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Notes
[1] Matilda Pullan, Maternal Counsels to a Daughter (London: Darton, 1855) 51. Pullan (née Chesney) was more commonly known for her interest in women’s fashions (writing for periodicals such as Belle Assemblée and the London and Paris Gazette of Fashion), although she did publish other books for the young.
Thanks to Daniel Markovits, Kate Flint, Helen Small, the anonymous reviewers of this article, and the staff at NCC for their enormously helpful suggestions. All mistakes and misreadings are, of course, entirely my own.
[2] My discussion of mother/daughter role‐modeling is indebted to Nancy Chodorow. Chodorow has argued that, in western cultures, mothers inhibit daughters from developing independent goals through a socially‐instituted cycle of perpetual female identification. Mothers, she claims, having been encouraged to be nurturant and empathetic by society, subsequently encourage their daughters to display similar qualities and so eventually become mothers themselves. Boys, however, must distance themselves from their mothers in order to develop a sense of themselves as distinctively male. Chodorow argues that the sexes consequently display a radically different understanding of their relationship to others and the world around them. “The basic feminine sense of self is connected to the world,” she argues, while “the basic masculine sense of self is separate.” Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (London: California UP, 1978) 169. See also Chodorow, “Family Structure and Feminine Personality,” Women, Culture and Society, eds. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1974) 43–66.
Chodorow’s theories may, as Margaret Homans has put it, “be “just as much a myth (if a more palatable one) as Freud’s and Lacan’s [theories of development] are.” I would certainly hesitate to draw conclusions about actual Victorian women’s experiences based on Chodorow’s conception of the mother/daughter bond alone. However, her theories do reflect suggestively on Victorian ideologies of female training and socialization—and, as Homans continues, “To say that a theory is mythic is hardly to diminish its authority for interpreting culture.” Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth‐Century Women’s Writing (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986) 15.
[3] As Kate Flint points out, advice manuals often co‐opt the mother/daughter relationship, “bonding the reader, at least in theory, into a framework of categorical self‐definition … ensuring the transmission of values and practices from one generation to the next.” Kate Flint, The Woman Reader 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993) 71.
[4] In 1852, Florence Nightingale commented on a contemporary literary phenomenon: “[T]he heroine [of a novel] has generally no family ties (almost invariably no mother), or, if she has, these do not interfere with her entire independence.” Florence Nightingale, Cassandra [1852], repr. In Cassandra and Other Selections from Suggestions for Thought, ed. Mary Poovey (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1991) 208. Many modern critics share Nightingale’s conviction that motherlessness—or seriously inadequate mothering—is a necessary condition in fiction for a self‐making heroine, that is to say, for the kind of heroine who can generate and impel a realist, character‐based plot. Susan Peck MacDonald, for instance, argues that “the good, supportive mother is so potentially powerful a figure as to prevent her daughter’s trials from occurring, to shield her from the process of maturation …” Peck MacDonald, “Jane Austen and the Tradition of the Absent Mother,” The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature, eds. Cathy M. Davidson and E.M. Broner (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1980) 58–69; 58. This article revisits the topic of motherlessness in literature, but focuses on how maternal absences at the scene of reading facilitate a transgressive reading practice that, in turn, facilitates transgressive self‐fashioning.
[5] Pullan 52. Sarah Stickney Ellis, a missionary and the doyenne of the Christian didactic manual, similarly stressed in The Mothers of England (1843): “In the choice of books to be read for the instruction or amusement of her daughters, a mother should always be consulted. A novel read in secret is a dangerous thing …” Sarah Stickney Ellis, The Mothers of England: Their Influence and Responsibility (1843; repr. New York: D. Appleton, 1844) 196.
