only, “Doubtless it was some very natural complaint of what he supposed to be an indiscretion on my part; though, indeed, I can call none to mind” (133). Even more striking is the editorial intrusion signed “R.L.S.” reporting the omission of five pages of Mackellar’s manuscript; this follows a passing remark that Mackellar had left the employ of Henry’s son, the seventh Lord Durrisdeer. The editor’s comments, “Five pages of Mr. Mackellar’s MS. are here omitted. I have gathered from their perusal an impression that Mr. Mackellar, in his old age, was rather an exacting servant,” discredit his testimony, and confirm suspicions that the steward was suspect. (125). Mackellar’s hypocrisy is more striking than the villainy he, with some enjoyment, describes. Alan Sandison regards him as so complicit in contending for control of the Durie family that he calls him “an imperial-minded Mackellar for whom the Manichean universe is—literally—a Godsend.”5 Deceitfully, Mackellar claims that writing this text, he may expiate some guilt of his own: “I think my old years will flow more smoothly, and my white hair lie quieter on the pillow, when the debt is paid” (9). The narrator is being disingenuous in referring to his own guilt, although he certainly carries a good share of responsibility for the demise of the family. But the subject of seeking expiation through words, the confessional mode, dominates the entire text; and consonant with the sacramental reference, it is a narrative filled with secluded conversations between two family members who exclude the others, with fragmented and sometimes unread written accounts, and, most striking, with Secundra Dass, who pretends not to understand English, so as to serve as his master’s informant, but who is portrayed at the end as somehow relieved and redeemed by the death of his master. A secondary narrator, Chevalier Burke, provides not only a contending, sympathetic interpretation of the Master but a sardonic commentary on the issue of national identities, specifically the view that they reflect familial, fraternal ties. Calling himself “just an Irish savage,”


159

Burke plays on a stereotype that, by the period in which this text is composed, is recognized as insulting, so that his identification with the man assumed to espouse the cause of Scotland over England might be assumed as foreordained. However, Burke’s first comments quoted by Mackellar record his dislike of “this horrid country” and its “savage people,” pointing out the assumptions of superiority that are endemic to all appeals of national distinctiveness. Within just a few sentences he reveals that neither he nor the Master are truly motivated by such a noble cause as defense of one’s nation or culture, but that the immediate attraction and eventual longlasting bond struck between the two men is based on mutual abhorrence. They engage in a verbal competition over which is the more unpopular and which is the least patient, and they eventually agree to choose by a spin of a coin between fighting each other for supremacy or making a bond of mutual loyalty. On the other hand, the scene recalls the coin toss of the Durie brothers, and Burke in fact suggests they might become “like a pair of brothers.” Furthermore, it is later revealed that after the Pretender’s fall, James has become a double agent, working for the English. And Burke shows himself to be that most abhorred of Irish types, the stage Irishman who plays on stereotypes of his countrymen, charming by “a touch of the brogue” the pirates in whose hands they find themselves (53). In this variety of references, the argument that national characteristics reiterate family ties is disputed, even revealed as duplicitous. Burke’s passing remark that he and James might become “a pair of brothers” is summarily disallowed by the Master, who says “I have a brother of my own, and I think no more of him than of a colewort” (34). In this response, James responds against the ideological claim of the sacrosanct nature of ties between siblings: these brothers hate each other. But the agreement struck between the Irish and Scot adventurers posits an operative agreement based on a primitive form of mutual deterrence. In even a passing potential comparison between a deal between outlaws and the revered bonds between brothers, the refutation of ideologies about family ties is echoed. The Master of Ballantrae is a family chronicle, but one that exposes the untenability of the most common ideological claims about its integrity. Thus it serves as an epigraph for a family, and even for the family, the social unit so treasured in the past. Mackellar introduces the narrative he is about to present as a “history of the house” and in his appended notes to the novel, Stevenson identified not only the historical basis in an actual family, but describes the narrative as a family’s history:

160

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL It was the case of Marquis of Tullibardine that first struck me; the situation of a younger brother succeeding in this underhand, irregular fashion, and under an implied contract of seniority, to his elder’s place and future, struck me as so full of bitterness, and the mental relations of a family thus circumstanced so fruitful of misjudgment and domestic animosity, it took my fancy then as a drama in a nutshell, to be solved between four persons and within four walls; with my new incident and with my new aim, I saw myself, and rejoiced to be, committed to great spaces and voyages, and a long evolution of time. But in the matter of the characters involved, I determined to adhere to the original four actors. . . . two brothers, a father, and a heroine (all nameless but in a determined relation). (225)

This description of the novel’s plan recalls the structure of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, which concentrates four characters intertwined in mutually destructive relationships, and so the description points to specifically modernist aspects of this novel. That resemblance also highlights the unreliability and culpability of the narrator in both texts. Characterization of these four figures is determined primarily by assessment of their roles in family functions and particularly in their responsibility for the corruption of the Durie family line. The patriarch, Lord Durrisdeer, a socially withdrawn but mentally acute father, fails to direct the fortunes of the family and even violates the unspoken code that fathers love each of their offspring equally. The reasons for his dereliction are not provided, nor does the narrative contain evidence on which to interpret his actions on such critical matters as why he initially supported the Master, or why he agreed to Henry’s subsequent acts. Instead, the reader is deprived access to information, such as his conversations with his daughter-in-law. The sons, James and Henry, are developed only as diametrical opposites to each other and as contrasting agents in honoring their responsibilities to the family. The rebellious James is given fuller treatment, particularly in his adventures at sea and in North America, but the accounts of Henry’s doings are restricted to what he does to defend the family and to take revenge on his brother. But even here the omissions of data are striking, particularly in the fragmented accounts of the travels of the mysterious Master. Henry’s wife, Alison Graeme, functions only in a prescribed family role, although tantalizing hints of her independence are offered. Basing the delineation of characters so intensively and exclusively on consideration of their domestic roles contributes to the impression recorded by some of Stevenson’s contemporaries, such as


161

Leslie Stephen, that he could not build convincing characters; Stephen cited Henry Durie as one such disappointing literary creation.6 But the total effect is to build a hothouse atmosphere, accentuating relevant personal qualities and relationships while omitting conventional defining characteristics. Once again, a consideration of the figure painting of the historical period is useful. Even the most representational portraitist of the century took liberties in reproducing human features in order to emphasize claimed aspects of character; but those innovative painters at the end of the century, those whose work would be known and admired by Stevenson, went much further. Manet and Cezanne eschewed conventional representation of the human form in favor of offering portrayals of apparently stilted and even distorted human figures only as pieces of larger patterns of shapes and colors; Daumier distorted the figure to promote social commentary. What seemed a limitation of creative ability to a critic such as Stephen can be seen as a deliberate stroke of innovation proceeding from a view of literature that transcends representation and storytelling. Accordingly, depiction of character is admittedly partial, intended only to expose crucial aspects of plot, subject and discourse. The narrative structure is determined solely by describing the demise of the Durie family and by extension the old Scots aristocratic lineage. It opens when an intact family is confronted by an issue that requires a level of commitment that will bring it into some kind of political alliance, thus disallowing the security that seclusion has provided. The narrative ends with the deaths of the two contending brothers, which constitutes a termination in that the surviving offspring are described as being so scarred by contention that they live on only in isolation and never marry or produce offspring. While the narrative events included in the accounts of Mackellar and Burke record travels around the world, the conflict rages only among family members, and the outcome is strictly a matter of one familial unit. The initial seclusion of the four Durie family members recalls the ideological association of the bourgeois family with removal from the commercial world, in that they have not had to involve themselves with such common matters until their fortune was threatened by the financial costs resulting from a political move. The news of the landing of the Young Pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie, in Scotland in 1745 forces them to involve themselves in one or another political form of allegiance. The immediate responses of the four members are various, but after a full three days of disputation, the family decides to split its bets, sending out one son to support the Stuart cause while the

162


other remains loyal to the Hanoverian line of Charles II. Although the younger brother, Henry, recognizes this compromise as “cheating at cards,” it is defended by that figure who represents the larger world, the steward, Mackellar, one who will eventually insinuate himself into the family so as to gain control of it. He argues that such a deliberate deception is commonplace, one employed by “many considerable families.” The motives of protection and advancement of the family’s material fortunes are laudable: “saving the house of Durrisdeer,” and “paying off . . . private liabilities, which were heavy beyond all opinion” (11–12). But the choice compromises the family’s autonomy. This accommodation of the actual world of contention for political rule is inevitable, of course, but nonetheless destructive if the family’s survival is seen as threatened by partisan involvements. But internal warfare accelerates the course of deterioration; the financial costs of supporting the brother who took the side of the losing cause are heavy, and the deceit that proceeds from the pitting brother against brother rends the entire fabric of the family and challenges the principle of primogeniture. In the domestic debate over which of the two brothers should join the Stuart cause, all arguments of precedent and patriarchal judgment should favor the older brother remaining at home while the younger, the cadet, takes the more risky position. But James, restless by nature and eager for adventure, refuses to go; he insists the decision be made by the flip of a coin, thus reducing an issue of family fortune to a matter of mere chance. When Alison Graeme, who, it is assumed, will become his wife, learns of the outcome, she flings the guinea through a window that contained the family shield. No more explicit indication of the drastic outcome of this impulsive decision is possible, nor is there any clearer indication that the rash act will terminate the family line. That James Durie should be thus allied with Charles Edward Stuart is, of course, appropriate, for the resemblance in personality is marked. Associating Henry with the Hanoverians would ally the family with English rule that, at the time of the composition of this text, was being contested. It is well to recognize that Stevenson wrote this text at the time of the Crofter’s War, and the founding of the Scottish Home Rule Association. Whatever Stevenson’s political convictions may have been, the immediate political implications of this text are self-evident.7 The relationship of Scotland to the United Kingdom was a matter of lively political discourse, in which Stevenson’s writings were respected as key documents supporting Scottish cultural nationalism for their presentation of a history and artistic tradition distinct


163

from England. In their bifurcated loyalties, the Duries represent Scotland, and the family becomes that nation, one that is already endangered and marginalized in an Empire that has already extended well beyond Great Britain. Not only are the brothers separated by their political affiliations, but from the division of sectarian loyalties derives the pairing of brothers to become both antithetical and complementary members: Henry and James Durie become versions of Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde. So completely obsessive is Henry’s hatred of his brother that his character can be known only through consideration of his brother; conversely, the Master of Ballantrae, James, exists in the narrative only to torture his brother. Yet the identity of the Durie family resides in those two, for the patriarch has long past relegated his authority. The Duries are a fragmented, corrupted remnant of the noble family. At the time of composition of this narrative, Stevenson defended the appropriation of Mackellar as providing “relief and verisimilitude.” The phrase bears close consideration. The Oxford English Dictionary reports that the second term came into frequent use in the mid-nineteenth century, and while it allows shades of denotation and connotation, the aspect of similarity rather than identity is a common provision. In narrative, then, aiming at verisimilitude would not require exact representation, nor aim at mimesis at all, but rather attempt to give an impression of reality. This verbal distinction is particularly important in the period in which Stevenson is writing, a time when impressionist painting had already earned recognition, and when those painters we now term Post-Impressionist were moving experimentation with pictorial effects in favor of bolder, more symbolic and less representational work. Stevenson is a contemporary of Cezanne and Gauguin, and we would assume he was even aware of their work. He had visited the Barbizon and found congenial new techniques of plein aire painting. One of his oldest friends, Theodore Robinson, lived and worked in Giverny and even enjoyed the favor of Claude Monet. While Stevenson found the naturalist theories espoused by Zola repulsive, he is known to have admired that French contemporary’s 1885 novel, L’Oeuvre, in which he so accurately represents the aesthetic theories of the time that readers identified the characters with Cezanne, Manet, and Monet and others. Andrew Lang, reviewing The Master of Ballantrae on its first publication, saw the connection; objecting to the novel for its unrelieved “modern gloom” and “fraternal hatred,” he concluded it to be “more akin to the temper of M. Zola than of Scott.”8 To read this novel in terms of post-impressionist

164


theories is to dispute the usual literary-historical classification of Stevenson as no more than the author of some children’s adventure stories, a pleasant stylist, and a late advocate of Romance as a literary genre. For its psychological explorations The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde has drawn serious attention; and Weir of Hermiston has earned recognition as a masterful depiction of intra-family conflict. Because the latter novel remained incomplete at Stevenson’s death, leaving gaps in the gross structure, I have chosen to analyze The Master of Ballantrae, an earlier, completed novel. However, its treatment of the ideology of the family, including his concentration on patriarchal tyranny and fraternal strife, and the structural tactics resultant from those late Victorian concerns entirely correspond with the claims of this chapter. The label “Romance writer” is a substantive barrier to reading this novel. Although the term may apply to some of his works, in his infrequent comments on literary art he offers a rough critical theory that is far from escapist. His 1884 essay “A Humble Remonstrance” is often cited as revealing his disagreement with Henry James and containing his critique of the realism of William Dean Howells’ novels; but that essay offers, albeit in a conversational tone, a theory of art that is not merely emotive but closer to the aestheticism of Pater, Wilde and Whistler: Life goes before us, infinite in complication; attended by the most various and surprising meteors; appealing at once to the eye, to the ear, to the mind—the seat of wonder, to the touch—so thrillingly delicate, and to the belly—so imperious when starved. It combines and employs in its manifestation the method and material, not of one art only, but of all the arts, Music is but an arbitrary trifling with a few of life’s majestic chords; painting is but a shadow of its pageantry of light and colour; literature does but drily indicate that wealth of incident, of moralobligation of virtue, vice, action, rapture and agony, with which it teems. What, then, is the object, what the method, of an art, and what the source of its power? The whole secret is that no art does “compete with life.” [a phrase from Henry James] . . . Literature, . . . in its most typical mood, the mood of narrative, similarly flees the direct challenge and pursues instead an independent and creative aim. So far as it imitates at all, it imitates not life but speech: not the facts of human destiny, but the emphasis and the suppressions with which 9 the human actor tells of them.


