The Ministry of Higher and secondary education of the Republic of Uzbekistan

Chapter II. England and United States ceremonies

2.1 Harriet Martineau

The simplistic psychology and naive religious optimism characteristic of some feminine writing reflected a female subculture in which confirmation in the church was often the most dramatic external event between the schoolroom and marriage; church-organized charity work, the only activity outside the home; and piety, the speciality of women and children. Reviewers deplored the immaturity of the fiction but could not bring themselves to do away with or expand the role. Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins parodied the Puseyite fanaticism of Charlotte Yonge's Heir ofRedclyffe in Household Words; even Guy's death scene they found "marred or made obscured, either by the writer's want of experience of human nature, or utter uncompatability of abstraction from one narrow circle of ideas."²⁰ W. R. Greg, although he abhorred the "false morality of lady novelists," their faith in the expedience of self-sacrifice and in the workings of providence, could not see how women's ethical horizons could be much expanded: "If the writer be a young lady, whole spheres of observation, whole branches of character and conduct, are almost inevitably closed to her."²¹

While it was theoretically possible for women novelists to write about female physical experience, including childbirth and maternal psychology, they faced many obstacles to self-expression in their own sphere. Victorian women were taught to keep these experiences to themselves, to record them in very private diaries (such as Mrs. Gaskell's diary about her first child, Marianne), or to share them in intimate friendships with one or two other women. There were strong taboos against sharing them with men. As one historian explains: "From early childhood, girls … were taught self-effacement and modesty, were encouraged to feel shame about their bodies, and were advised to try to 'hide' the natural conditions of menstruation and pregnancy. The single woman of the middle-class was forced to deceit if she was to taste any of the freedom of knowledge given her brothers. The married woman of the class was constantly told not to trouble her husband with her own petty problems, to bear the pain of illness in silence, and to prevent knowledge of all indelicate matters from reaching 'innocent' ears."²² Women educated to perceive themselves, in the popular horticultural imagery of the period, as lilies-of-the-valley or violets seeking the shade were understandably ambivalent about the self-revelation necessary in fiction.²³ The conflict between art and self-exposure, rather than any physical weakness, probably accounts for the stress symptoms of sickness and headache suffered by novelists like Geraldine Jewsbury, who fell ill each time she completed a book and finally gave up writing fiction on her doctor's orders.

Victorian critics agreed that if women were going to write at all they should write novels. Yet this assessment, too, denigrated and resisted feminine achievement. Theories of female aptitude for the novel tended to be patronizing, if not downright insulting. The least difficult, least demanding response to the superior woman novelist was to see the novel as an instrument that transformed feminine weaknesses into narrative strengths. Women were obsessed by sentiment and romance; well, these were the staples of fiction. Women had a natural taste for the trivial; they were sharp-eyed observers of the social scene; they enjoyed getting involved in other people's affairs. All these alleged female traits, it was supposed, would find a happy outlet in the novel. "Women," wrote E. S. Dallas, "have a talent for personal discourse and familiar narrative, which, when properly controlled, is a great gift, although too frequently it degenerates into a social nuisance."²⁴ Such an approach was particularly attractive because it implied that women's writing was as artless and effortless as birdsong, and therefore not in competition with the more rational male eloquence.

To critics who sentimentalized and trivialized women's interest in psychological motivation, the novel was the inevitable crystallization of femininity. The spectacle of J. M. Ludlow, straining to explain away Mrs. Gaskell and her sister writers without appearing ungentlemanly or making any concessions about female intelligence, is an instructive illustration:

By eliminating from his definition of the novel all the qualities he could not bring himself to see in women, Ludlow could accept even his own response to women's novels without having to modify any of his stereotypes. So intent was he on showing the perfect compatability of the stereotype and the product that he could dismiss the question of "expressing feeling in written words" as the merest trick of the literate. Rather than protesting against such criticism, women writers, as we have seen, reinforced it by playing down the effort behind their writing, and trying to make their work appear as the spontaneous overflow of their womanly emotions. This strategy was partly a way of minimizing the professional and intellectual aspects of the work, and partly a way of describing the powerful drives for self-expression that, especially for feminine novelists like Mrs. Oliphant, made the act of writing initially a possession by the muse: "I have written because it gave me pleasure, because it came natural to me."²⁶

The feminine subcultural ideology did, however, have strengths as well as weaknesses. Men like Ludlow and Dallas, and even Hutton, may have regarded fiction as a form of repressive desublimation for women, a safe and suitable channel for energies that might otherwise have been turned to business, politics, religion, and revolutionary action. But feminine novelists, as Lorna Sage brilliantly suggests, came to take their role as the educators of the heart very seriously, so that "while deferring to male knowledge and power, they subtly revise and undermine the world from which they are excluded." Sage describes how Margaret Hale in Mrs. Gaskell's North and South, for example, quietly introduces the industrialist Mr. Thornton to the feminine values of domestic duty, familial loyalty, and personal affection, so that gradually his discussions of political economy, collective action, and violent strikes recede into the background. Gaskell transposes the political into "local, individual terms, much as she tames Mr. Thornton and redirects his savage energies into private life."²⁷ I would add to Sage's observations the fact that the women's victories are economic as well as emotional. Like Jane Eyre and Shirley Helstone, Margaret not only tames Thornton but also, in a final humiliation, endows him with her legacy so that he can pay off his debts and keep his mill. To get a great deal of money and to give it to a man for his work was the feminine heroine's apotheosis, the ultimate in the power of self-sacrifice.