[6] Anne Bowman, The Common Things of Every‐Day Life: A Home Book of Wisdom for Mothers and Daughters (London: G. Routledge, 1857) 172. Bowman’s books for boys are invariably stirring and adventuresome (see, for example, The Boy Voyagers; or, Pirates of the East [1859] and The Bear Hunters of the Rocky Mountains [1861]). The title of her lone novel for girls, meanwhile, suggests a weary resignation to contemporary gender norms: How to Make the Best of It: A Tale for Young Ladies appeared in 1861.
[7] Marianne Farningham, Girlhood (London: James Clarke, 1869) 45, 48. Farningham, a pseudonym for Mary Anne Hearne, began her career as a teacher, turning to writing (generally books for and about the young) in the 1860s.
[8] Flint 90–5.
[9] Pullan 51. Didactic writing aimed at girls has been the focus of a fair amount of recent criticism. Judith Rowbotham’s Good Girls Make Good Wives: Guidance for Girls in Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989) is a helpful study of the didactic novel: her introduction provides a particularly useful account of the social, cultural, and material circumstances that facilitated the growth of didactic literature in the nineteenth century. Kimberley Reynolds, like Rowbotham, examines the lessons in womanhood propagated by authors such as L.T. Meade and Evelyn Everett Green as well as girls’ magazines in Girls Only? Gender and Popular Children’s Fiction in Britain, 1880–1910 (London: Harvester, 1990). In The New Girl: Girls’ Culture in England 1880–1915 (New York: Columbia UP, 1995), Sally Mitchell moves beyond a focus on the ideological motives behind didactic literature, considering instead “what girls were taking and using from their stories” (6). Indeed, Mitchell restores agency to the girl reader, representing her as actively engaged in constructing her own literary interpretations, rather than passively consuming and internalizing the (typically) traditional notions of womanhood expounded by didactic writers. My own article does not speculate about girls’ actual experiences of reading, but it will follow Mitchell in examining the suggestive spaces, the lacunae in ostensibly conservative literature.
[10] Flint 95.
[11] Pullan 48.
[12] Ruskin 117. Dinah Birch has convincingly argued against Kate Millett’s reading of Ruskin as (in Birch’s words) “the supreme expression of all [feminists] need to know and despise about Victorian culture.” Ruskin was interested in and even actively supportive of women’s tertiary education, Birch points out; she also argues that his reading of gender roles in “Of Queen’s Gardens” was prompted partly by a need to define and work out his own masculinity. However, the remarkable success of Sesame and Lilies does suggest that Ruskin’s vision struck a chord with some portion of Victorian society—that it gave voice, at the very least, to a particular and prevailing idea of what should constitute masculine and feminine behavior. Dinah Birch, “Ruskin’s ‘Womanly Mind,’” Essays in Criticism 13 (1988): 308–324; 308.
[13] I should stress again that I am discussing theories of girls’ reading and not actual experiences of literary consumption. The account I develop concentrates on the view writers of advice texts had of reading—its possibilities, its pleasures, its dangers. I do not intend to extrapolate from such theorizations of reading about Victorian girls’ actual interpretative responses, which are obviously shaped by numerous other social, cultural, material, and personal factors. Sally Mitchell’s remark (on girls’ novels such as The Wide, Wide World and Jessica’s First Prayer) is instructive: “I do not … mean to imply any simple single theory of reading. The same material has multiple uses for different readers, for the same reader at different times, and for the same reader simultaneously when the book serves overlapping and conflicting functions” (Mitchell 143). Indeed, it seems to me that writers like Ellis, Farningham, and Pullan developed their theories in part because they recognized—and were moved to attempt to contain—the dizzying multiplicity of possible textual responses.
[14] Peter De Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics, and the Subject (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989) 267.
[15] Farningham 44, 45
[16] Elizabeth Sewell, Principles of Education: Drawn from Nature and Revelation, and Applied to Female Education in the Upper Classes 2 vols. (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1865) II. 123. Sewell’s fiction will be discussed in more detail presently.
[17] Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1856; repr. Oxford: OUP, 1993) I. 703–5. Aurora is one contemporary reader who celebrates the jouissance of reading: “It is … when/We gloriously forget ourselves and plunge/Soul‐forward, headlong, into a book’s profound,/Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth –/’Tis then we get the right good from a book” (I. 705–9).