165

Far from promoting the novel of adventure, with its elaborated plot, he gives equal status to two other kinds of fictional narrative: the novel of character, which “requires no coherency of plot,” and the dramatic novel, focusing on “one of the passionate cruces of life,” which can even dispense with detailed portraiture. Anticipating James’s objections to his argument, he speaks of the American as speaking of “the finished picture and its worth when done,” while he himself is concerned with “the brushes, the palette, and the north light.”10 Pursuing the proposal that The Master of Ballantrae be read as a work of post-Impressionist art, the fragmentation of its plot elements is explainable: like pieces of a landscape, incidents are juxtaposed with each other so as to emphasize contrasts, but without the causal relationships that are normally assumed as driving a plot. How James Durie twice survived after being assumed dead is never explained, in favor of painting him as diabolical, superhuman. Secondary characters such as Secundra Dass and Chevalier Burke remain mere elements of background, providing contrasts of insidious evil or comic relief. Even the distortions and distractions that result from employing Mackellar as the primary narrator become explainable. Like a Manet painting of a figure, the depiction does not attempt photographic accuracy, and in fact tends toward caricature. Mackellar is highly colored, in the sense that his religious biases and personal flaws are emphasized so as to draw the reader’s attention, even to intrude upon the narrative, with reminders of his omnipresence. But he so functions as a strong contrast to the other figures depicted that it is possible to read the narrative as one would read a canvas: as a set of contrasting units brought into a determined form that evokes in a calculated way responses of particular intensity. To return to Stevenson’s terms, it is through the foregrounding of Mackellar that the text acquires “relief” in that other characters appear only through reference to him; it acquires “verisimilitude” in the total effect not of mimetic reproduction of actuality but rather in an impression of seeming familiarity in the presentation of contrasting but ultimately interrelated elements of narrative. Mackellar is, then, not merely a filter through which the narrative may be interpreted, like the narrators of Wuthering Heights, but a presence complicit in the outcome of the events, serving as a contrasting element to those made prominent in the narrative, closer, in other words to John Dowell in The Good Soldier. The impression of verisimilitude derives from the cogency of Mackellar’s narration: this is what would be told, in the way in which it would be told: this is an account of the importance of family, its

166


lineage, its ideal inner workings, its exercise of prudent actions, its benevolent patriarchal rule, as revealed in conflict with sheer diabolism. Mackellar’s reverence for the Durie lineage is so uncompromising that he must judge the current members as inadequate. But his devious design goes so far as to mock traditional domestic virtues as conflicting with a world that has been extensively changed. In his extreme view, the family not only as separated from the modern commercial world, but antithetical to it. In his account, the idealized family cannot succeed in the cutthroat battle of financial competition. The Durie family, driven into retreat from an uncongenial world, cannot even survive in that seclusion: the search for stability drives them to cover their bets by backing both the Pretender and the reigning king; to seek financial survival, the Duries are driven into participation in the financial concerns of the Empire, including the most unsavory exploitations in the new world. Mackellar goes further, claiming that in the struggle for survival, the values of the idealized family circle are outmoded, even vestigial. The traditional familial aspiration to provide mutual support and affection to its members must be replaced by the model of constant contention, even bloody attacks. The family, like all living units, must be regarded as participating in the struggle to adapt that would be assumed by Social Darwinists as inevitable. Even traditional family goals such as that of providing mutual support and affection are dismissed in his account. The family in which he serves is contentious, relentless in its antagonisms. Of course, he himself has fostered a large part of that contention, but whatever the causes were, the attack on the Durie family succeeds. The final words of the novel, the concluding comments of Mackellar, show how absolutely family virtues have been sacrificed to materialistic concerns: that James was heir to a title, was admired throughout the world, and had exhibited bravery—all values of involvement in the larger world—lies forgotten. Henry, after “unmerited distress,” is buried with his fraternal enemy. But material achievements served neither: both men end forgotten, except through the tale reconstructed by Mackellar and others. The subscript, “The piety of his wife and one old servant raised this stone to both,” indicates how little can be said, other than recounting the tale. And the reader emerges at the end of the account as would a viewer of an impressionist painting: aware of large, subtle patterns, contrasting and complementary elements, but only little concerned with the accuracy of the representation. In this literary equivalent of a visual work of art the intertextual elements have the same function as broad brush strokes and other painterly elements: to call attention to


167

the work as artifice, as artifact. Mackellar repeatedly complains about how difficult it is to write his account. And the contrivance of reconstructing one tale from various documents deposited in a lawyer’s office even further twists the context from which the action is seen or read. Yet in its totality of skewed perspectives, vivid contrasts and even fragmentary pieces cohere as a human attempt to account for important subjects. In his appended notes to the novel, Stevenson announced precisely such an intention: The realism I love is that of method, not only that all in a story may possibly have come to pass, but that all might naturally be recorded—a realism that justifies the book itself as well as the fable it commemorates. (226)

The realism to which he aspires is what he elsewhere termed “verisimilitude,” achieved through techniques of relief—employing contrasts, even distortions, and layered perspectives. If we confine our reading of the implications of the plot to the set of conclusions proposed by Mackellar and read those as means by which issues of family coherence and even survival are interrogated, certain recurrent ideological claims earn conclusive and dismissive exposition. Each of these claims about the fragile but fundamental social unit of the family is so anatomized and treated with such concision that the novel can be seen as a kind of final statement, an epitaph for the family. It contains summarizing, if ultimately dismissive, commentary on the major aspects of family ideology. In the Durie family patriarchy is exposed as so weakened as to be inoperative. From the start the old Lord Durrisdeer fails to rule his household; he allows the sons to decide on the most important decision affecting the family’s fortunes by an act of mere chance. More disastrous, he violates the assumption of equitable support among his offspring, clearly favoring the rebellious James over the responsible Henry. In its purest form, the idealized family requires not only paternal benevolence but equity, just as the ideal state is based on such equal protection and rights. And Lord Durrisdeer’s failings are repeated, even amplified in the next generation: Henry neglects his daughter and favors his son, Alexander. Paternal and maternal love, once assumed to be innate, has been exposed as a raging struggle for dominance. Over the preceding decades when patriarchal authority was regarded as declining, sibling relationships had been endowed with enhanced surrogate importance. Now, near the end of the century,

168


brotherhood is seen as offering no bond of common affection: the Durie brothers are not only divided by their temperaments, but instinctively abhor each other. In their contention, James is the more culpable in attempting to seduce his brother’s wife, and later so to win over Henry’s son that in a sense the boy is similarly seduced. But Henry himself becomes obsessed with hatred of his brother, risking his life and the family’s fortunes to assure that his brother is killed. In composing this narrative, Stevenson had considered “The Brothers” and “The Familiar Incubus” as working titles; obviously the first would fit, but the second is more indicative of the truly destructive element in the plot. Both brothers are demonic: something growing within the family, not outside of it, is ultimately murderous. Even after their deaths, the family line cannot be revived: the surviving children of Henry and Alison will not procreate, so scarred are they by the horrors of domestic discord that they have witnessed. The abandonment of their domestic roles by patriarchs, spouses, and siblings allowed their authority to be assumed by outsiders, particularly in managing aspects of the family’s financial and instructional concerns. Thus Mackellar moves in on the family, acquiring power along the way as he imposes his judgment on the old Lord, Alison, and the two brothers. Like his literary precursors—those estate managers, nursemaids, and tutors in nineteenth-century novels who invaded and took control of hapless families—he masks his ambition in professions of familial regard. But by this historical phase, in which the family seems to have surrendered its most important functions and thus weakened and internally split, a vacuum has been created in which power may be stolen by such a clever and manipulative schemer, a man of commerce, deceitfully speaking the language of financial prudence. So thorough is his eventual domination of the family that he resembles the rapacious colonizer, as Alan Sandison notes; the comparison is apt, although it should be noted that it was the brothers that led the Duries outside the secure Scottish landscape into adventures in America, and they themselves that weakened the domestic finances to the extent that the family can survive only by going abroad.11 The novel’s title calls attention to the matter of lineage, and a decision concerning which brother may inherit which title initially spurs the plot. The family steward makes much of the noble history of the family and professes to be concerned primarily with promoting its continuance. However, the narrative subverts the claim that lineage is so worthy of adulation and preservation. And without that core, driving concern, the entire system of literary representation becomes


169

undermined. If, as has been argued, the figure of the father as authority is the very foundation of narrative, in this text an assault on the patriarch is perpetrated.12 No one is the actual Master of Ballantrae specified in the novel’s title; family authority has been surrendered, and the line is being terminated. The father who should have borne responsibility has retired and died, the son has hastened the demise of the family by pursuing revenge against his brother before dying in that cause, and the scarred children will not marry nor produce offspring. In fact, as Adrian Poole points out, the title reveals a contradiction in that neither brother could properly be named Master of Ballantrae, though both could claim to be Master of Durrisdeer. This complication even further undermines the test’s treatment of authority and of mastery.13 Stripped of authority, no character’s interpretations can earn the confidence of a reader. Both of the brothers are so obsessed with their private enmities that their claims are palpably biased, and the interloper Mackellar, who pretends to represent a stable, objective set of values, reveals himself to be driven by ambition, with the result that his Scotch Presbyterianism is associated with sheer greed. But beyond Mackellar there are further levels of narration: a set of hundred-year-old documents, which it might be assumed have acquired a degree of veracity by their very age, and the editorial selection made by one of the two contemporary readers in an Edinburgh legal office. So many narrators, each of whose motives in telling a story are called into question, and yet so many omissions in the tale itself . . . the final effect is a solid refutation of any claim of objectivity: the truth can never be established. Like the multiplicity of narrators, the division of a title character into two persons further disallows the kind of exploration of literary character that is characteristic of nineteenth century fiction. Henry and James are Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: reverse images of each other, so interlinked that one cannot be known without the other, and their views of other characters and events can be discerned only by reference to its own opposite. The result is an impasse: neither can be analyzed except by his antagonistic relationship to his brother, and that precludes any claim by a narrator or by the text to provide reliable data on which an interpretation of character could be made. The plot is no more accessible to systematic analysis: the initial division of the family into warring parties was made purely by chance, a flip of a coin; an identical gesture won for James the fidelity of his Indian accomplice, Secundra Dass. All subsequent events derive from this random act, and the moralistic urgings of Mackellar never have a chance to dissuade the brothers from their vengeful acts. As a result,

170


the skeletal family plot—in which a family, faced by potential threats to its integrity, struggles against adversaries in order to be reunited at the end and even strengthened by the process—can never be realized. The Duries move inexorably from an initial state of stability to utter dissolution as they stray farther and farther from home; in doing so, they move from seclusion and some degree of self-sufficiency into greater and greater involvement in the corrupted world of Empire. The parable of the prodigal son, which supplied the foundation for the family plot, again emerges in this late narrative, but so distorted that it signals the complete reversal of attitudes and reformulation of ideology that appear in this text. The parallel is explicit: Henry scolds Mackellar to treat his just-returned brother with proper respect, saying “I cannot have you go; this is to make a stranger of the prodigal son; and let me remind you where—in his own father’s house!” (76). But the roles played by the Durie family members overturn those in the biblical source. The returning offspring is not repentant; the older brother’s resentment is relentless; no one elicits sympathy. After the duel between the brothers, in which Henry believes he has killed James, he begs forgiveness of his father. But the father makes no verbal response and proceeds in a cold, calculating manner to investigate the matter. No one exhibits the degree of forgiveness with which the parable abounds. The father, who allowed and abetted the division between sons, utters as his dying words a passage from Virgil in which Aeneas prays for a reunion with his father: “Take pity on a son and father” (120), but no reunion is ever accomplished. Instead, the triad of father and two sons is deliberately destroyed by the sons themselves. Mackellar, whose personal interpretations of the brothers’ actions are typically distorted by his insistent moralism and by his own selfish ambition, is justified in his summary comment, for the evidence contained in his account to this point would, as he says, lead to such a generally agreed conclusion: “To any considering mind, the two sons had between them slain their father, and he who took the sword might be even said to have slain him with his hand” (121). Indeed, Henry admits to a deliberate impulse of destruction: “I will drive a wedge into that family that shall once more burst it into shivers” (148). In this narrative, then, the story of the prodigal son ends not with reunion and forgiveness, but in the deaths of all members of the family, making it in the end a travesty of the original parable. The closure expected in the family plot, the redemption of the prodigal son and the celebration of a new, invigorated family, is obviated. The Durie family has been destroyed by its own members. The


171

narrative ends with epigraphs for the two brothers. Even the interloper who had capitalized on the family’s name for his own advancement has not succeeded in advancing his status: the text mentions that he has been dismissed from his post by Henry’s son. In its place is a sense of closure as exhaustion: the death not only of the Durie family but of the abstraction of the family, the entire ideology in which so much had been invested. At the end it is Mackellar who provides the final judgment. Noting that the old Lord Durrisdeer’s early hope to avoid scandal on the family name, he comments, I saw he had fallen, like the rest of us, to think mainly of the house. Now that all the living members of the family were plunged in irremediable sorrow, it was strange how we turned to that conjoint abstraction of the family itself, and sought to bolster up the airy nothing of its reputation; not the Duries only, but the hired servant himself. (106)

The family is, even for Mackellar, no more than a “conjoint abstraction,” and its importance only an “airy nothing.” The ideology of the family, once so sustained, so invested with importance, is at the end exposed as insidious, even destructive to its very members. The novel’s form is intentionally fragmented into a series of post-impressionistic verbal accounts revealing the shocking dissolution of the family.

“Home Sickness”: Ernest Pontifex, or The Way of All Flesh Ernest Pontifex, or The Way of All Flesh reveals the final stage of the nineteenth century’s exploration of the ideology of the bourgeois family and reveals the ultimate effects on the novel’s form. No narrative is as thorough in its refutation of the consoling claims of family integrity and beneficence, and no novel of the century breaks from established narrative practice more audaciously. First published a year after the author’s death, but virtually completed by 1884, the novel signals the utter collapse of an ideology that had dominated social discourse for the long century. In this text the bourgeois family is denounced as the very opposite of a model of order, not even a haven from the stultifying effects of industrialization; it is exposed as a corrupting, destructive, and even unnatural social unit. As a consequence, the novel’s form represents the final phase in a similar assault on orthodoxy in its

172


refutation of narrative authority, its loose plot, and its open-ended conclusion. Not only does it conclude a period of literary history, it points the direction that is to follow: the features of literary modernism, already being developed in France and America, that will blossom in the decades to come. As revealed in his published notebooks, Samuel Butler’s contempt for the ideology of the bourgeois family is absolute: I believe that more unhappiness comes from this source than from any other—I mean from the attempt to prolong family connection unduly and to make people hang together artificially who would never naturally do so. The mischief among the lower classes is not so great, but among the middle and upper classes it is killing a large number daily. And the old people do not really like it much better 14 than the young.

The social unit so long regarded as wholly beneficial, as the prototype of an orderly society, as the repository of noble virtues, and as the transmitter of precious values is now thoroughly and savagely denounced. Throughout his varied works of social commentary appear similar devastating assaults on the family. Parents are exposed as selfish and even malign; siblings are as likely to be enemies as allies. Only through exercise of heroic proportions can a child overcome the poisonous effects of family life. Children are likely never to recover from the suffering inflicted on them, and, thus imprinted with a perverse model of behavior, as adults they inflict similar pain on their children. Genealogy becomes a record of abuse, leading the most willful to resist continuing the cycle. Butler even goes so far as to regret the physical dependence of the newborn on an intimate social group, wishing instead for the freedom experienced by other animal forms that never have to cohabit with parents. In the alternative universe of Erewhon, children, happy in a pre-mortal state, must sign a birth formula exonerating their parents from any responsibility for them before they can be born, and agree to enduring abject submission for the course of their lives. Ernest Pontifex, or The Way of All Flesh, reiterates such cynical comments on the family. What had been revered by earlier writers as a model institution, is in this novel described as an arena of oppression rather than a place of security and a provider of consolation. Even nostalgia, “the old dull weight of home sickness,” is used in this text to expose a sense of dread, an awareness of oppression, rather the source of security or consolation.15


173

In employing the measure of “unhappiness” in the above-cited passage, Butler echoes the utilitarian theories of the time; but his specific use of the term reveals a level of cynicism that is pervasive in his work. Elsewhere in the notebooks he defines happiness as lying “in the memory of a recent worse and the expectation of a better that is to come soon.”16 Even “pleasure,” another term on which utilitarians sought to base ethical principles is destabilized: Pleasure, after all, is a safer guide than either “right” or “duty.” For hard as it is to know what gives us pleasure, “right” and “duty” are often harder to distinguish still, and, if we go wrong with them, will lead us into just as sorry a plight as a mistaken opinion concerning pleasure will lead us. When men burn their fingers through following after pleasure they find out their mistake and get to see where they have gone wrong more easily than when they have burnt them throughout following a fancied duty, or a fancied idea concerning right virtue. (320)

