Abstract
When Matilda Pullan writes her Maternal Counsels to a Daughter in 1855, she figures the launch of a young girl’s ‘career’ of marriage and motherhood as the beginning of a bright, if perilous, adventure on the ‘ocean of life’. Over fifty years later, travel writer, Gertrude Bell, will open her first book on the Middle East with the image of a new woman escaping the house, embarking on ‘wild travel’. Yet the earlier journey of Pullan’s domestic angel also has the ‘immeasurable world’ in view. Forming the ‘bulwark’ of her society, so very like her nation’s ships of imperial conquest, her venture is attendant with ‘misgivings’ about whether or not she will founder. Pullan’s metaphor exposes the deep anxiety about modernity that fuelled the Victorian quest to understand who women were and where they were going. With their ability to civilize savage aspects of modern life, to stave off encroaching cultural degeneration, and to breed the next generation of empire-builders, married women were imagined as cultural saviours both at home and abroad. The angel’s face disguised an ambitious ego. These not so secret agents of empire were invented to help map out England’s claims to be the moral centre of the world (Ellis 1839: 13; Poovey 1989: 189), radiating influence to a periphery understood as racially inferior (Cotsell 1990: 15; Emerson 1856: 62), in need of Christian conversion, and ripe for conquest (Stodart 1844: 146–70).
Did you ever witness the launch of one of those gallant vessels which form the bulwarks of our country […]? Is it possible to witness a launch without some such speculations and misgivings as these — to avoid thinking of the perils the ship must encounter from the rocks and shoals beneath her, the thunders of the heavens above, from foes without, and, perchance, mutiny within her bulwarks? Can we among all the works of man, find a fitter emblem of human life itself, and especially of the career of a young girl launched for the first time into the ocean of life?
(Pullan 1855: vii–viii)
To those bred under an elaborate social order few such moments of exhilaration can come as that which stands at the threshold of wild travel. The gates of the enclosed garden are thrown open, the chain at the entrance to the sanctuary is lowered, with a wary glance to right and left you step forth and behold! the immeasurable world.
(Bell 1907: 1)
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Russell, S. (2013). ‘Nobody’s child must sleep under Somebody’s roof — and why not yours?’ Adventures of the Female Ego in Dickens, George Meredith’s The Egoist and Wilkie Collins’s No Name. In: Reus, T.G., Gifford, T. (eds) Women in Transit through Literary Liminal Spaces. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137330475_2
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