Emily’s Will: George Gissing, Wage Labour and Aesthetic Desire

Abstract

The conclusion to Gissing’s A Life’s Morning describes romantic plenitude in terms which almost make its opposite, which gesture toward emptiness and loss. Emily’s physical touch is only a layer of signification for Wilfred Athel. It is ‘the symbol of’ fulfilled desire. She is the feminine object of a desire written as aesthetic, within an impossible relation of class economics. This novel, written in 1885, was serialised in the Cornhill in 1888, after the publications of Thyrza and Demos. It follows a pattern common to the 1880s and 1890s, being both romance and socialist critique. It also expresses a preoccupation with the relation between aesthetics and gender which continues through Eve’s Ransom and The Crown of Life—novels structured around a complex dynamic involving economic agency, ‘artistic’ yearnings and sexual desire. These three works sit uneasily atop a widely accepted critical division of Gissing’s oeuvre into socialist and ‘new woman’ fictions, or into naturalist and psychological novels. The structuring experience of gendered desire forms a link between these poles which can illuminate the problematic divisions between them. Each of these works produces a relation between gendered object-relation, aesthetics and capital which defines a very particular structure of feeling, regardless of any critical division which might be used to separate them.

There were times when he scarcely dared to take in his own that fine-moulded hand that was the symbol of life made perfect.

(Gissing, 1888, 3, pp. 321–2)