This denial of the claims of duty derives from a rejection of the authority of those who precede us and with it the claims of education through paternally imposed principles instead of trial and error via participation in the struggles of life. Although a forceful critic of Darwin, Butler nonetheless views life as a fight for survival, although with possible intervention by human desire and goals as affecting genetic transmission, instead of individual participation in the struggles of life or any simple version of random selection. A practical thinker, Butler focuses on ends and purposes in all his works, and in this novel his approach is also teleological: each action is judged by its effects, and all are viewed in terms of evolutionary goals of human perfection. Christianity is not disputed for its foundation in faith, nor for its insistence on the literal accuracy of the Scriptures, nor even for its institutional failings; it is judged as a means of leading men to a higher evolutionary stage. And it is found lacking. The economic system that privileges inheritors of wealth such as Townley over the impoverished inhabitants of Ashpit Place is not denounced; in fact, the narrator and Ernest announce their own preference for the rich. The educational system is criticized not for the reasons Dickens denounced it in Hard Times, but because training in the classics does not provide practical advantage for making a living. Social institutions and systems are regarded instrumentally, primarily in terms of the extent to which they facilitate human advancement. Development of the individual, a

174


favored Victorian concept, is seen as the paramount goal, rather than the progress of society. Looming in opposition are protean forces: intellectual stagnation, ignorance, hypocrisy, superstition, and unreasonable social constraints. And the conflict is viewed in evolutionary terms, with antagonistic forces gaining power over the course of succeeding generations. As a record of five generations of the Pontifex family, the narrative provides an end-of-the-century summary of changes in perception, as distinguished from actual changes in behavior. The narrator comments: At the beginning of the nineteenth century the relations between parents and children were still far from satisfactory. The violent type of father, as described by Fielding, Richardson, Smollett and Sheridan, is now hardly more likely to find a place in literature than the original advertisement of Messrs. Fairlie & Pontifex’s “Pious Country Parishioner,” but the type was much too persistent not to have been drawn from nature closely. The parents in Miss Austen’s novels are less like savage wild beasts than those of her predecessors, but she evidently looks upon them with suspicion, and an uneasy feeling that le père de famille est capable de tout makes itself sufficiently apparent throughout the greater part of her writings. (20)

He adds that if there has been a change in behavior, it may be attributable to a strain of Puritanism from earlier centuries, with its emphasis on Hebraic and Christian teachings that regard children as sinful and parents as wise. It is logically and experientially insupportable: the Christian catechism, he comments, “was written too exclusively from the parental point of view; the person who composed it did not get a few children to come in and help him” (30). Instead of assuming any progression in family life or relations, the narrative focuses upon repeated instances of behavior that have the cumulative effect of demolishing the main tenets of family ideology that had prevailed at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Pontifex family name is so besmirched by generations of abuse that the narrative account elicits sympathy for Ernest’s determination to break away from it, even if that entails separating himself from his own children. When Ernest regains his strength after breaking from his parents and undergoing a disabling illness, he utters his most triumphant conviction: “There is only one thing which weighs upon me—I refer . . . to my conduct towards my father and mother. I have been much too good to them. I treated them much too considerately” (310).


175

Claims of both patriarchy and matriarchy alike are exploded; parents are denounced for seeking only absolute control over their children. In place of mutual affection, loathing and contention within the family unit are the norm of behavior. The incapacity of parents to love their children results from their own victimization as children and is substantiated by a willful exercise of selfish control within an atmosphere of unceasing competition for financial security that is consonant with a popularized form of Darwinian evolutionary theory. Even sibling relationships, which had at one stage of ideological development been valorized, are regarded as subject to such contention. Ernest, like his father, dislikes his siblings, even though they regard their parents as the enemy as strongly as he does, making mutual antipathy the rule: “The greater part of every family is always odious; if there are one or two good ones in a very large family it is as much as can be expected” (253). At the end of the century even the paradoxical role of the family to train children for independence is exposed as antagonistic to normal human development. Instead of fostering mental strength and confidence, family affiliations are viewed as producing precisely the opposite effect: life-long guilt, psychological and even financial dependence, and the replication of bad behavior in each succeeding generation. Ernest proves his independence only when he breaks from parental bonds, although the extent of his triumph is qualified by his subsequent backward drift. The furthest extension of this assault on the family is voiced by Overton when he disclaims even the argument that the family is the primary generative and protective social institution: Why should the generations overlap one another at all? Why cannot we be buried as eggs in neat little cells with ten or twenty thousands pounds each wrapped round us in Bank of England notes, and wake up, as the sphex wasp does, to find that its papa and mamma have not only left ample provision at its elbow but have been eaten by sparrows some weeks before we began to live consciously on our own accounts? (71)

The metaphor derived from evolutionary discourse is functional, for it is implied that such a social institution is subject to the same course of development as all natural species. The family, he later argues, is merely a survival of an earlier animal form, the compound animal, which is now extinct.

176

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL Certainly there is no inherent love for the family system on the part of nature herself. Poll the forms of life and you will find it in a ridiculously small minority. The fishes know it not, and they get along quite nicely. The ants and the bees who far outnumber man sting their fathers to death as a matter of course, and are given to the atrocious mutilation of nine-tenths of the offspring committed to their charge, yet where shall we find communities more universally respected? (91)

Unlike Goldsmith, Austen and Dickens, who viewed the pursuit of economic advancement as antithetical to family sympathies, Butler approaches the very opposite position. When an early patriarch of the Pontifex family is described as so “very fond of his money,” an explanation is offered: “it is not easy for him at all times to be very fond of his children also” (20). Because adults need money, they earn respect by their success in making a living. Ernest is most happy, and is regarded as most admirable as well, when he successfully establishes a small business enterprise selling used clothing. Nevertheless, tracing the fortunes of the Pontifex family over five generations, a pattern of resistance to the model of industrialization and commerce is discernable. The earliest member mentioned in the text, John Pontifex, from the eighteenth century, embodies a type of craftsman who could be self-sufficient. A carpenter by trade, he was also a skillful amateur artist and musician. Because his own father had been a day laborer, John learned habits of industry sufficient to acquire a farm and lead a comfortable life. Although wedded to a domineering wife, he seems contented, although disregardful of his only son, George. But as the account of the Pontifex generations continues, the vocations imposed on, rather than chosen by, succeeding patriarchs are accompanied by repeated instances of paternal tyranny, maternal manipulation, physical abuse, hypocrisy, and selfishness. George is contemptuous of his children and even physically abusive of them. His son Theobald is even more mean-spirited in his treatment of Ernest and his siblings. The account culminates in the resistance to its influence and direful effects by that title character and the rescue of his children, achieved through separation from their parents and practical training in life: Ernest’s son George has been raised far from his father and now works successfully in the shipping trade. Economic forces are regarded as determinate considerations and are readily utilized by overbearing parents to extort obedience of their children. George and Theobald preach the virtues of making one’s fortune as independent operators, but by depriving their children of


177

sufficient support they contrive to buy their dependence and gratitude. Each succeeding generation seems to be more ostentatious in displaying wealth and less liberal in bestowing it on the offspring, thus contributing to the mutual hostility between generations, which Butler views as inevitable. Only those spared such contention, Alethaea and Overton, who have ample financial resources and no marital partners or children, can afford to be generous and kind. Townley, whose parents died when he was only two years old, leaving him heir to a fine estate, is enabled to grow up balanced and benevolent. Financial attainments not only merit social regard, they are approved in the narrative account as well. The rich are usually admirable, and even Old Pontifex is praised more for his financial achievements than for his 17 artistic or personal ones. Wealth, in this text, is quite literally fortune, while the struggle for financial security is likely to destroy parent-child relationships much more than the possession of great wealth. So compelling is Butler’s Social Darwinist conviction of inevitable economic contention in which the fittest are rewarded with comfortable incomes that familial affections are regarded as weaker impulses, easily overcome by material ambition. As a result of the novel’s fundamental economic orientation, duty—or, more accurately termed, indebtedness— becomes the dominant bonding force within the family, rather than love or even animalistic bonding. The petulant Theobald, recognizing in his son a lack of affection, claims that the boy has a duty to feel otherwise—because of incurred debts: He’s not fond of me; I’m sure he is not. He ought to be after all the trouble I have taken with him, but he is ungrateful and selfish. It is an unnatural thing for a boy not to be fond of his own father. If he was fond of me I should be fond of him, but I cannot like a son who, I am sure, dislikes me. (108)

Christina’s letter to her children, prepared years before her death, urges them to honor their father and siblings as a duty (94). To prevent assent to such pleading, Overton deflates her sentimentality and hypocrisy, commenting on this letter: “How like maternal solicitude is this! Solicitude for the most part lest the offspring should come to have wishes and feelings of its own, which may occasion money difficulties, fancied or real. It is this that is at the bottom of the whole mischief” (95). Inevitable contention prevails, dictated by a Social Darwinist view of life as a struggle for survival and exacerbated in families in which

178


children must oppose parents in order to secure economic independence. The most dignified aspects of family life are depicted as tainted by hypocrisy or selfish exploitation. The household is no preserve of tranquility but a place of unremitting warfare. Familial affections among parents and children, or among siblings, are foreign to this arena of conflict. Among Ernest and his brother and sister, Joey and Charlotte, there is no trace of affection. Even when reunited with them at their mother’s deathbed, Ernest expresses his dread at having to kiss his sister and endure the company of his brother. Although they might well bond together against their father, such siblings regard each other as rivals. The hostility between parents and children is intensified by the innate dependence of the latter on the former and by primal attachments to parents; correspondingly, parents seems to have to overcome instinctual feelings toward their offspring. Overton terms such instincts in the young Ernest as a “readiness to love” and as “affection,” and he accuses the boy’s parents as steadily killing it—in the boy and in themselves. Overton comments on Theobald’s wife, Christina, and her treatment of Ernest, “She was fond of her boy, which Theobald never was, and it was long before she could destroy all affection for herself in the mind of her firstborn. But she persevered” (79). The effect of such exploitation of the young is clear in the account of Ernest’s development. As early as age twelve, when he arrives at Dr. Skinner’s school, Ernest admits that he does not love his parents, although at this stage he feels guilt in this failure: When should he learn to love his papa and mamma as they had loved theirs? How could he hope ever to grow up to be as good and wise as they, or even tolerably good and wise? Alas! Never. It could not be. He did not love his papa and mamma, in spite of all their goodness both in themselves and to him. He hated papa, and did not like mamma, and this was what none but a bad and ungrateful boy would do after all that had been done for him. (110)

If this seems only an expression of childish rebellion, it should be added that Ernest’s dislike of his parents only intensifies as the novel progresses, and his greatest expression of pleasure occurs when Overton admits that he never liked them, either. Overton’s sardonic commentary so repeatedly and effectively undercuts the dramatized account and the claims of parents that he becomes the figure who models or dictates the readers’ responses. He is urbane and appealing in offering his account and bold in disputing


179

orthodoxy. He is even endowed with biases—particularly against the institution of marriage and the teachings of Christianity—that remain idiosyncratic, thus enabling a distancing, or objectification appropriate to intellectual discourse rather than to eliciting an emotional response. His arguments are cogent and his expression fresh, so that he thus becomes not merely the instrument but the authorial voice determining the subjects to be explored and the terms in which they may be regarded; he ultimately becomes the embodiment of the only viable response to a depleted ideology, sardonic commentary: To parents who wish to lead a quiet life I would say: Tell your children that they are very naughty—much naughtier than most children; point to the young people of some acquaintances as models of perfection, and impress your own children with a deep sense of their own inferiority. You carry so many more guns than they do that they cannot fight you. This is called moral influence and it will enable you to bounce them as much as you please; they think you know, and they will not have yet caught you lying often enough to suspect that you are not the unworldly, and scrupulously truthful person which you represent yourself to be. (25)

The tendency toward inversions, evident in such statements, not only challenges orthodox, sentimental claims, it mocks the high moral tone in which such claims had earnestly been made. Concluding his account of George Pontifex, having castigated him for deliberately and consistently breaking the wills of his children and even for the physical abuse of his sons, Overton says only: “Take him then all in all, I am not inclined to be so severe upon him as my father was. Judge him according to a very lofty standard, and he is nowhere. Judge him according to a fair average standard, and there is not much fault to be found with him” (77). So complex and articulated is the narrative voice in this text that one can discern his inconsistencies and his growth. Like narrators in the novels of James or Conrad, or even like the most complex of unreliable voices—Ford’s Edward Dowell in The Good Soldier—Overton changes in the course of narrating his account, becoming most ironic as he reaches the last stages. For instance, early in the account, he offers a favored bromide of the Victorians—that voiced by Browning’s Andrea del Sarto—that ultimately only aspirations count; but by the narrative’s end he can allow only a much more cynical view: that all such goals are specious. Initially he quotes his own father as saying

180


about Ernest’s grandfather, John Pontifex, “It is not by what a man has actually put upon his canvas, nor yet by the acts which he has set down . . . upon the canvas of his life that I will judge him, but by what he makes me feel that he felt and aimed at” (6). Eventually, not content with exposing the fallacy of Christian teaching, the narrator goes so far as to parody it. When Christina rushes toward her son and clasps him in her arms upon his release from prison, he says only, “Mother . . . we must part,” a reverse image of the Pietà, and an exemplum of Ernest’s claim that he is “giving up father and mother for Christ’s sake” (263). He proposes that there are no absolute moral standards, only measures relative to the time and setting; for instance, he reports that George Pontifex “thrashed his boys two or three times a week and some weeks a good deal oftener, but in those days fathers were always thrashing their boys. [Guilt or blamelessness] turns upon the question whether a sufficient number of reasonable people placed as the actor was placed would have done as the actor has done. At that time it was universally admitted that to spare the rod was to spoil the child, and St. Paul had placed disobedience to parents in very ugly company” (21). Ralf Norrman finds in Butler’s works a dualist perception and way of thought that made the rhetorical figure of the chiasmus his favored technique. Butler, he says, sees only contradictions and is finally uninterested in working toward solutions.18 However, in arguing that moral judgment should be eschewed, and in disputing claims of clear causality, Overton is precluded from constructing the usual narrative, one based on strings of causalities, and supported by ethical standards assumed to be endorsed by both writer and reader. The effect on this novel is critical, for contrary to the expectations of the reader of the mass of earlier nineteenth century fiction, this narrative tends to eschew both judgments and conclusions. Overton’s tendency toward antithetical terms and his resistance to seeking a synthesis of opposites constitute a model of the final stage of development of the novel as a dialogical entity, in which resolution, as it appears as closure of a narrative, is precluded. In fact, he effectively obviates any such conclusion in arguing that human agents do not adequately know their own motives: How little do we know our thoughts—our reflex actions indeed, yes; but our reflections! Man, forsooth, prides himself on his consciousness. We boast that we differ from the winds and waves and falling stones, and plants, which grow they know not why, and from the wandering creatures which go up and down after their prey, as we are


181

pleased to say without the help of reason. We know so well what we are doing ourselves, and why we do it, do we not? I fancy that there is some truth in the view which is being put forward nowadays, that it is our less conscious thoughts and our less conscious actions which mainly mould our own lives and the lives of those who spring from us. (21–22)

Finally, and most challenging of these interrogations of traditional narrative, Overton questions whether external perceptions can be distinguished from internal ones: The trouble is that in the end we shall be driven to admit the unity of the universe so completely as to be compelled to deny that there is either an external or an internal, but must see everything both as external and internal at one and the same time, subject and object— external and internal—being unified as much as everything else. This will knock our whole system over, but then every system has got to be knocked over by something. (264–65)

Denying transcendent standards of judgment, motivation, and even distinctions between outer and inner realities, Overton cannot function as a reliable guide or informant, and even the novelistic structure determined by conflict between identifiable antagonists is impossible. In its place we have the juxtaposition of contending elements, a picture constitutive of the modernist view. This breakdown of traditional novelistic structure is most evident in the final of the three volumes that constitute the novel, for they show how far the conventions of fiction have been replaced by techniques that will come to be regarded as modernist. If, as Ernest proclaims, there is no universal absolute truth (246), denying authority of parents, broader society or even a single narrator, the very foundation of narrative is demolished. The implied contract between speaker/writer and audience aims to secure endorsement of shared attitudes, commonalities that are obviated in a purely subjective and unstable universe. The disjointed entries offering sparse accounts of Ernest’s occupation and failed marriage that constitute the closing section of this text can now be recognized as appropriate, even inevitable. No authoritative voice can subordinate one entry to another nor claim an order of causality in them. Ernest Pontifex has become, in many respects, the Stephen Dedalus who appears at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and he is depicted with