[18] Vivian Zamel, “Writing One’s Way Into Reading,” TESOL Quarterly 26 (1992): 463–83. Feminists have found the suggestion that readers may control the meaning of a text highly suggestive, of course. For a relatively early collection of essays on the role gender may play in the interaction between text and reader see Patrocinio P. Schweickart and Elizabeth A. Flynn, eds., Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1986); for a more recent series of essays investigating women’s interpretive processes see Sara Mills, ed., Gendering the Reader (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994).
[19] The Victorians were not the first to view advice texts as character changing: as Mitzi Myers has argued, Georgian women writers’ “stories for the young and their manuals for maternal instructors reflect notions of literature quite distinct from those that have been the norm in modern critical thinking until rather recently. They do not think in terms of self‐contained imaginative artifacts; they think of how writing alters a reader’s responses. Whether the reader is a mother looking for tips or a girl‐child seeking amusement, Georgian writers have designs on their audience.” Myers reminds us that such attitudes were liberating as well as regulatory: Georgian writers recognize women as beings capable of internal self‐regulation, combating prevailing stereotypes of girls and women as “impulsive, emotionally susceptible, ardently imaginative.” Mitzi Myers, “‘A Taste for Truth and Realities’: Early Advice to Mothers on Books for Girls,’ Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 12 (1987): 118–124, 118.
[20] The term “spiritual orphan” is used by Carla L. Peterson to describe Maggie Tulliver’s inadequately mothered state in The Determined Reader: Gender and Culture in the Novel from Napoleon to Victoria (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1986) 186.
[21] Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth (1850; repr. Oxford: OUP, 1985) 56, 54.
[22] “Holme Lee” (pseudonym of Harriet Parr), Maude Talbot 3 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, 1854) II. 22–3, 21.
[23] A less well‐known example of this phenomenon occurs in Aimée Daniell Beringer’s The New Virtue, when a sixteen‐year‐old heroine discovers her need for a less circumscribed life, and the potential excitement of romantic intercourse, when she stumbles upon Thackeray’s The History of Henry Esmond in her guardian’s library: “she dimly scented the scintillating, wicked atmosphere which worked Beatrice’s undoing. She felt her pulses stir under the lash of the biting sarcasm and the vivid picture of man’s baseness and woman’s frailty. She could define nothing, embody nothing; but here at last were colour, movement, sound, life, everything for which she longed with an inarticulate pain which choked its own utterance …” Beringer, The New Virtue (London: Heineman, 1896) 13.
[24] As Carla L. Peterson notes: “The pictures of the rock standing alone and of the stranded broken boat are images of singleness and desolation that accurately reflect her situation in the Reed household … The churchyard, with its inscribed headstone, recalls Jane’s dead parents …” Peterson 87–8.
[25] Gayatri Spivak’s analysis of Jane Eyre foregrounds the heroine’s unconventional behavior throughout the early pages of the novel, stressing the degree to which “Jane breaks the rules of the appropriate topography of withdrawal” by slipping into the breakfast room to read. By further concealing herself behind a curtain, Jane gains a position of “self‐marginalised uniqueness.” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985) 243–61; repr. The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism, ed. Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore (London: Macmillan, 1989) 175–95; 178.
[26] Pullan 50.
[27] Spivak 179.
[28] Pullan 44.
[29] See esp. Peterson 94–5.
[30] Peterson 186.
[31] Pullan x. Peterson also sees a correlation between Mrs. Tulliver’s inadequacy and Maggie’s reading, arguing: “Maggie turns to books to fill the spiritual and intellectual void that surrounds her and to help her in her quest for origins and identity.” 186.
[32] Peterson 190.
