Abstract
What is a woman? If you have to ask the question, you might say, you will probably never find an answer; or, as Simone de Beauvoir has said, in asking the question we have already suggested an answer, since the very fact of having asked is significant.1 I may as well confess at once that I will not answer it, that in fact there is no answer to this question which obsessed nineteenth-century writers. Another way of putting this refusal is to observe that there are too many answers which cluster around this question, too many hopes for certainty and, finally, too many representations, a plenitude of forms and values which constitute an impenetrable thicket of meanings. Moreover, there are thickets in at least two forests: one we might label essentialist, in which the term draws its definition from immutable, ultimately biological conditions, and the other constructivist, in which no a priori trees are presumed to exist in the forest at all.2 This is not to say, however, that there are no paths through this density. One path is to observe a connected series of representations, such as are constituted by those novels we will examine.
Woman deck’d
With saintly honours, chaste and good
Coventry Patmore, ‘The Angel in the House’
What rumour’d heavens are these
Which not a poet sings
O, Unknown Eros?
Coventry Patmore, ‘The Unknown Eros’
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Notes
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage, 1952), p. xvii.
Important work has been done on the Romance Plot and the heroine’s marriage/death alternative as closure by Nancy K. Miller, The Heroine’s Text: Readings in the French and English Novel, 1722–1782 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980); Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon;
Rachel Brownstein, Becoming a Heroine: Reading about Women in Novels (New York: Viking Press, 1982);
Rachel Blau du Plessis, Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth Century Woman Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985);
and Leslie Rabine, Reading the Romantic Heroine: Text, History, Ideology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985).
The uniquely English articulation of the courtship plot is the subject of Ruth Bernard Yeazell’s Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1991).
Joseph Allen Boone, Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987);
Laurie Langbauer, Women and Romance: The Consolations of Gender in the English Novel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990),
and Robert Polhemus, Erotic Faith: Being in Love from Jane Austen to D.H. Lawrence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) consider the relation of romantic love as ideology to romance as traditional genre in the British novel.
Some contributions are Patricia Branca, Silent Sisterhood: Middle Class Women in the Victorian Home (Pittsburgh: Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1975);
Carol Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Routledge, 1981);
Eric Sigsworth, ed., In Search of Victorian Values: Aspects of Nineteenth-Century Thought and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988).
For nineteenth-century America, see Nancy Cott, Bonds of Womanhood: ‘Woman’s Sphere’ in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977),
Frances Cogan, Ail-American Girl: The Ideal of Real Womanhood in Mid-Nineteenth Century America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989);
and Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining a Self in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), which in turn build on the work of Barbara Welter, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Mary Ryan.
Carol Groneman’s essay, ‘Nymphomania: The Historical Construction of Female Sexuality’, Signs 19 (1994): 337–67, reviews the history of theories of female sexuality from the Enlightenment through the Victorian era.
See particularly Newton, Women, Power and Subversion, Poovey, Uneven Developments, and Armstrong and Tennenhouse, The Ideology of Conduct; sources range from Catherine Hall, ‘The Early Formation of Victorian Domestic Ideology’, in Fit Work for Women, ed. Sandra Burman (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1979), to a recent assessment in Elizabeth Langland’s ‘Nobody’s Angels: Domestic Ideology and Middle-Class Women in the Victorian Novel’, PMLA (107) 1992: 290–304; their work investigates an area that is essential to my own view but has an entirely different centre of interest. Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology is an important model for analysing the complexity of literary reactions to official ideologies.
A recent, provocative analysis of Victorian domestic ideology which is rooted in cultural history is Anita Levy’s Other Women: The Writing of Class, Race, and Gender, 1832–1898 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).
Julian Pitt-Rivers, ‘Honor and Social Status’, in Honor and Shame: The Value of Mediterranean Society, ed. J.G. Peristiany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 72.
Some historical studies of sexuality and family relations are Edward Shorter, Making of the Modern Family (New York: Basic Books, 1975);
Peter Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977);
Randolph Trumbach, Rise of the Egalitarian Family (New York: Academic Press, 1978);
Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977),
J.-H. Flandrin, Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979);
Paul-Gabriel Bouce, ed., Sexuality in Eighteenth Century Britain (Manchester: B & N Imports, 1982);
Alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction 1300–1840 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986);
G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Vol. II: The Tender Passion.