182


similar ironic distancing.19 Proclaiming lofty goals for himself, Ernest, like Stephen, faces probable, if not inevitable defeat; he is the isolated, alienated modern protagonist, and the heroic aura of his program is undercut by the ironic presentation of it. His repeated criticism of religious orthodoxy has been compromised: at the end he admits that he “takes the sacrament duly once a year as a sop to Nemesis lest he should again feel strongly upon any subject” (356). He has become a reversal of his heroic identity: he is earnest about nothing, and idealism has been refuted as both futile and even foolish. Such skepticism about fundamental institutions challenged the foundations of social thought. U. C. Knoepflmacher, in a thorough analysis of this work, compares Butler with Thomas Hardy: for both “the old gospels of love, disinterestedness and renunciation have become invalid.”20 Even marriage is regarded as untenable, so that the main character is left at the end with no prospects of support except for the kindly concern of his bachelor friend, Overton. The final effect, then, is to ground the account of several generations of morally earnest members of the Pontifex family within the larger world of harsh materialistic struggle. The forces antagonistic to idealism are insuperable, and so the plot ends not with triumph but with suspension in a fragmented, unknowable universe. And the entire account is conveyed by a narrator who denies human efficacy and disables judgment by the reader.21 Given such radical objections to conventional assumptions, the plot cannot be concluded in the usual sense; it trails off, disallowing final judgments or resolution of conflicts. Narrative authority— parental rule—has been replaced by loose ties outside the family. The very foundations of patriarchal authority, which also constitute the entire claims of narrative authority, are demolished, making impossible not only moral instruction but, because of the absence of sympathetic involvement in the family unit, even the accurate representation of reality. Restoration of the family as a viable force is not even desired; and the form of the narrative is transformed to fragmented expression rather than ordered narrative. The reader is confronted, perhaps moved, but not invited into discourse. Subplots, which had been utilized to amplify and support ideological claims by offering parallel narratives, are abandoned, for the project of thorough investigation of ideological claims is no longer an intention. The text has become a post mortem on an institution that has lost its viability. The consistent instructive pretense of long-promoted claims of the family being the model of an orderly society and the home a place


183

in which parents seek to protect and nurture their offspring, an enclave in which siblings support each other, a place in which the most noble ethical instruction takes place, or a haven that offers a preferable alternative to the crass world of commerce—in short, the entire set of claims that had earlier constituted the ideology of the bourgeois family is, at the century’s end, abandoned. For the novelist, domestic life has become a bankrupt concern. Tolstoy’s famous claim, inscribed at approximately the same time Butler composed this novel—“Happy families are all alike”—amply expresses the air of dismissal while proposing the revised kind of narrative that follows. In the succeeding literary phase, the patriarch will be displaced by rebels against domestic ideology: Anna Karenina, Stephen Dedalus, Paul Morel, the heroines and heroes of modernist fiction.22 Although claims about the imminent demise of the family continue to appear, in the actual world patriarchy is neither stronger nor weaker, and internal relations among siblings continue to operate as before. The preservation of the family as a socializing unit is treasured as always. But in novels that focus on that issue, the assumptions are different and the discourse constrained. In the succeeding century, as at the present time, there appear sentimental throwbacks to the prototype, glorifying old-fashioned family life, usually in a rural setting, just as there continue to appear sentimental romance novels endorsing outmoded gender roles and archaic social attitudes. But such works do not participate in the ideological discourses of the time. Within the main development of the conventions of the novel, as in political discourse, the claim that the family is the model of an orderly society is no longer espoused. No longer can patriarchal rule, reinforced by filial and sibling support, be regarded as the template for developing political and social systems. Paternalism is dismissed as an unwarranted intrusion into individual lives. Patriarchy, the keystone on which most familial claims rests, is, if not totally denied, at least so severely qualified as to preclude absolute assertions and to disable the kind of strong narrative closure that endorsed parental rule or family stability. The circular form was predicated by plots that moved from intact families through division and back to integrated, strengthened family units. The chiastic form was fitting for narratives that offered inverted family structures to replace traditional patriarchal rule. The motif of the prodigal son that entailed a return and restoration of familial ties needed to conclude with the errant child’s return. But the new ideology dictated a final voyage away, dismissal, suspension and a focus on the family member who escapes.

184


The canonical novels that treat family life in the generation that immediately follows Butler and Stevenson, the early masterpieces of English modernism, conclude in the same open-ended manner. Protagonists in a set of texts all of which are centrally concerned with family life are left at the narrative’s end suspended, sometimes with noble aspirations, but with disabling qualifications. Stephen Dedalus forsakes family to write the history of his race, but no narrative authority remains to make the reader regard his prospects as firm. Paul Morel, having lost the consolation of his mother, no longer a son or a lover, will set off towards the gold phosphorescence of an ambiguous city. The children of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay will make a start in reaching the lighthouse, but with no indication of what will follow. Winnie Verloc, arguably the real heroine of The Secret Agent, retains no such prospects and commits suicide, the ultimate victim of “an impenetrable mystery . . . destined to hang for ever,” while the “incorruptible Professor” is left wandering “like a pest in the street full of men.” Deprived of that older comforting ideology of the family, existence seems so indeterminate that declarative expression in the form of the traditional novel is impossible. Barthes’ question asked at the outset resonates: “If there’s no more Father, what’s the use of telling stories?”

N OTES

Introduction 1.

Christopher Wood, Victorian Painters, vol. 2 (Suffolk, England: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1995), 15.

2.

For a discussion of the ways in which this new technology redefined what was regarded as “reality,” see Nancy Armstrong’s Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1999).

3.

Geraldine Norman, Biedermeier Painting, 1815–1848 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 8.

4.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Verso, 1998), 57.

5.

Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York: Knopf, 1962).

6.

Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977).

7.

Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London: Methuen, 1965).

8.

For a summary of current findings on such matters, see Leonore Davidoff, Megan Doolittle, Janet Fink, and Katherine Holden, The Family Story: Blood, Contract and Intimacy, 1830–1960 (London: Longman, 1999), 16–97; and Richard Wall, “The Transformation of the European Family across the Centuries,” in Family History Revisited: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Wall, Tamara K. Hareven, and Josef Ehmer (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001), 217–41.

9.

For a comprehensive study of the development of the “juridical subject” as it is revealed in six novels of the eighteenth century, see John P.

186

NOTES Zomchick, Family and Law in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

10. So much has been written on changing functions of the family over the past three centuries that I can here cite only the texts most germane to my literary focus. Of particular importance are: Armstrong and Lawrence Tennenbaum, The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor and the Origins of Personal Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Karen Chase and Michael Levenson, The Spectacle of Intimacy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London: Hutchison, 1987); Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families, trans. R. Hurley (London: Hutchison, 1980); Christopher Flint, Family Fictions: Narrative and Domestic Relations in Britain, 1688–1798 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form 1832–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); and Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property, and Social Transition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 11. John Demos, Past, Present and Personal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 24–40. 12. Randolph Trumbach, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth Century England (New York: Academic Press, 1978); and Lynn Hunt, “The Unstable Boundaries of the French Revolution,” in A History of Private Life, ed. Michelle Perrot, vol. 4 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 25. 13. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, vol. 5 of The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (New York: New York University Press, 1989), 23. 14. Wollstonecraft, A Vindication, 68. Subsequent references are included in the text. 15. Hall, “The Early Formation of Victorian Domestic Ideology,” in Fit Work for Women, ed. Sandra Burman (New York: St. Martin’s, 1979), 15–32; and Chase and Levenson, Spectacle of Intimacy, 21–45. 16. Peter Gay’s five-volume work, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984–1998), and Gay, Schnitzler’s Century (New York: Norton, 2002), constitute the definitive studies of bourgeois culture, and particularly of the centrality of family ideology to that concept. 17. Lord Shaftesbury, quoted in Jenni Calder, The Victorian Home (London: B. T. Batsford, 1977), 131.

NOTES

187

18. Donzelot, The Policing of Families., 92. 19. John Ruskin, “Of Queens’ Gardens,” in Sesame and Lilies, by John Ruskin, in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1905), 122. 20. Peter Gay concludes, “Whether they reveled in it or feared it, contemporary observers could agree that the nineteenth century middle-class family was the supreme haven of privacy.” Gay, The Education of the Senses (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 445. 21. Elizabeth Langland’s Nobody’s Angels: Middle Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995) is one of the few essential studies of Victorian ideology, and its central arguments inform this entire study. Another relevant treatment of such issues appears in Elizabeth Fox Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 299–336. 22. Elaine Showalter, “Family Secrets and Domestic Subversion: Rebellion in the Novels of the 1860s,” in The Victorian Family: Structure and Stresses, ed. Anthony S. Wohl (New York: St. Martin’s, 1978), 101–16. 23. John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, ed. Susan Moller Okin (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1988), 39. 24. Historians claim various causes of the fin de siècle unconcern about family ideology, except to note that it is not regarded as such a precious institution. Financial crises and overpopulation stemmed the expansion of legislation benefiting the family, and new divorce laws forced a revision of attitudes about its stability. See O. R. McGregor, Divorce in England: A Centenary Study (London: Heinemann, 1957), 81. See also Asa Briggs, “Victorian Values,” in Victorian Values: Aspects of Nineteenth-Century Thought and Society (Manchester, England: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994), 265–68. 25. Linda Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 199. 26. The term appears in John Orr’s Tragic Realism and Modern Society (London: Macmillan, 1989), 4. Orr’s study analyzes a set of novels dealing with the flaws and failures of a quest for community. For another study of fiction as an aesthetic form of consensus, see Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Realism and Consensus in the English Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). 27. Denis Jonnes, The Matrix of Narrative: Family Systems and the Semiotics of Story (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1990), 268. 28. Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation, xiii.

188

NOTES

29. Paula Backscheider, introduction to The Family Instructor, by Daniel Defoe (New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1989), 172. Originally published in 1715–1718. 30. Conduct books of the period similarly parallel novels as expressions of ideologies, such as proposing models for the behavior of women, but they do not engage the reader in a process of eliciting responses and even resistance. For an informative account of the ways in which they amplify changing ideologies, see Armstrong and Tennenhouse, eds., The Ideology of Conduct (New York: Methuen, 1987). 31. Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London: Verso, 1978), 64. 32. Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (London: Routledge, 1990), 142. Reportedly, Bakhtin completed a monograph on the provincial novel and the family novel, focusing on Fielding’s Tom Jones, but it was never published, having been burned during the bombardment of Moscow in World War II. Rene Wellek, History of Modern Criticism, vol. 7 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 368. One could wish that manuscript were discovered for the insights he would bring on the complex interrelationships of ideology to narrative, and specifically to read his explanation of the development of the family novel. 33. The most concise definitions of Bakhtin’s term are those offered in Katerina Clark and Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 278–88; and Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 366–432. 34. Wallace Martin succinctly defines this restricted usage: “The word ‘ideology’ has long seemed to be a foreign interloper in our everyday and disciplinary languages. Its natural habitat is political theory, where it sometimes refers to hidden motives or to factors of which we are unaware that lead to false consciousness. Bakhtin uses it to refer to ‘a particular way of viewing the world, one that strives for social significance,’ and in this sense it is close to the ordinary meaning of ‘point of view.’ What he adds to a more technical analysis is an awareness of how content not only penetrates the form of fiction but constitutes it, and of the centrality of language in any discussions of narrative.” Martin, Recent Theories of Narrative (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 150–51. 35. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 162. No critical term is without its limitations. Slavoj Zizek warns of one hazard in using the term “ideology”: “Does not the critique of ideology involve a privileged place, somehow exempted from the turmoils of social life, which enables some subject-agent to perceive the very hidden mechanism that regulates social visibility and non-visibility? . . . ‘Ideology’ can designate anything from a contemplative attitude that misrecognizes

NOTES

189

its dependence on social reality to an action-oriented set of beliefs, from the indispensable medium in which individuals live out their relations to a social structure to false ideas which legitimate a dominant political power.” Slavoj Zizek, “The Spectre of Ideology,” in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Zizek (London: Verso, 1994), 3–4. 36. Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State,” 176. 37. James Branch Cabell, The Certain Hour (New York: McBride, 1929), 175–76. 38. Laslett, “The Wrong Way Through the Telescope: A Note on Literary Evidence in Sociology and Historical Sociology,” British Journal of Sociology 27 (1976): 328. 39. Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (London: Harper Collins, 1997), 473. 40. Janice Carlisle, The Sense of an Audience (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982), 42–43. 41. Clifford Geertz, “Ideology as a Cultural System,” The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 219. 42. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 47. 43. Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 20–26, 146–77. 44. Four standard works provide bases on which my arguments are based: Robert L. Caserio, Plot, Story, and the Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979); Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); Patricia D. Tobin, Time and the Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978); and Denis Jonnes, The Matrix of Narrative. 45. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 104. See also, Peter K. Garrett, The Victorian Multiplot Novel: Studies in Dialogic Form (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983). 46. Armstrong and Tennenhouse, The Imaginary Puritan, 6–18. 47. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 114. Brooks’s theories and his subtle readings of novels inform my entire study. 48. Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 212. 49. Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981), 27. 50. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979).

190

NOTES

51. Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield, ed. Arthur Friedman (London: Oxford University Press, 1974). Subsequent references to this text are parenthetically cited. 52. Ronald Paulson traces the development from Clarissa through Fielding’s Amelia and Smollett’s Humphry Clinker, noting the motif of a voyage as characteristic of the form. Paulson, Popular Art and Polite Art in the Age of Hogarth and Fielding (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 149–55. 53. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (London: Rupert Hart Davis, 1971), 33. 54. Goldsmith, Collected Letters, ed. Katherine C. Balderston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), 60. 55. Robert Hopkins’s The True Genius of Oliver Goldsmith (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969) contains the fullest argument that Goldsmith’s intention was satiric; most subsequent scholarship disputes his claim, while recognizing a great degree of internal irony in this novel. 56. See Hopkins, The True Genius, 172–79; and Eric Rothstein and Howard D. Weinbrot, “The Vicar of Wakefield, Mr. Wilmot, and the Shistonian Controversy,” Philological Quarterly 55 (1976): 225–40. 57. Zomchick, Family and the Law, 154–55.

Chapter 1 1.

For a discussion of the adaptation of the French Revolution to family ideology, see Lynn Hunt’s “The Unstable Boundaries of the French Revolution” in From the Fires of the Revolution to the Great War, ed. Michelle Perrot (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 12–45.

2.

Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (London: Harper Collins, 1997).

3.

Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).

4.

Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (London: Hogarth, 1987).

5.

Eudora Welty, “A Note on Jane Austen,” Shenandoah 20 (Spring 1965): 4.

6.

W. A. Craik, Jane Austen in Her Time (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1969), 94.

7.

Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 219.

8.

For an analysis of how this text reflects the development of the closed family system see Paula Marantz Cohen, “Stabilizing the Family System at Mansfield Park,” ELH 54 (1987): 669–93.

NOTES 9.

191

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923–1954), 6. Subsequent citations of page numbers will be included in parentheses in the text.