One of the most persistent denigrations of women novelists was the theory that only unhappy and frustrated women wrote books. G. H. Lewes, writing in 1852, was one of the earliest to analyze the "compensatory" nature of female literature:

In 1862, Gerald Massey repeated Lewes' point: "Women who are happy in all home-ties and who amply fill the sphere of their love and life, must, in the nature of things, very seldom become writers."²⁹ And the same idea, in almost the same words, was still cropping up as late as 1892; Catherine J. Hamilton's introduction to Women Writers: Their Works and Ways concurs: "Happy women, whose hearts are satisfied and full, have little need of utterance. Their lives are rounded and complete, they require nothing but the calm recurrence of those peaceful home duties in which domestic women rightly feel that their true vocation lies."

Feminine novelists responded to these innuendos of inferiority, as to others, not by protest but by vigorous demonstration of their domestic felicity. They worked hard to present their writing as an extension of their feminine role, an activity that did not detract from their womanhood, but in some sense augmented it. This generation would not have wanted an office or even "a room of one's own"; it was essential that the writing be carried out in the home, and that it be only one among the numerous and interruptible household tasks of the true woman. Mrs. Gaskell wrote in her dining-room with its four doors opening out to all parts of the house; Mrs. Oliphant half-complained and half-boasted that she had never had a study, but had worked in "the little 2nd drawing room where all the (feminine) life of the house goes on."³⁰ When interviewers came to visit, Mrs. Linton would display her embroidered cushions, fire-screens, and chair-seats; Mrs. Walford would pour tea; Mrs. Oliphant would pose in black silk and lace. Mrs. Craik modestly described the position of the feminine novelists: "We may … write shelvesful of books—the errant children of our brain may be familiar half over the grown world, and yet we ourselves sit as quiet by our chimney-corner, live a life as simple and peaceful as any happy common woman of them all."³¹

This grass-roots approach, this domestication of the profession, was also a trap. Women novelists might have banded together and insisted on their vocation as something that made them superior to the ordinary woman, and perhaps even happier. Instead they adopted defensive positions and committed themselves to conventional roles. If womanliness was defined as something that had to be proved, it had to be proved again and again. The feminine writers' self-abasement backfired and caused the kind of patronizing trivialization of their works found in George Smith's obituary of Mrs. Gaskell: "She was much prouder of ruling her household well … than of all she did in those writings."³²

Even a sophisticated critic like Lewes, who believed that a full knowledge of life was dependent upon the depiction of feminine as well as masculine experience, had difficulties in separating a theory of female literature from his own sexual stereotypes. In his significantly titled pre-George Eliot essay, "The Lady Novelists," Lewes begins with the "abstract heights" of female "nature," rather than with the empirical evidence of female achievement:

The domestic experience which forms the bulk of woman's knowledge finds an appropriate form in novels; while the very nature of fiction calls for that predominance of Sentiment which we have already attributed to the feminine mind. Love is the staple of fiction, for it "forms the story of a woman's life." The joys and sorrows of affection, the incidents of domestic life, assume typical forms in the novel. Hence we may be prepared to find women succeeding better in finesse of detail, in pathos and sentiment, while men generally succeed better in the construction of plots and the delineation of character.³³

Obviously, being "prepared" to find such a polarization of narrative skills would affect critical judgments. When Lewes turns, in a rather whimsical way, to specific writers, he can only discern the combinations of Sentiment and Observation that he has already decided are feminine traits: the signs of gentility, domesticity, and breeding that the title of his article implies. For Lewes, as for other Victorian critics, women of genius did not require a modification in sexual theory; the apparent exception was readily seen to be charmingly and ineffectually disguising her true womanhood. Thus, Jane Austen's books are first and foremost "novels written by a woman, an English-woman, a gentlewoman"; George Sand has vainly "chosen the mask of a man; the features of a woman are everywhere visible"; and Sand's philosophy is "only a reflex of some man whose ideas she has adopted."³⁴ When he gets to Charlotte Brontë, Lewes has a moment's trouble with his categories, but he reminds the reader that if one is not "blinded" by the masculine force of Jane Eyre, one can perceive the "rare powers of observation" that stamp it as feminine.³⁵

A much more successful effort to define a theory of female literature was Richard Holt Hutton's "Novels by the Authoress of 'John Halifax,'" which appeared in the North British Review in 1858. Hutton, who later became a percipient and responsible critic of George Eliot, used his review of Dinah Mulock to analyze "the main characteristics on which feminine fictions, as distinguished from those of men, are strong or defective." Hutton began his article with practical criticism and moved outward toward the theoretical; although he would obviously have come out with different views with Austen or Brontë, rather than Mulock, as his chief example, his inductive method was a good one, and he was careful to keep his generalizations narrow. Hutton recognized the problems of choosing a representative female author, and explained that Mulock had been selected chiefly because she was not a genius, but a competent writer who might better represent "the kind of faculty which is potential or actual in most clever women."³⁶