Some sources which trace the growth in importance of Western romantic love in the nineteenth century and beyond are Steven Seidman, Romantic Longings: Love in America, 1830–1980 (New York: Routledge, 1991);
Elaine Hoffman Baruch, Women, Love and Power: Literary and Psychoanalytic Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 1991);
Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men and Romantic Love in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Stephen Kern, The Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns; and Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction.
Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 10.
See also Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, trans. R. Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978).
Westminster Review, 35 (1841): 122. For a consideration of popular journalism in assessing women’s relation to romantic love and sexuality, see Sally Mitchell, The Fallen Angel: Chastity, Class and Women’s Reading, 1835–1880 (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1981);
Judith Newton, ‘Engendering History for the Middle Class’, in Gender and Discourse in Victorian Literature and Art, ed. Antony Harrison and Beverly Taylor (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992), discusses the ideological stance of male essays on women in nineteenth-century journals.
Mary Poovey’s The Proper Lady is the best study of the concept of Ladyhood and its effect on literature, but her view differs from mine in that she does not separate the idea of Moral Femininity from the social ideal of the Proper Lady. See also Martha Vicinus, ‘The Perfect Victorian Lady’, in Suffer and Be Still, ed. M. Vicinus (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1972);
Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1978);
Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, The Best Circles: Women and Society in Victorian England (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1973);
and M. Jeanne Peterson, Family, Love and Work in the Lives of Victorian Gentlewomen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
Mrs S.T. Martyn, ‘The Social Position of Women’, Ladies’ Wreath 1 (1847): 76.
Mrs S.T. Martyn, ‘What Constitutes a Lady?’, Ladies’ Wreath 1 (1846): 1.
See Janet Wolff, ‘The Culture of Separate Spheres: The Role of Culture in 19th c. Public and Private Life’, in The Culture of Capital: Art, Power and the Nineteenth Century Middle Class, ed. J. Wolff and J. Seed (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1988); see also Linda Hunt, A Woman’s Portion, for the complex interaction of ideology and literature in women’s lives.
Carlyle, Past and Present, Book III, Ch. 2, in Prose of the Victorian Period, ed. William Buckler (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), p. 136.
Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman: A Study of Human Secondary Sexual Characteristics 5th edn (New York: Scribner’s, 1914). See Anita Levy’s discussion of Havelock Ellis, sexology and gender in her Other Women: The Writing of Class, Race and Gender, 1832–1898 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).
‘Female Pretensions’, London Review of Politics, Society, Literature, Art and Science, XI (1865): 139; Stendhal, On Love (1822) (New York: Doubleday, 1957), p. 23.
Rev. W.B. Sprague, ‘Advice to a Daughter’, Ladies Wreath, 1 (1846): 237.
Branca, Silent Sisterhood, p. 8; and P. Branca, ‘Myth of the Idle Victorian Woman’, in Clio’s Consciousness Raised, ed. M. Hartman and Lois Banner (New York: Octagon Books, 1976), pp. 186–9.
Sarah Ellis, The Women of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits (London: Fisher, Son & Co., 1839).
See, for example, Nancy Cott, Bonds of Womanhood. The inconsistency of an ideology that described women as at once of a finer spiritual fibre than men, yet weak and irrational, was a card well played by ‘domestic feminists’ of the nineteenth century: see also Joan Burstyn, Victorian Education and the Ideal of Womanhood (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1980);
and Deborah Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).
E. Linton, Introduction to Modern Women and What is Said of Them (New York: J.S. Redfield, 1870), p. 6.
Robert Elsmere, quoted in Brian Harrison, ‘Girls’ Friendly Society’, Past and Present 61 (1973): 123.
Pierce Egan, ‘The Wonder of Kingswood Chace’, London Journal 33 (1861): 273.
Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (New York: Harper, 1956), p. 88.
H. Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex (Philadelphia: F.A. Davis, 1912), Vol. 3, p. 199 (my italics).
Kate Linker, ‘Representation and Sexuality’, Art After Modernism, ed. Brian Wallis (Boston: David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc., 1984), p. 393.
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© 1997 Susan Ostrov Weisser
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Weisser, S.O. (1997). Chastity and ‘Rumour’d Heavens’: ‘Woman’ and The Double Message of Sexual Love. In: Women and Sexual Love in the British Novel, 1740–1880. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230377349_2
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