10. Maaja Stewart, Domestic Realities and Imperial Fictions (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993). See, in particular, 31–33, 122. 11. Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 160–62. 12. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London: Hutchison, 1987), 348–56. 13. Ellen Pollak interprets Sir Thomas decision to bring Fanny into the household as part of a program of cultural preservation designed to protect men from foreign constraints. She notes also that marriage between cousins, the prospect of which seems to frighten him, was not illegal at the time. Pollak, Incest and the English Novel, 1684—1814 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 162–99. 14. For extended discussions of this matter, see Glenda A. Hudson, Sibling Love and Incest in Jane Austen’s Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1992); Johanna M. Smith, “‘My Only Sister Now’: Incest in Mansfield Park,” Studies in the Novel 19 (1987): 1–15; Julie Shaffer, “Familial Love, Incest, and Female Desire in Late Eighteenth and Early NineteenthCentury British Women’s Novels, “ Criticism 41 (Winter 1999): 67–99. 15. Allowing marriage between cousins in this instance may in fact serve a capitalist end, a form of home trading. For a detailed discussion of this possibility, see Eileen Cleere’s Avuncularism: Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Nineteenth-Century English Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 33–75. 16. William J. Goode, The Family (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1964), 85. 17. Alistair Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). 18. For a provocative discussion of the interior architecture of Mansfield Park, with diagrams of the rooms, including the proposed modifications for the theatrical, see Vladimir Nabokov’s essay on the novel in his Lectures on Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1999), 9–62. Michael Irwin argues the opposite: that the Bertram house is not described in such detail that it functions in the way that Fanny’s Portsmouth home does; see Irwin, Picturing: Description and Illusion in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979), 127–32.

192

NOTES

19. Ruth Bernard Yeazell interprets this as a cleansing of the profaned domicile, evidence of Sir Thomas’s insistence on order. See Yeazell, “The Boundaries of Mansfield Park, Representations, no. 7 (1984): 133–152. 20. Hudson, Sibling Love and Incest, 42. 21. Tara Ghoshal Wallace, Jane Austen and Narrative Authority (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), 59. 22. Of particular importance, in addition to works cited, are Isobel Armstrong, Mansfield Park (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988); Julia Prewitt Brown, Jane Austen’s Novels: Social Change and Literary Form (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1979); Mary Evans, Jane Austen and the State (London: Tavistock, 1987); Avrom Fleishman, A Reading of Mansfield Park (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1967); Claudia Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Deborah Kaplan, Jane Austen Among Women (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Margaret Kirkham, Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1983); Roger Sales, Jane Austen and Representations of Regency England (London: Routledge, 1994); Tanner, Jane Austen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); and James Thompson, Between Self and World (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988). 23. Johnson, “Gender, Theory and Jane Austen Culture,” in Mansfield Park, ed. Nigel Wood (Buckingham, England: Open University Press, 1993), 91–120. 24. Anne K. Mellor’s Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York: Routledge, 1988) is the most substantial work of scholarship on this author. Recent important contributions include The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein, ed. Audrey Fisch, Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 25. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, ed. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1999), 233. 26. Ibid., 244. 27. Ibid., 82. 28. In addition to Mellor’s book, see Mitzi Myers, “Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley: The Female Author between Public and Private Spheres,” in Mary Shelley in Her Times, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 160–72; and Pamela Clemit, The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).

NOTES

193

29. Kate Ferguson Ellis, “Monsters in the Garden: Mary Shelley and the Bourgeois Family,” in The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel, ed. George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 123–42; Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989); Ellis, “Subversive Surfaces: The Limits of Domestic Affection in Mary Shelley’s Later Fiction,” in The Other Mary Shelley; and Julia Sanders, “Rehabilitating the Family in Mary Shelley’s Falkner in Mary Shelley’s Fictions: From Frankenstein to Falkner, ed. Michael Cherle-Sinatra. (London: Macmillan, 2000), 211–23. 30. Betty Bennett, ed., The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, vol. 2 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 185. I have corrected departures from modern spelling in this citation. 31. Mary Shelley, Lodore, ed. Fiona Stafford (London: William Pickering, 1996), 26. Subsequent references will be to this text and page numbers will be included in parentheses. 32. For a discussion of social pretense and education in the novel, see Charlene E. Bunnell, “The Illusion of ‘Great Expectations’: Manners and Morals in Mary Shelley’s Lodore and Falkner,” in Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after Frankenstein, ed. Syndy M. Conger, Frederick S. Frank, and Gregory O’Dea (Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), 175–292; and Bunnell, “Breaking the Tie That Binds: Parents and Children in Romantic Fiction,” in Family Matters in the British and American Novel, ed. Andrea O’Reilly Herrera, Elizabeth Mahn Nollen, and Sheila Reitzel Foor (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997), 31–53. 33. Emily W. Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (Boston: Little Brown, 1989); and U. C. Knoepflmacher, “Thoughts on the Aggression of Daughters,” in The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 88–119. 34. A recent, and convincing interpretation, that of Katherine C. Hill-Miller, argues that Ethel resists this patriarchal rule through becoming a mother, although even at the end of the novel, her primary emotional tie is to her father. Hill-Miller, “My Hideous Progeny”: Mary Shelley, William Godwin, and the Father-Daughter Relationship (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993). And Anne K. Mellor, Shelley’s best critic to date, points out the ways in Lodore’s promotion of an womanly ideal as either the innocent Eve or the Proper Lady is inherently “potentially dangerous consequences for women.” Mellor, Mary Shelley, 190. 35. Lisa Vargo, introduction to Lodore, by Mary Shelley (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1997), 37–38. 36. Fiona Stafford, “Lodore: A Tale of the Present Time,” in Mary Shelley’s Fictions: From Frankenstein to Falkner, 181–93.

194

NOTES

37. For other parallels to Tennyson’s poem in another of Shelley’s novels, see Paul A. Cantor, “The Apocalypse of Empire: Mary Shelley’s The Last Man,” in Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after Frankenstein, 19.

Chapter 2 1.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Locksley Hall,” in The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longmans, 1969), 690.

2.

For a summary of demographic scholarship disputing claims of family changes during this period, see Richard Wall, “The Transformation of the European Family across the Centuries,” in Family History Revisited: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Richard Wall, Tamara K. Hareven, and Josef Ehmer (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001), 217–41.

3.

Brian Maidment compares two versions of the title page of The Family Economist—one dated 1848 and the other 1850—to argue that the changes in the depiction of family members therein reveal ideological changes regarding family cohesion. His point is similar to mine: such works participate in the formation of social attitudes. See Maidment, “Domestic Ideology and Its Industrial Enemies,” in Gender Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Literature, ed. Christopher Parker (London: Scolar Press, 1995), 25–56.

4.

Karl Ittmann, Work, Gender and Family in Victorian England (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 143–44.

5.

Margaret Dalziel, Popular Fiction 100 Years Ago (London: Cohen and West, 1957), 16.

6.

Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall estimate that the perceived separation of home life and work was perceived as absolute by the 1840s. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London: Hutchison, 1987), 180–81.

7.

For the fullest discussion of this subject, see Margaret Lane, “Dickens on the Hearth,” in Dickens 1970, ed. Michael Slater (London: Chapman and Hall, 1970), 153–71; Alexander Welsh, The City of Dickens (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 141–63.

8.

David Musselwhite, Paintings Welded Together: Politics and Desire in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (London: Methuen, 1987), 159–60.

9.

Sylvia Manning, “Families in Dickens,” in Changing Images of the Family, ed. Virginia Tufte and Barbara Myerhoff (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 150.

10. Lionel Trilling, “The Dickens of our Day,” A Gathering of Fugitives (Boston: Beacon, 1956), 43.

NOTES

195

11. Of recent critical works, I would give priority to Catherine Waters, Dickens and the Politics of the Family (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Her reading of Dombey and Son is masterful and convincing, and my discussion of that text builds upon her arguments, paying special attention to the formal effects of the ideological issues she identifies on the form of the novel. Other works that should be consulted are: Arthur A. Adrian, Dickens and the Parent-Child Relationship (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1984); Malcolm Andrews, Dickens and the GrownUp Child (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994); Phillip Collins, Dickens and Education (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971); Deirdre David, Rule Britannia: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Barbara Hardy, The Moral Art of Charles Dickens (London: Athlone Press, 1970); Steven Marcus, Dickens from Pickwick to Dombey (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965); Goldie Morganthaler, Dickens and Heredity: When Like Begets Like (London: Macmillan, 2000); Lyn Pykett, Charles Dickens: Critical Issues (London: Palgrave, 2002); Anny Sadrin, Parentage and Inheritance in the Novels of Charles Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Hilary Schor, Dickens and the Daughter of the House (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); F. S. Schwarzbach, Dickens and the City (London: Athlone, 1979); Efraim Sicher, Rereading the City/Rereading Dickens: Representation, the Novel, and Urban Realism (New York: AMS Press, 2003); Michael Slater, Dickens and Women (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983); and Jeremy Tambling, Dickens, Violence and the Modern State (London: Macmillan, 1995). 12. John Lucas’ discussion of this subject is particularly insightful: Lucas, “Dickens and Dombey and Son: Past and Present Imperfect,” in Tradition and Tolerance in Nineteenth Century Fiction, ed. David Howard, John Lucas, and John Goode (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), 99–140. 13. Pykett argues that this novel is the first of Dickens’s mature phase, distinguished by more coherent treatment of intellectual concepts and by a tighter form as well: Pykett, Charles Dickens: Critical Issues, 99. 14. Ibid., 104. 15. See Lucas, “Dickens and Dombey and Son,” 99–140. For a thorough and detailed examination of Dickens’s treatment of commercial forces in this novel, as represented by the railway and the sea, see Sicher, Rereading the City, 91–146. Tambling goes so far as to call Dombey “a modern freetrader,” for the author’s fascination, albeit mixed with nostalgia, with the railways: Tambling, Dickens, Violence, 50. 16. Dickens’ numbered plans are included as Appendix B of Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, ed. Alan Horsman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Subsequent references to this text will be included by page numbers in parentheses.)

196

NOTES

17. Andrews, Grown-Up Child, 121–22. 18. For an opposing argument, see Ross H. Dabney, Love and Property in the Novels of Dickens (London: Chatto and Windus, 1967), 50–65. 19. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 666. On the other hand, A. E. Dyson calls the comparison to the Heavenly Father a “patent evasion,” in Dyson, The Inimitable Dickens (London: Macmillan, 1970), 113. 20. See Susan R. Horton, Interpreting Interpreting (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 31–34. 21. In a seminal and challenging essay on this novel, Denis Donoghue argues that the Toodles family serves as a contrast to Dombey’s corrupted unit. See Donoghue, “The English Dickens and Dombey and Son,” in Dickens Centennial Essays, ed. Ada Nisbet and Blake Nevius (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 1–21. 22. Morganthaler, Dickens and Heredity, 123. 23. Joseph Allen Boone, Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 128. 24. See especially H. K. Browne’s illustration on 770, and the scene in which the bird tries to warn his master of imminent danger on 780. 25. Sadrin, Parentage and Inheritance, 13. 26. Musselwhite, Paintings Welded Together, 199–205. 27. Waters, Politics of the Family, 52. 28. Carolyn M. Dever describes the conclusion of Bleak House as a “strangely sanitary dream world,” but one that is “an embattled construct, for the universe of the larger novel consistently destroys any pretense to conventional ‘family values.’” In Dever, “Broken Mirror, Broken Words: Autobiography, Prosopopeia, and the Dead Mother in Bleak House,” Studies in the Novel 27 (1995): 43. 29. Ian Watt regards hypergamy as a convention of the novel, not one of actual society. See Watt, Rise of the Novel (London: Hogarth, 1987), 154. 30. William Makepeace Thackeray, The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family, vol. 2, ed. Peter L. Shillingsburg (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1996), 366. 31. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 73–107. 32. Charles Napier, introduction to Lights and Shadows of Military Life, by Count de Vigny and E. Blaze, cited in H. T. Lambrick, Sir Charles Napier and Sind (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), 33. 33. In Michael Lund, Reading Thackeray (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 114–15, Lund reads Sarah Mason as the principled,

NOTES

197

resilient heart of the Newcome family line, and so reveals how her calculated reappearances in the narrative direct the reader’s responses. 34. In Micael M. Clarke, Thackeray and Women (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995), Clarke presents a convincing argument that Clara Newcome is based on Caroline Norton, the subject of a notorious legal case of the period, concluding that this novel constitutes a substantive contribution to contemporary debate on divorce legislation. See especially 150–52. 35. See Deborah A. Thomas, Thackeray and Slavery (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1993), 114–39. 36. Juliet McMaster finds in the animal imagery of the fable intimations of an amoral universe, no less savage and predatory than what was to be formulated by Darwin as the evolutionary struggle for survival. See J. McMaster, Thackeray: The Major Novels (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), 173–74. 37. Catherine Peters, points out that Pendennis was intended by Thackeray to provide a biased account. Peters, Thackeray’s Universe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 224–25. When a friend complained to Thackeray about Pen’s “uxurious weakness,” the author replied that he was “a weak character, led by a woman.” 38. For a discussion of the function of portraits in this text see Janice Carlisle, The Sense of an Audience (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982), 119 ff. 39. See Lund, Reading Thackeray; J. McMaster, Thackeray: The Major Novels; and, particularly, Hardy, The Exposure of Luxury: Radical Themes in Thackeray (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972). 40. Hardy, The Exposure of Luxury, 168–69. 41. Robert A. Colby, in Thackeray’s Canvass of Humanity (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979) offers a solid reading of this text as a family novel, concluding with a succinct assessment of the constrained degree of patriarchal power evident here: “Not only are parents left somewhat confused . . . on what course to take, but their very authority is undermined,” 370. 42. R. D. McMaster notes the frequency of this allusion but noting that most of the allusions to the prodigal son in the text involve mother-son relationships, rather than paternal ones. See R. D. McMaster, Thackeray’s Cultural Frame of Reference (London: Macmillan, 1991), 47. 43. See in particular the passage exonerating Ethel of responsibility, pointing to her parents’ mistreatment, Thackeray, The Newcomes, 415.

198

NOTES

Chapter 3 1.

George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, ed. Gordon S. Haight (London: Oxford University Press, 1996), 32. Subsequent references will be included by parenthetical notes in the text. Margaret Anne Doody explores parallels between Eliot’s and Richardson’s novels, including the brother-sister relationship, in Doody, “George Eliot and the EighteenthCentury Novel” Nineteenth Century Fiction 35 (1980–1981): 260–91.

2.

These were dominant perceptions, but not, in fact, actualities. For historical evidence to the contrary see Peter Laslett’s The World We Have Lost (London: Methuen, 1965), and more recent historical analyses collected in Leonore Davidoff, Megan Doolittle, Janet Fink, and Katherine Holden, The Family Story: Blood, Contract and Intimacy, 1830–1960 (London: Longman, 1999).

3.

For a discussion of Lewes’s text and this novel, see Robert A. Colby, Fiction with a Purpose (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967), 235–45.

4.

Gillian Beer’s treatment of the influence of Darwin’ and other evolutionary theorists on the literature of the period is definitive; her analyses of the ways in which ideas determined Eliot’s next three novels underlie the assumptions of my reading. See Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), 1983.

5.

Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law, cited in Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 4.

6.

The metaphoric identification of society with the family is notable in Comte. For a thorough consideration of Eliot’s responses to Comte, see T. R. Wright, “George Eliot and Positivism: A Reassessment” Modern Language Review 76 (1981): 257–72. On Spencer and Eliot, see Nancy L. Paxton’s George Eliot and Herbert Spencer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); for a broader study of Eliot’s appropriation of sociological theories of the time, see Suzanne Graver’s George Eliot and Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

7.

Bernard Paris, Experiments in Life (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1965).

8.

See Rosemary Ashton, George Eliot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 373, 375; and Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 277–78.

9.

George Eliot, June 27, 1859 letter to Mr. and Mrs. Charles Bray and Sara Hennell, in The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, vol. 3 (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1954), 99. For a discussion of biographical elements in the novel, see Barbara Hardy, Critical Essays on George Eliot (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), 50–51.