[33] Peterson has also discussed differences in the function of reading in Jane’s and Maggie’s lives. Most notably, she argues that Jane’s reading introduces her to religious and secular narratives that are subsequently and positively revised—particularly feminized—in her own experience, while Maggie is unable to shape such narratives into optimistic portraits of God’s grace or, indeed, of successful womanhood. See, in particular, Peterson 86–112 and 190–1. Nancy Cerveti examines Jane’s and Maggie’s reading experiences in Scenes of Reading: Transforming Romance in Brontë, Eliot, and Woolf (New York: Peter Lang, 1998) esp. 29–47 and 49–69. Cerveti, like Peterson, concentrates on the relationship between the content of the narratives the heroines read and their subsequent lives: my article takes a step backward and focuses on the reading practice that enables them to approach literature proactively in the first place.
Another famous nineteenth‐century motherless reader is, of course, Emma Bovary; Peterson’s account of Flaubert’s novel focuses on Emma’s transgressive reading practice (“disintegrative rather than synthetic … passively accepting rather than critical”), although Peterson does not tie this specifically to Emma’s motherless condition (Peterson 170. For full discussion see 162–175).
[34] One thinks, in this regard, of Margaret Oliphant’s criticism of Jane Eyre:
[We had an] ideal … in the old halcyon days of novel‐writing; when suddenly there stole upon the scene … a little fierce incendiary, doomed to turn the world of fancy upside down. She stole upon the scene—pale, small, by no means beautiful—something of a genius, something of a vixen—a dangerous little person, inimical to the peace of society … . Such was the impetuous little spirit which dashed into our well‐ordered world, broke its boundaries, and defied its principles—and the most alarming revolution of modern times has followed the invasion of Jane Eyre.
Margaret Oliphant, “Modern Novelists Great and Small,” Blackwood’s 77 (1855): 554–568; 557.
[35] This reader cannot help feeling that the countess’s unhappiness is caused by more than just the earl’s neglect; her reference to “captivity” and her half‐enunciated desire “for I know not what” suggest a need for more in life than a husband’s love. Elizabeth Sewell’s female characters quite often articulate—or nearly articulate—a need for greater self‐determination, although her novels always propose a more or less orthodox Christian conclusion to the problem (see, in particular, Ivors [1856]). A single woman who helped support her lackadaisical father and brothers financially through her writing, Sewell’s autobiography reveals frustration at their chauvinistic, condescending treatment of her and her writing. For more discussion on Sewell’s experiences of life and their potential impact on her fiction, see Shirley Foster, Victorian Women’s Fiction: Marriage, Freedom, and the Individual (London: Croom Helm, 1985) ch. 4.
[36] One contemporary didactic author, John Angell James, stressed that independent religious activity was as dangerous as any other kind of independent study: “Young females, while at home, should be generally regulated by the wishes of their parents, and especially by their mothers… . A good and wise daughter will ever look up with affectionate deference to a good and wise mother, and will therefore enter on no career of religious activity without consulting her.” Female Piety, Or the Young Woman’s Friend and Guide Through Life to Immortality (London: Hamilton, Adams, 1852) 136 (italics in original).
[37] Jill L. Matus points out that while motherlessness is indeed a common Victorian literary trope, fears about the dangerous maternal legacy are also widespread: “In a number of fictional situations … the mother’s legacy asserts itself as a determining and inescapable inheritance. Dead mothers live on in their daughters’ inherited propensities; daughters are trapped in what their mothers pass on.” Unstable Bodies: Victorian Representations of Sexuality and Maternity (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995) 191. The characterization of the maternal inheritance as terrifying and inescapable seems to me to articulate the oppressive inevitability of the mother/daughter identification cycle.
[38] Principles of Education II. 120.
[39] For literary critical discussion on the role of reading in the formation of the subject see Peterson, esp. 27–36 and Flint esp. 39–43. Peterson’s theories are informed by Lacanian analysis; Flint uses Foucauldian concepts of knowledge to examine “the space, or rather the spaces, which may be occupied by the reading, as well as by the writing subject.” 40.