Hutton agreed with Lewes that "feminine ability has found for itself a far more suitable sphere in novel-writing than in any other branch of literature,"³⁷ but he attributed the predilection of women's deficiencies in intellectual training and discipline, rather than to any positive correlation between female psychology and narrative realism. For the philosophical modes that he valued most highly, he thought, women substituted documentation, a copious circumstantial descriptiveness. Observation thus could be seen not as an innate feminine gift but as a developed compensatory skill. Hutton theorized that differences in masculine and feminine education and intellectual processes had led to two poles of narrative structure. In men's novels some kind of philosophy, some general idea, dictated the artistic composition of the narrative. The characters were placed in this broad intellectual framework, like Waverley in Scott's contrasts of past and present, or Becky in Thackeray's satire. Women's novels, on the other hand, concentrated on the characters themselves. Reader identification with the characters gave those novels a special intensity, but one that was transitory since it was intellectually limited. By these standards, Hutton defined Dickens as a "feminine" writer, one of the many indications in his article that he was not insisting on rigid biologically sexual terms.

Yet "feminine" is always a pejorative term for Hutton. He found that even in delineating character, their specialty, women were at a serious disadvantage, partly because of changing fashions in the novel:

In many ways, the natural limitations of feminine power are admirably adapted to the standard of fiction held up as the true model of a feminine novelist in the last century. It was then thought sufficient to present finished sketches of character, just as it appeared under the ordinary restraints of society; while the deeper passions and spiritual impulses, which are the springs of all the higher drama of real life, were, at most, only allowed so far to suffuse the narrative as to tinge it with the excitement necessary for a novel.³⁸

In other words, when readers began to look to fiction for a more ambitious realism, for psychological analysis, and for intellectual subtlety, women were handicapped by the social pressures of feminine gentility. Women were expert at rendering the surface, but art now required an exploration of the springs of life.

Like Lewes and Mill, Hutton felt that lack of imagination was the "main deficiency of feminine genius": "It can observe, it can recombine, it can delineate, but it cannot trust itself farther: it cannot leave the world of characteristic traits and expressive manner, so as to imagine and paint successfully the distinguishable, but not easily distinguished, world out of which those characteristics grew."³⁹ Because they were unable to speculate about motivations, to project themselves into the unseen interiors of their characters, particularly their male characters, women writers, Hutton thought, were increasingly being forced into use of the autobiographical form to give their books superficial unity and a center of imaginative authenticity. Although a vivid central character based on personal experience seemed to be within their abilities, women's concentration on such a character could wreck the novel's aesthetic balance.

Hutton traced this deficiency in imagination to cultural circumstance rather than to nature. Women were at a disadvantage, first, because their direct experience was so limited; and second, because they were poorly educated, especially in the masculine fields of science, economics, and philosophy, which developed the ability to generalize and theorize: "The same mind that has been trained to go apart with laws of matter, and laws of wealth, and laws of intellect, and to elaborate them as if no outer world for the time existed at all, also enables men to go apart with conceptions of character."⁴⁰ On the other hand, Hutton thought, "the patient and pliant genius" of women enabled them to deal with the evolution and gradual growth of character; because of this ability to portray growth, writers such as Mulock or Charlotte Yonge could deal with moral and spiritual problems without becoming didactic.

Hutton had to modify some of these views when George Eliot appeared on the scene, and he might have modified them sooner if he had understood Jane Eyre, Villette, or Wuthering Heights. But literary stereotypes adapted very slowly to any real evidence of feminine achievement. If we break down the categories that are the staple of Victorian periodical reviewing, we find that women writers were acknowledged to possess sentiment, refinement, tact, observation, domestic expertise, high moral tone, and knowledge of female character; and thought to lack originality, intellectual training, abstract intelligence, humor, self-control, and knowledge of male character. Male writers had most of the desirable qualities: power, breadth, distinctness, clarity, learning, abstract intelligence, shrewdness, experience, humor, knowledge of everyone's character, and openmindedness.

This double standard was so widely accepted through about 1875 that critics and readers automatically employed it in the game of literary detection. Approaching an anonymous or pseudonymous novel, reviewers would break it down into its elements, label these masculine or feminine, and add up the total. The predominance of masculine or feminine elements determined the sex of the author. As a critical instrument this practice was not very reliable; considering the odds based on chance alone, the percentage of correct guesses is not impressive. Male writers were occasionally misidentified as women. R. D. Blackmore's first novel, Clara Vaughan (1864), had a female narrator; and the Saturday Review, convinced they had detected an authoress, used the opportunity for an attack on maidenly ignorance: "Another decided feature by which our lady novelists are wont to betray the secret of their authorship is the characteristic mode in which they unconsciously make sport of the simplest principles of physics, and of the most elementary rules or usages of the law."⁴¹ Blackmore had practiced law in London for five years. But even embarrassing errors such as this could not persuade reviewers that the sexual double standard needed revision.

2.2 Elizabeth Gasskell