NOTES

199

10. Ashton, George Eliot, 235. For an extended analysis of the structural problems of the narrative see Mary Ellen Doyle, The Sympathetic Response (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981), 57–92. Graham Martin, “The Mill on the Floss and the Unreliable Narrator,” in George Eliot: Centenary Essays and an Unpublished Manuscript, ed. Anne Smith (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1980), 36–54, attributes the problem to the dual nature of the narrator as sympathetic and critical. For a rare claim of the novel’s inherent design, see Mary Wilson Carpenter’s George Eliot and the Landscape of Time (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1986), 54–60; she argues that the seven book structure is based on the Apocalypse.) In Dorothea Barrett, Vocation and Desire (London: Routledge, 1989), Barrett ascribes it to “an instance of forgetting,” consistent with her view of the narrators of Eliot’s novels as “genuinely selfdivided and polyphonic,” 30–31, 32. 11. Michael Ragussis, Acts of Naming: The Family Plot in Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 110. 12. Ragussis, Acts of Naming, 111–13, 118–22. He also argues that Tulliver undercuts his own authority by assigning responsibility for his son’s education to someone else, but given the fact that his nemesis Mr.Wakem also sends his son to Mr. Stelling, that decision is more likely a reflection of the contemporary movement toward offering formal education outside the household. 13. Paula Marantz Cohen calls him “Janus-like” in that he stands in opposition to the lawyers. on the one hand, and kinship tradition represented the Dodson as well, and so resisting both the new and the old orders: Cohen, The Daughter’s Dilemma: Family Process and the NineteenthCentury Domestic Novel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 132. 14. Letter to Charles and Cara Bay quoted in Barrett, Vocation and Desire, 94. 15. Barrett, Vocation and Desire, 57. 16. Judith Mitchell agrees with the many critics who discern erotic, incestuous impulses in Maggie’s relationship with Tom, adding an oedipal association as well: “Tom represents the father that Maggie can never please yet on whom her psychological well-being depends, and from whom she must free herself if she is to attain healthy adult autonomy.” Mitchell, The Stone and the Scorpion: The Female Subject of Desire in the Novels of Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 112. The most extensive and decisive discussions of the incest motif in this novel appear in David Smith’s “Incest Patterns in Two Victorian Novels,” Literature and Psychology 15 (1965): 135–62; Michael Steig’s “Anality in The Mill on the Floss” Novel 5 (1971): 42–53; Tanner, Adultery in the Novel, 71–72; Beer, George Eliot (Brighton, England:

200

NOTES Harvester Press, 1986), 82–107; Barrett, Vocation and Desire, 53–54; Cohen, The Daughter’s Dilemma, 141; and Laura Comer Emery, George Eliot’s Creative Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 5–13. See also Haight’s George Eliot for its discussion of Marian Evans’ love of Isaac, which he calls the “dominating passion of her childhood,” 5. He also sites the sonnet series “Brother and Sister,” written in 1869, which expresses her later, and equally intense affection.

17. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. Stefan Collins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 105. 18. Ibid., 13. 19. Haight, George Eliot, 66–67. 20. Robert L. Caserio, Plot, Story, and the Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 235. 21. Jenni Calder, Women and Marriage in Victorian Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 135. 22. See also U. C. Knoepflmacher, George Eliot’s Early Novels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 194–95. Interpretations of the novel’s ending as it completes a reading of Maggie’s character are plentiful, and often challenging. Arguing as I do that the sister-brother relationship is the novel’s central concern, I will not pursue this matter further; but some of the most particularly cogent discussions are found in: Beer, “The Dark Woman Triumphs: Passion in The Mill on the Floss,” in George Eliot, 82–107; Deirdre David, Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy (London: Macmillan, 1989), 209–24; Mary Jacobus, “The Question of Language: Men of Maxims and The Mill on the Floss,” Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 207–22; and Nancy Miller, “Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women’s Fiction,” PMLA 96 (1981): 36–47; and Mitchell, The Stone and the Scorpion, 104–12. 23. Barbara Hardy reads the concluding scene more positively, saying it offers a “double Eureka feeling: the final embrace of the loved-one and the vision of meaning.” But that perception of meaning requires a reading that I claim contorts imagistic associations of the flood and denies the interpretation of the main character that has operated throughout the rest of the text. Hardy, Particularities: Readings in George Eliot (London: Peter Owen, 1982), 58–74. As a female version of the bildungsroman, Joseph Allen Boone argues, the death of the heroine would be expected, providing the thematic and well as structural closure, and reiterating the social critique of a patriarchal, hierarchical social structure in which “the female rebel has no place.” Boone, Tradition Counter Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 99. However, throughout the narrative the pair of brother and sister have constituted the subject, rather than the individual heroine. Nevertheless, the social commentary

NOTES

201

implied by the annihilation of the pair, indeed the entire family, signifies the non-viability of fraternal ties in combating the aggressive forces of a market-driven world. Without inherited patriarchal power, and lacking any function of reproducing or even training a succeeding generation, the fraternal unit is no more than kinship, bound together by blood and by common experiences in the past. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth regards the family ties as “amusing if not hypocritical,” and the fraternal relationship between Maggie and Tom as “vestigial, irrelevant and even reactionary” in Ermarth, The English Novel in History 1840–1895 (London: Routledge, 1997), 160, 176–77.But see also her article “Maggie Tulliver’s Long Suicide,” in Studies in English Literature 14 (1974): 587–601 on this relationship. 24. See Glenda A. Hudson’s persuasive study of the connection between sibling love and narrative closure in Jane Austen’s novels: Hudson, Sibling Love and Incest in Jane Austen’s Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1992). 25. See Beer, “Beyond Determinism: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf,” in Women Writing and Writing About Women, ed. Mary Jacobus (London: Croome Helm, 1979), 87–88. 26. See Catherine Hall, “The Sweet Delights of Home,” in A History of Private Life, ed. Michelle Perrot, vol. 4 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 47–93. Elsewhere, Davidoff and Hall conclude that the family came to be viewed as “the primary form of social organization underpinned by Christian thinking. The early family was an extension of the heavenly family.” Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London: Hutchison, 1987), 109. See also Davidoff, Jeanne L’Esperance, and Howard Newly, “Landscape with Figures: Home and Community in English Society,” in Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class, ed. Davidoff (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 41–72. 27. Anthony S. Wohl, The Victorian Family: Structure and Stresses (New York: St. Martin’s, 1978), 11. Similarly Peter Keating concludes that the Victorians “united religious belief and an hierarchical society by means of a familial scale descending from the Holy Family, through the Royal Family and the Clerical Family, down to the poorest slum inhabitants, whose outcast state, as many social explorers were to testify, was confirmed by their supposedly lax views on marriage.” Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875–1914 (London: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1989), 157. 28. G. K. Chesterton, quoted in Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (London: Batsford, 1988), 214. Briggs’s chapter (213–59) on the association of home with religion, in which Julia McNair Wright’s writings are central texts, offers a through analysis of this subject.

202

NOTES

29. Nightingale’s Suggestions for Thought was privately printed in 1860, so only few copies are extant. A selection of passages, containing the core of the argument cited herein appears in: Florence Nightingale, Cassandra and Other Selections from Suggestions for Thought, ed. Mary Poovey (New York: New York University Press, 1992). Subsequent references to this text are included in the text. 30. Charlotte M. Yonge, Preface to The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations (London: Macmillan, 1904), vii. Subsequent references are included in the text. 31. Catherine Sandbach-Dahlstrom regards Yonge’s use of realistic especially effective, given her didactic intention; she even reads the open-ended conclusion of the text as pre-modern: “circumventing the narrative convention of closure.” Sandbach-Dahlstrom, Be Good Sweet Maid: Charlotte Yonge’s Domestic Fiction: A Study in Dogmatic Purpose and Fictional Form (Stockholm: Stockholm Studies in English, 1984), 59–61. 32. Lois Conrad presents a strong argument for the historical importance of this novel in the Victorian dialogue about women’s subjectivity and the role of the family in Conrad, Perish or Publish: Victorian Culture and Women’s Subjectivity in the Autobiographies and Fiction of Margaret Oliphant and Charlotte Yonge (PhD diss., Tulane University, 1997). 33. It has been argued that the overt religious tone and didacticism of this novel represents a different kind of novel: the domestic novel, which portrays the home as the focus for examining moral and religious issues. The question remains whether such novels earn consideration in the formal development of the genre, given the lack of dialogical opportunities they provide. See June Sturrock, “Heaven and Home”: Charlotte M. Yonge’s Domestic Fiction and the Victorian Debate over Women (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, English Literary Studies, 1995). 34. Edward Said notes a pattern in late Victorian and modernist works in which childless couples and “unregenerately celibate men and women” suggest the difficulties of filiation. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 16. In refraining from marrying and producing offspring, Ethel is an early precursor of that type: not having children may constitute a rejection of subscribing to the family narrative pattern

Chapter 4 1.

David Roberts, Paternalism in Early Victorian England (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979), 98–99.

2.

Robert Louis Stevenson, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, vol. 1, ed. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press., 1994–1995), 411.

NOTES

203

3.

Stevenson, The Master of Ballantrae: A Winter’s Tale, ed. Adrian Poole (London: Penguin, 1996), 7. Subsequent references to this text will be provided in parenthetical citations.

4.

For an analysis of Mackellar’s and the others narrations here employed, see James Kilroy, “Narrative Techniques in The Master of Ballantrae,” Studies in Scottish Literature 5 (1967): 98–106.

5.

Alan Sandison, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Appearance of Modernism (London: Macmillan, 1996), 288.

6.

Leslie Stephen, “Robert Louis Stevenson,” National Review 38 (1902): 739.

7.

See Douglas Gifford, “Stevenson and Scottish Fiction: The Importance of The Master of Ballantrae,” in Stevenson and Victorian Scotland, ed. Jenni Calder (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981), 62–87; and William Gray, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Literary Life (London: Palgrave, 2004).

8.

Andrew Lang, unsigned review in Daily News, October 5, 1889, included in Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage, ed. Paul Maixner (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), 1981), 345.

9.

Roberft Louis Stevenson, “A Humble Remonstrance,” in Robert Louis Stevenson on Fiction, ed. Glenda Norquay (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 89.

10. Ibid., 90. 11. Sandison, Robert Louis Stevenson, 298. 12. The argument that narrative authority derives from patriarchy is taken from Edward Said’s Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). Sandison pursues this matter further, again using the theories of Said and Peter Brook, to pursue this important subject of patriarchal authority in this text. See Sandison, Robert Louis Stevenson, 13–37, 270–316. 13. See Adrian Poole’s introduction to the Penguin edition of the The Master of Ballantrae, (London: Penguin, 1996), xvii. 14. Samuel Butler, The Notebooks, ed. Henry Festing Jones (London: Jonathan Cape, 1921), 24. 15. Butler, Ernest Pontifex, or The Way of All Flesh, ed. Daniel F. Howard (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964), 320. Because this text is based on Butler’s manuscripts, it is preferable to the version first published, which had been extensively modified by his literary executor, R. A. Streatfield. Subsequent references will be to this text, and page numbers will be included in the text. 16. Butler, Notebooks, 363.

204

NOTES

17. See the perceptive analysis of this in Thomas L. Jeffers, Samuel Butler Revalued (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981), 97–103. 18. See Ralf Norrman, Samuel Butler and the Meaning of Chiasmus (London: Macmillan, 1986). 19. For further comparison of this novel with Joyce’s, see Daniel F. Howard’s introduction to this edition of Butler’s novel, xx—xxi; and Ilse Dusoir Lind, “The Way of All Flesh and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: a Comparison,” Victorian Newsletter 9 (1956): 7–10. 20. U. C. Knoepflmacher, Laughter and Despair: Readings in Ten Novels of the Victorian Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 213. 21. Butler’s novel has not received the critical attention it deserves. Among the few detailed studies, see Lee E. Holt, Samuel Butler: Revised Edition (Boston: Twayne, 1989); Avrom Fleishman, Figures of Autobiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); and Margaret Ganz, “Samuel Butler: Ironic Abdication and the Way to the Unconscious,” English Literature in Transition 28 (1985): 366–94. 22. Butler began writing this novel the same year Tolstoy began writing Anna Karenina.

B IBLIOGRAPHY

Adrian, Arthur A. Dickens and the Parent-Child Relationship. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1984. Allen, Dennis W. Sexuality in Victorian Fiction. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993. Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster. London: Monthly Review Press, 1971. Anderson, Michael. Approaches to the History of the Western Family 1500–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ———. Family Structure in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971. ———, ed. Sociology of the Family. London: Penguin, 1971. Andrews, Malcolm. Dickens and the Grown-Up Child. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994. Archibald, Diana C. Domesticity, Imperialism, and Emigration in the Victorian Novel. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002. Aries, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. New York: Knopf, 1962. Armstrong, Frances. Dickens and the Concept of Home. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990 Armstrong, Isobel. Mansfield Park. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1988. Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. ———. Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Armstrong, Nancy, and Leonard Tennenbaum, eds. The Ideology of Conduct. New York: Methuen, 1987. ———. The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor and the Origins of Personal Life. Berkeley: University of California, 1992. Ashton, Rosemary. George Eliot. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.

206

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Auerbach, Nina. Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978. Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. R. W. Chapman edition. Oxford: Clarendon, 1923–54. Bahar, Saba. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy. London: Palgrave, 2002. Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Translated by Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Bannet, Eve Tavor. The Domestic Revolution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Barickman, Richard, Susan MacDonald, and Myra Stark. Corrupt Relations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Barrett, Dorothea. Vocation and Desire. London: Routledge, 1989. Barrett, Michele, and Mary McIntosh. The Anti-Social Family. London: Verso, 1991. Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983. ———. George Eliot. Brighton: Harvester, 1986. Behlmer, George K. Friends of the Family: The English Home and Its Guardians. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Beizer, Janet. Family Plots: Balzac’s Narrative Generation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986. Bennett, Betty T., and Stuart Curran, eds. Mary Shelley in Her Times. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Berry, Laura C. The Child, the State, and the Victorian Novel. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999. Boone, Joseph Allen. Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. ———. The Spirit of Reform: British Literature and Politics, 1832–1867. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977. Brewer, Derek. Symbolic Stories. London: Longmans, 1988. Briggs, Asa. A Social History of England. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994. ———. Victorian Things. London: Batsford, 1988. ———. Victorian Values: Aspects of Nineteenth-Century Thought and Society. Manchester, England: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994. Brooks, Peter. Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative. London: Harvard University Press, 1993. ———. Reading for the Plot. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Brown, Julia Prewitt. Jane Austen’s Novels: Social Change and Literary Form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

207

Brown, Sarah Annes. Devoted Sisters: Representations of the Sister Relationship in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2003. Bunnell, Charlene E. “All the World’s a Stage”: Dramatic Sensibility in Mary Shelley’s Novels. New York: Routledge, 2002. Burman, Sandra, ed. Fit Work for Women. New York: St. Martin’s, 1979. Butler, Marilyn. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975. Butler, Samuel. Ernest Pontifex, or The Way of All Flesh. Edited by Daniel F. Howard. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964. ———. The Notebooks. Edited by Henry Festing Jones. London: Jonathan Cape, 1921. Calder, Jenni, ed. Stevenson and Victorian Scotland. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981. ———. The Victorian Home. London: B. T. Batsford, 1977. ———. Women and Marriage in Victorian Fiction. London: Thames and Hudson, 1976. Carlisle, Janice. The Sense of an Audience. Athens: University of Georgia, 1982. Carlisle, Janice, and Daniel R. Schwarz, eds. Narrative and Culture. Athens: University of Georgia, 1994. Carpenter, Mary Wilson. George Eliot and the Landscape of Time. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Caserio, Robert L. Plot, Story and the Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979. Chase, Karen, and Michael Levenson. The Spectacle of Intimacy: A Public Life for the Victorian Family. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Clark, Katerina, and Michael Holquist. Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Clarke, Micael M. Thackeray and Women. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995. Cleere, Eileen. Avuncularism: Capitalism, Patriarchy, and NineteenthCentury English Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Clemit, Pamela. The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993. Cohen, Paula Morantz. The Daughter’s Dilemma: Family Process and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991. Colby, Robert A. Fiction with a Purpose: Major and Minor NineteenthCentury Novels. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967. ———. Thackeray’s Canvass of Humanity. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979. Colby, Vineta. Yesterday’s Woman: Domestic Realism in the English Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974. Collins, Phillip. Dickens and Education. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971.

208

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Conger, Syndy M., Frederick S. Frank, and Gregory O’Dea, eds. Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after Frankenstein. Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997. Conrad, Lois. Perish or Publish: Victorian Culture and Women’s Subjectivity in the Autobiographies and Fiction of Margaret Oliphant and Charlotte Yonge. PhD diss., Tulane University Press, 1997. Corbett, Mary Jean. Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790–1879: Politics, History, and the Family from Edgeworth to Arnold. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Cottom, Daniel. Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Craik, W. A. Jane Austen in Her Time. London: Thomas Nelson, 1969. Dabney, Ross H. Love and Property in the Novels of Dickens. London: Chatto and Windus, 1967. Dalziel, Margaret. Popular Fiction 100 Years Ago. London: Cohen and West, 1959. David, Deirdre. Fictions of Resolution in Three Victorian Novels. London: Macmillan, 1981. ———. Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy. London: Macmillan, 1989. ———. Rule Britannia: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. Davidoff, Leonore, ed. Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class. Cambridge: Polity, 1995. Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850. London: Hutchison, 1987. Davidoff, Leonore, Megan Doolittle, Janet Fink, and Katherine Holden. The Family Story: Blood, Contract and Intimacy, 1830–1960. London: Longman, 1999. Davis, Lennard J. Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Defoe, Daniel. The Family Instructor (1715). Introduction by Paula Backsheider. Delmar, NY: Scholars Facsmiles and Reprints, 1989. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Demos, John. Past, Present and Personal. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Dennis, Barbara. Charlotte Yonge (1823–1901): Novelist of the Oxford Movement. Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen, 1992. Dever, Carolyn M. “Broken Mirror, Broken Words: Autobiography, Prosopopeia, and the Dead Mother in Bleak House.” Studies in the Novel 27 (1995): 42–62. Dickens, Charles. Dombey and Son. Edited by Alan Horsman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

209

Donzelot, Jacques. The Policing of Families. Translated by R. Hurley. London: Hutchison, 1980. Doody, Margaret Anne. “George Eliot and the Eighteenth-Century Novel.” Nineteenth Century Fiction 35 (1980–81): 260–91. ———. The True Story of the Novel. London: Harper Collins, 1997. Doyle, Mary Ellen, S.C.N. The Sympathetic Response. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981. Duckworth, Alistair M. The Improvement of the Estate. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971. Dyhouse, Carol. Feminism and the Family in England 1880–1939. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Dyson, A. E. The Inimitable Dickens. London: Macmillan, 1970. Eagleton, Terry. Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory. London: Verso, 1978. Eberle-Sinatra, Michael, ed. Mary Shelley’s Fictions: From Frankenstein to Falkner. London: Macmillan, 2000. Eliot, George. The George Eliot Letters. Edited by Gordon S. Haight. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970. ———. The Mill on the Floss. Edited by Gordon S. Haight. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Ellis, Kate Ferguson. The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989. Emery, Laura Comer. George Eliot’s Creative Conflict. Berkeley: University California Press, 1976. Engle. Monroe. The Maturity of Dickens. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959. Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. The English Novel in History, 1840–1895. London: Routledge, 1997. ———. Realism and Consensus in the English Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983. Evans, Mary. Jane Austen and the State. London: Tavistock, 1987. Fisch, Audrey, Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schor, eds. The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Flanders, H. Austin. Structures of Experience: History, Society, and Personal Life in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1984. Flandrin, Jean-Louis. Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household and Sexuality. Translated by Richard Southern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Fleishman, Avrom. Figures of Autobiography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. ———. A Reading of Mansfield Park. Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 1967. Flint, Christopher. Family Fictions: Narrative and Domestic Relations in Britain, 1688–1798. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.

210

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Flint, Kate, ed. The Victorian Novelist: Social Problems and Social Change. New York: Croom Helm, 1987. Gallagher, Catherine. The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form 1832–1867. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Galperin, William H. The Historical Austen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Ganz, Margaret. “Samuel Butler: Ironic Abdication and the Way to the Unconsciousness.” English Literature in Transition 28 (1985): 366–94. Garrett, Peter K. The Victorian Multiplot Novel in Dialogic Form. New Haven, CT: Yale, 1982. Gay, Peter. The Bourgeois Experience. 5 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984—1998. ———. Schnitzler’s Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture, 1815–1914. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Genovese, Elizabeth Fox, and Eugene D. Genovese. Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. TheMadwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. Gilmartin, Sophie. Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Goldsmith, Oliver. Collected Letters. Edited by Katherine C. Balderston. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. ———. The Vicar of Wakefield. Edited by Arthur Friedman. London: Oxford University Press, 1974. Gonda, Caroline. Reading Daughters’ Fictions: Novels and Society from Manley to Edgeworth: 1709–1834. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Goode, William J. The Family. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964. Goody, Jack. The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Graver, Suzanne. George Eliot and Community. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Gray, William. Robert Louis Stevenson: A Literary Life. London: Palgrave, 2004. Greenfield, Susan C. Mothering Daughters: Novels and the Politics of Family Romance: Frances Burney to Jane Austen. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002. Grylls, David. Guardians and Angels: Parents and Children in NineteenthCentury Literature. London: Faber and Faber, 1978. Guy, Josephine. The Victorian Social-Problem Novel: The Market, the Individual and Communal Life. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

211

Haight, Gordon S. George Eliot. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968. Hall, Donald E. Fixing Patriarchy: Feminism and Mid-Victorian Male Novelists. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Halperin, John. The Life of Jane Austen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Hardy, Barbara, ed. Critical Essays on George Eliot. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970. ———. The Exposure of Luxury: Radical Themes in Thackeray. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972. ———. The Moral Art of Charles Dickens. London: Athlone, 1970. ———. Particularities, Readings in George Eliot. London: Peter Owen, 1982. Hawkes, David. Ideology. London: Routledge, 1996. Heilbrun, Carolyn G. “Marriage Perceived: English Literature 1873–1941.” In What Manner of Woman, edited by Marlene Springer, 160–83. Oxford: Blackwell, 1977. Herrera, Andrea O’Reilly, Elizabeth Mahn Nollen, and Sheila Reitzel Foor, eds. Family Matters in the British and American Novel. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Press, 1997. Hill-Miller, Katherine. “My Hideous Progeny”: Mary Shelley, William Godwin, and the Father-Daughter Relationship. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993. Hirsch, Marianne. The Mother-Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Holquist, Michael. Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World. London: Routledge, 1990. Holt, Lee E. Samuel Butler: Revised Edition. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Honan, Park. Jane Austen: Her Life. New York: St. Martin’s, 1978. Hopkins, Robert. The True Genius of Oliver Goldsmith. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969. Horton, Susan. Interpreting Interpreting. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. Hudson, Glenda A. Sibling Love and Incest in Jane Austen’s Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1992. Hunt, Linda C. A Woman’s Portion: Ideology ,Culture and the British Female Novel Tradition. New York: Garland, 1988. Hunt, Lynn. “The Unstable Boundaries of the French Revolution.” In From the Fires of the Revolution to the Great War, edited by Michelle Perrot, 12–45. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Ingham, Patricia. Dickens, Women and Language. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. ———. The Language of Gender and Class: Transformation in the Victorian Novel. London: Routledge, 1996. Irwin, Michael. Picturing: Description and Illusion in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1979.

212

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ittmann, Karl. Work, Gender and Family in Victorian England. New York: New York University Press, 1993. Jacobus, Mary. “The Question of Language: Men of Maxims and The Mill on the Floss.” Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 207–22. ———, ed. Women Writing and Writing about Women. London: Croome Helm, 1979. Jameson, Frederic. The Political Unconscious: Narraive as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Methuen, 1981. Jeffers, Thomas L. Samuel Butler Revalued. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981. Johnson, Claudia. Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Jonnes, Denis. The Matrix of Narrative: Family Systems and the Semiotics of Story. New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1990. Kane, Penny. Victorian Families in Fact and Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995. Kaplan, Deborah. Jane Austen among Women. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Keating, Peter. The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875–1914. London: Martin Secker, 1989. Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending. New York: Oxford, 1967. Kirkham, Margaret. Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction. Brighton, England: Harvester, 1983. Knoepflmacher, U. C. George Eliot’s Early Novels. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. ———. Laughter and Despair: Readings in Ten Novels of the Victorian Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Lambrick, H. T. Sir Charles Napier and Sind. Oxford: Clarendon, 1952. Langland, Elizabeth. Nobody’s Angels: Middle Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Literature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. ———. Society in the Novel. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. ———. Telling Tales. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002. Laslett, Peter. The World We Have Lost. London: Methuen, 1965. ———. “The Wrong Way through the Telescope.” British Journal of Sociology 27 (1976): 319–42. Lerner, Laurence. Love and Marriage: Literature and Its Social Context. London: Edward Arnold, 1979. Levine, George, and U. C. Knoepflmacher, eds. The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Lodge, David. After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism. London: Routledge, 1990.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

213

Lucas, John. “Dickens and Dombey and Son: Past and Present Imperfect.” In Tradition and Tolerance in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, edited by David Howard, John Lucas, and John Goode, 99–140. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966. Lund, Michael. Reading Thackeray. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988. MacDonagh, Oliver. Jane Austen: Real and Imagined Worlds. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991. Macfarlane, Alan. The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property, and Social Transition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Maixner, Paul. Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. Marcus, Stephen. Dickens from Pickwick to Dombey. London: Chatto and Windus, 1965. Martin, Wallace. Recent Theories of Narrative. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986. May, Leila Silvana. Disorderly Sisters: Sibling Relations and Sororal Resistance in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001. McCrea, Brian. Impotent Fathers: Patriarchy and the Demographic Crisis in the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998. McGregor, O. R. Divorce in England: A Centenary Study. London: Heinemann, 1957. McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. McMaster, Juliet. Thackeray: The Major Novels. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971. McMaster, R. D. Thackeray’s Cultural Frame of Reference. London: Macmillan, 1991. McNight, Natalie J. Suffering Mothers in Mid-Victorian Novels. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997. Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. London: Routledge, 1988. ———. Romanticism and Gender. London: Routledge, 1993. Meyer, Susan. Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. Edited by Stefan Collins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ———. The Subjection of Women. Edited by Susan Moller Okin. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988. Miller, D. A. Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981. Miller, Nancy. “Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women’s Fiction.” PMLA 96 (1981): 36–47. Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. London: Rupert Hart Davis, 1971.

214

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mintz, Steven. A Prison of Expectations: The Family in Victorian Culture. New York: New York University Press, 1983. Mitchell, Judith. The Stone and the Scorpion: The Female Subject of Desire in the Novels of Charlotte Bronte. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994. Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. London: W. H. Allen, 1977. Moglen, Helene. The Trauma of Gender: A Feminist Theory of the English Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Morganthaler, Goldie. Dickens and Heredity: When Like Begets Like. London: Macmillan, 2000. Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990. Musselwhite, David E. Paintings Welded Together: Politics and Desire in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel. London: Methuen, 1987. Nabokov, Vladimir. Lectures on Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1999. Nelson, T. G. A. Children, Parents, and the Rise of the Novel. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995. Nightingale, Florence. Cassandra, and Other Selections for Thought. Edited by Mary Poovey. New York: New York University Press, 1992. Nisbet, Ada, and Blake Nevius, eds. Dickens Centennial Essays. Berkeley: University California Press, 1971. Norman, Geraldine. Biedermeier Painting, 1815–1848. London: Thames and Hudson, 1987. Norrman, Ralf. Samuel Butler and the Meaning of Chiasmus. London: Macmillan, 1986. O’Toole, Tess. Genealogy and Fiction in Hardy: Family Lineage and Narrative Lines. London: Macmillan, 1997. Orr, John. Tragic Realism and Modern Society. London: Macmillan, 1989. Paris, Bernard. Experiments in Life. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1965. Parker, Christopher, ed. Gender Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Literature. London: Scolar, 1995. Paulson, Ronald. Popular Art and Polite Art in the Age of Hogarth and Fielding. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979. Paxton, Nancy L. George Eliot and Herbert Spencer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. Perrot, Michelle, ed. A History of Private Life. Vol. IV, From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Peters, Catherine. Thackeray’s Universe. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Pollak, Ellen. Incest and the English Novel: 1684–1814. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Pollock, Linda A. Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

215

———. A Lasting Relationship. London: Fourth Estate, 1987. Poovey, Mary. Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. ———. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Novels of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. ———. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in MidVictorian England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Poster, Mark. Critical Theory of the Family. New York: Seabury, 1978. Pykett, Lyn. Charles Dickens: Critical Issues. London: Palgrave, 2002. Raby, Peter. Samuel Butler: A Biography. London: Hogarth, 1991. Ragussi, Michael. Acts of Naming: The Family Plot in Fiction. New York: Oxford, 1986. Reed, John. Victorian Conventions. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1975. Roberts, David. Paternalism in Early Victorian England. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979. Rothstein, Eric, and Howard D. Weinbrot, “The Vicar of Wakefield, Mr. Wilmot and the Shistonian Controversy.” Philological Quarterly 55 (1976): 225–40. Ru, Yi-Ling. The Family Novel: Toward a Generic Definition. New York: Peter Lang, 1992. Sadoff, Dianne F. Monsters of Affection: Dickens, Eliot and Bronte on Fatherhood. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. Sadrin, Anny. Parentage and Inheritance in the Novels of Charles Dickens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Said, Edward W. Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Columbia, 1975. ———. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Sales, Roger. Jane Austen and Representations of Regency England. London: Routledge, 1994. Sandbach-Dahlstrom, Catherine. Be Good Sweet Maid: A Study in Dogmatic Purpose and Fictional Form. Stockholm: Stockholm Studies in English, 1984. Sanders, Valerie. The Brother-Sister Culture in Nineteenth-Century Literature. London: Palgrave, 2002. Sandison, Alan. Robert Louis Stevenson and the Appearance of Modernism. London: Macmillan, 1996. Schaffer, Talia. “The Mysterious Magnum Bonum: Fighting to Read Charlotte Yonge.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 55, no. 2 (2000): 244–75. Schlaffer, Heinz. The Bourgeois as Hero. Translated by James Lynn. Savage, MD: Barnes and Noble, 1989. Schor, Hilary. Dickens and the Daughter of the House. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

216

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Schwarzbach, F. S. Dickens and the City. London: Athlone, 1979. Shaffer, Julie, “Familial Love, Incest, and Female Desire in Late Eighteenthand Early Nineteenth-Century British Women’s Novels.” Criticism 4 (Winter, 1999): 67–99. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. The 1818 Version. Edited by D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf. Ontario: Broadview, 1999. ———. Letters. Edited by Betty Bennett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. ———. Lodore. Edited by Fiona Stafford. London: William Pickering, 1996. Shorter, Edward. The Making of the Modern Family. London: Collins, 1976. Sicher, Efraim. Rereading the City/Rereading Dickens: Representation, the Novel, and Urban Realism. New York: AMS, 2003. Slater, Michael, ed. Dickens 1970. London: Chapman and Hall, 1970. ———. Dickens and Women. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983. Smith, Anne. George Eliot: Centenary Essays and an Unpublished Fragment. Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1980. Smith, David. “Incest Patterns in Two Victorian Novels.” Literature and Psychology 15 (1965): 135–62. Smith, Grahame, Dickens, Money and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. Smith, Johanna M. “My Only Sister Now: Incest in Mansfield Park.” Studies in the Novel 19 (1987): 1–15. Sollors, Werner, ed. The Return of Thematic Criticism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Spacks, Patricia Meyer. Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in EighteenthCentury English Novels. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Steig, Michael. “Anality in The Mill on the Floss.” Novel 5 (1971): 42–53. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Letters. Edited by Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994–95. ———. The Master of Ballantrae: A Winter’s Tale. Edited by Adrian Poole. London: Penguin, 1996. ———. Robert Louis Stevenson on Fiction. Edited by Glenda Norquay. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. Stewart, Maaja A. Domestic Realities and Imperial Fictions. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993. Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500—1800. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. Stone, Lawrence, and Jeanne C. Fautier Stone. An Open Elite? England 1540–1880. Oxford: Clarendon, 1984. Sturrock, June. “Heaven and Home”: Charlotte M. Yonge’s Domestic Fiction and the Victorian Debate over Women. Victoria, BC: University of Victoria Press, 1995. Sunstein, Emily W. Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality. Boston: Little Brown, 1989.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

217

Tambling, Jeremy. Dickens, Violence and the Modern State. London: Macmillan, 1995. Tanner, Tony. Adultery in the Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. ———. Jane Austen. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Tauchert, Ashley. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine. London: Palgrave, 2002. Taylor, Barbara. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Taylor, D. J. Thackeray. London: Chatto and Windus, 1999. Thackeray, William Makepeace. The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family. Edited by Peter L. Shillingsburg. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Thomas, Deborah A. Thackeray and Slavery. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1993. Thompson, F. M. L. The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain 1830–1900. London: Fontana, 1988. Thompson, James. Between Self and World: The Novels of Jane Austen. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988. Tobin, Patricia D. Time and the Novel. Princeton. NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978. Todd, Emmanuel. The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structures and Social Systems. Translated by David Garrioch. Oxford: Blackwell, 1985. Trilling, Lionel. A Gathering of Fugitives. Boston: Beacon, 1956. Trumbach, Randolph. The Rise of the Egalitarian Family. New York: Academic, 1978. Tufte, Virginia, and Barbara Myerhoff, eds. Changing Images of the Family. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. Van Boheeman, Christine. The Novel as Family Romance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987. Wall, Richard, Tamara K. Hareven, and Josef Ehmer, eds. Family History Revisited. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001. Wallace, Tara Ghoshal. Jane Austen and Narrative Authority. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995. Waters, Catherine. Dickens and the Politics of the Family. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. London: Hogarth, 1987. Weisbrod, Carol. Butterfly, the Bride: Essays on Law, Narrative, and the Family. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Wellek, Rene. History of Modern Criticism. 8 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955–1992. Welsh, Alexander. The City of Dickens. Oxford: Clarendon, 1971. Welty, Eudora, “A Note on Jane Austen.” Shenandoah 20 (Spring, 1965): 3–7. Williams, Raymond. The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.

218

BIBLIOGRAPHY

———. The Long Revolution. London: Hogarth, 1992. Wohl, Anthony, ed. The Victorian Family: Structure and Stresses. London: Croom Helm, 1978. Wollstonecraft, Mary, Works. Edited by Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler. New York: New York University Press, 1989. Wood, Christopher. Victorian Painters. 2 vols. Suffolk, England: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1995. Wright, T. R. “George Eliot and Positivism: A Reassessment.” Modern Language Review 76 (1981): 257–72. Wynne, Deborah. The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine. London: Palgrave, 2001. Yeasell, Ruth Bernard, “Boundaries of Mansfield Park.” Representations 7 (1984): 133–52. Yonge, Charlotte. The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations. London: Macmillan, 1904. Zizek. Slavoj, ed. Mapping Ideology. London: Verso, 1994. Zomchick, John P. Family and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Zwinger, Lynda. Daughters, Fathers and the Novel: The Sentimental Romance of Heterosexuality. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.

I NDEX

Aesopian fables, 104, 108–11, 115 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence, 3 Althusser, Louis, 19–20 Anderson, Michael, 7 Andrews, Malcolm, 85 Aries, Philippe: Centuries of Childhood, 7 Armstrong, Nancy: The Imaginary Puritan, 25 Arnold, Matthew, 80, 129 Austen, Jane, 174, 176; Mansfield Park, 20–21, 35–62 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 18–19, 93, 188n32 Barrett, Dorothea, 126 Barthes, Roland, 24, 184 Baxter, Charles, 156 Beer, Gillian, 120 Biedemeir style, 4 Boer War, 154 Boone, Joseph, 92 bourgeois culture, 12, 21–22, 186n16 Brantlinger, Patrick, 103 British Imperialism, 6, 22, 62, 82, 103–4, 107–8, 114, 117, 153–54, 158, 163, 166, 170 Bronte, Emily: Wuthering Heights, 42–43, 46, 165 Brooks, Peter: Reading for the Plot, 25, 33 Browning, Robert: “Andrea del Sarto,” 179–80

Burke, Edmund, 10–12 Butler, Marilyn, 38 Butler, Samuel, 171; Ernest Pontifex, or The Way of All Flesh, 21, 23, 171–83; Notebooks, 171–72 Cabell, James Branch, 21 Calder, Jenni, 135 Carlisle, Janice, 22 Carlyle, Thomas, 80, 91 Caserio, Robert: Plot, Story, and the Novel, 134–35 Cezanne, Paul, 161, 163 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, 139 Comte, Auguste, 6, 120 Conrad, Joseph, 179; The Secret Agent, 184 courtship plot, 5, 22, 36, 37–39, 48–50, 55–56, 103–11, 112–15, 146 Craik, W. A., 37 Crimean War, 117 Crofter’s War, 162–63 Darwin, Charles, 118, 119–20, 139, 173, 175 Daumier, Honoré, 161 Davis, Lennard J., 25 Defoe, Daniel, 33; The Family Instructor, 8, 17–18, 45, 149 de Kock, Paul: Le Barbier de Paris, 76 Deleuze, Giles: and Felix Guattari, 43

220

INDEX

Demos, John, 7, 9–10 Dickens, Charles, 22, 82–84, 100, 111, 124, 176; Bleak House, 99; A Christmas Carol, 83; Dombey and Son, 20–21, 28, 82–100, 102, 129; Great Expectations, 84, 88, 90, 99, 129; Hard Times, 84, 129, 173; Martin Chuzzlewit, 84; Oliver Twist, 84 Disraeli, Benjamin, 117 domestic periodicals, 81 Donzelot, Jacques, 13 Doody, Margaret, 22, 36 Doyle, Richard, 104, 107, 109 Durkheim, Emile, 7 Eagleton, Terry, 18–19 Education Act of 1870, 80 Egg, Augustus: “Past and Present,” 3 Eliot, George, 14, 111, 119, 121, 122, 126, 139; Adam Bede, 121; Middlemarch, 125; The Mill on the Floss, 20–21, 118–38, 152 Ellis, Kate, 65–66 endogamy, 39, 42–46, 61–62, 63–65, 112 Engels, Friedrich: Communist Manifesto, 6–7; The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 6 Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds, 187n26 evolution, natural, 118–20, 123, 138, 139, 173–75, 177–78 family: fears concerning survival of, 5–15, 48, 74, 79–82, 101–15, 119–20, 145–52, 156–71, 172–76; history of, 6–15, 24–27, 79–82, 90–92, 98–99, 119–20, 140–52, 153–55, 175–76 Fielding, Henry, 36, 100, 174 Ford, Ford Madox: The Good Soldier, 160, 165, 179

French Revolution, 5–6, 10–12, 35–36, 138, 190n1 Freud, Sigmund, 6–7, 23–24, 93 Frith, William Powell: “Road to Ruin,” 3 Gallagher, Catherine, 17 Gay, Peter: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, 12 Geertz, Clifford, 23 genre painting, 1–4, 15, 87 Gilbert, Sandra M.: and Susan Gubar, 27 Godwin, William, 65, 70 Goldsmith, Oliver, 36, 176; The Vicar of Wakefield, 2, 20–21, 28–34, 35, 66, 145, 151 Great Exhibition of 1851, 117 Hardy, Barbara, 111 Hardy, Thomas: Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 100 Hareven, Tamara, 7 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 8, 15 Hogarth, William, 2, 108 Holquist, Michael, 19 Howells, William Dean, 164 Hudson, Glenda, 61 Hume, David, 32 Hunt, Lynn, 10 Huxley, Thomas, 129 hypergamy, 36–62, 100–101, 112 ideology: definition, 19–20, 22–23, 188nn34–35 incest, 43, 58, 63, 74, 76, 137–38, 191n14, 199–200n16 Indian Mutiny, 117 Irish Nationalism, 154 James, Henry, 164–65, 179 Jameson, Frederic, 27 Johnson, Claudia, 62 Jonnes, Denis: The Matrix of Narrative, 16

INDEX

221

Joyce, James: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 181–82, 183

Morland, George, 2 Musselwhite, David, 83, 93

Kant, Immanuel, 15 Keble, John, 143 Knoepflmacher, U. C., 182

Napier, Charles, 103–4 Nightingale, Florence: Suggestions for Thought, 140–46, 151–52 Norrman, Ralf, 180 novel: closure, 25, 28, 34, 38–40, 61–62, 72–73, 77, 83, 97–99, 102, 112–15, 122, 136–38, 148–52, 170–71, 180–83; history of, 15–18, 24–27, 143–44

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 120 Lang, Andrew, 163 Langland, Elizabeth, 14, 187n21 Lasch, Christopher, 10 Laslett, Peter, 7–8, 21 Lawrence, D. H.: Sons and Lovers, 183–84 Leavis, F. R., 130 Leighton, Lord Frederic, 3 LePlay, Frederic, 7 Lewes, George Henry, 119 lineage: pride in, 9, 23, 36, 45–46, 50, 80, 86–88, 90, 154, 156–71, 174–76 Locke, John, 8 Lucas, John, 85 Maine, Henry Sumner, 120 Malthus, Thomas, 12–13 Manet, Edouard, 161, 165 Manning, Sylvia, 83 Married Women’s Property Act, 12, 153 Martineau, Harriet, 136 Martineau, Robert: “The Last Day in the Old Home,” 2–3 Marx, Karl: Communist Manifesto, 6–7 Matrimonial Causes Act, 80 Mayhew, Henry, 117 McMaster, R. D., 197 Mill, John Stuart, 85, 138, 142; On Liberty, 131–33; The Subjection of Women, 14 Millais, John Everett: “Christ in the House of His Parents,” 139 Millet, Kate, 29 Monet, Claude, 163

Oastler, Richard, 81 Orr, John: Tragic Realism and Modern Society, 16, 187n26 Parsons, Talcott, 7 Pater, Walter, 164 Patmore, Coventry, 14 patriarchy, 5, 27–28, 29–34, 38–47, 49–61, 63–77, 85–99, 101–4, 112–15, 119–38, 140–52, 174–83 political paternalism, 154, 183 Pollock, Linda, 7, 15 Poole, Adrian, 169 Poor Laws, 81 Post-Impressionist painters, 163–65 prodigal son motif, 30, 46–48, 54, 59–61, 97–99, 113–14, 118–21, 124–38, 170–71, 183, 197n42 Pykett, Lyn, 84 Ragussis, Michael, 123 reform laws, 80, 123 religious analogues, 11, 12, 14, 18, 25–26, 30, 33, 86–88, 96–98, 120, 122, 132–36, 138–52 religious controversies, 22–23, 29, 51, 87, 115, 117–18, 120, 138–40, 143, 149–51, 173–74, 180, 182 Richardson, Samuel, 8, 33, 100, 118, 174

222

INDEX

Robinson, Theodore, 163 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 15 Ruskin, John: “Of Queens’ Gardens,” 13 Sadrin, Anny, 93 Said, Edward: Beginnings: Intention and Method, 24, 150–51 Sandison, Alan, 158, 168 Scottish nationalism, 161–63 Shaftesbury, Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3, 12, 81, 138 Shelley, Mary, 62–63, 72; Frankenstein, 63–66, 71, 75, 77; Lodore, 20–21, 66–77 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 65 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 174 sibling relationships, 5, 6, 15, 23, 27, 33, 37–39, 40–48, 50, 52–55, 58–62, 63–65, 72–73, 87, 89–90, 93–94, 97, 102, 109, 112–13, 118–38, 147–50, 155, 159–60, 162–63, 167–70, 175, 178, 183, 200–201n23 Sikh Wars, 82, 103 Smollett, Tobias, 174 Spencer, Herbert, 6, 120 Stephen, Leslie, 160–61 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 155–56, 184; “A Humble Remonstrance,” 164–65; The Master of Ballantrae, 20–21, 155–71; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 155, 163, 169; The Weir of Hermiston, 155, 164 Stewart, Maaja, 42 Stone, Lawrence, 7 subplots, 24, 65–68, 82–99, 129–31, 182 Tanner, Tony, 36 Tennenhouse, Leonard: The Imaginary Puritan, 25 Tennyson, Alfred, 7, 91, 117–18, 133

Thackeray, William Makepeace, 2, 100, 104, 111; The Newcomes, 20–21, 82, 99–115 Thomas à Kempis, 132–33, 135, 152 Tolstoy, Leo, 183 Tractarian Movement, 117–18, 143, 152 Trilling, Lionel, 83 Trollope, Anthony, 100 Trumbach, Randolph, 10 Ulysses figure, 76 verisimilitude, 163–67 Victoria, Queen, 81, 139, 154 Virgil, 170 von Kotzebue, August: Lovers’ Vows, 51–55 Wallace, Tara Ghoshal, 61 Waters, Catherine, 99, 195n11 Welty, Eudora, 36–37 Wheatley, Francis: “Four Times of the Day,” 2 Whistler, James McNeill, 164 Wilde, Oscar, 164 Wilkie, David, 2 Wohl, Anthony, 139 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 10–12, 65; A Vindication of the Rights of Men, 10–12; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 10–12 Wood, Christopher, 2 Woolf, Virginia: To the Lighthouse, 184 Yeats, Willliam Butler: Purgatory, 64 Yonge, Charlotte: The Daisy Chain, 20–21, 138–52; The Heir of Redclyffe, 143 Zola, Emile, L’Oeuvre, 163 Zomchick, John C., 32–33

The Nineteenth-Century English Novel: Family Ideology and Narrative Form

The Nineteenth-Century English Novel: Family Ideology and Narrative Form

The Nineteenth-Century English Novel: Family Ideology and Narrative Form

Narrative Form

The English Novel and Prose Narrative (Literary Studies (Edinburgh Paperback))

Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880-1914

Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship

The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

Henry Miller and Narrative Form Constructing the Self, Rejecting Modernity (Contexts and Genre in English Literature)

Modern English Structures: Form, Function, and Position

Narrative as rhetoric: technique, audiences, ethics, ideology

The industrial reformation of English fiction: social discourse and narrative form, 1832-1867

The English Family, 1450-1700

Modern English Structures: Form, Function, and Position

Family Ties: A Novel

Eighteenth-Century English: Ideology and Change (Studies in English Language)

Reading the Victorian novel: Detail into form

MASTERS OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL

Mirror of Morality: Chinese Narrative Illusration and Confucian Ideology

Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel

The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel

Harm's Way: Tragic Responsibility and the Novel Form

The English Catholic Community, 1688-1745: Politics, Culture and Ideology

Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel

Ideology

The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine

Ideology, politics, and language policies: focus on English

The Art of Alibi: English Law Courts and the Novel

The English Novel In History: 1950-1995

The English Novel In History 1840-95 (Novel in History)

The art of alibi: English law courts and the novel

The Nineteenth-Century English Novel: Family Ideology and Narrative Form