LADIES, LUNATICS AND FALLEN WOMEN IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM:

THE FEMINIST POLITICS OF NEO-VICTORIAN FICTION, 2000-2010

NADINE MULLER

Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English
University of Hull

October 2011
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments .........................................................................................................................i

List of Illustrations..................................................................................................................... iii

List of Abbreviations ................................................................................................................. iii

Introduction

Through the looking glass: the feminist politics of neo-Victorian fiction ............................... 1

Neo-Victorian fiction and third-wave feminism: beginnings and contexts ................................... 4

Prefixing history: terminologies and definitions ............................................................................ 8

Defining the present through the past: the politics of writing history ......................................... 15

Beyond (dis)identification: historiographic potentials ................................................................. 22

Consuming women: neo-Victorianism, third-wave feminism and the sexualisation of culture .. 28

The feminist politics of neo-Victorian fiction: chapters and themes ........................................... 35

Chapter 1

(Re)Writing genealogies: feminism, matrilinealism and neo-Victorian fiction .................... 38

Feminist genealogies: histories and contexts ............................................................................... 39

‘And what of history?’: The feminist genealogies of A Short History of Women ....................... 51

Not my mother’s daughter: Fingersmith’s matrilineal fictions.................................................... 63

Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 77

Chapter 2

Hystoriographic metafiction: gender, madness, therapy and power .................................... 79

Feminism and mental health: hystories and theories ................................................................... 80

Rewriting and overwriting the Victorian madwoman: Human Traces ........................................ 91

An Inconvenient Wife: hypnosis, power and the ambiguities of liberation .................................. 99

Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 114

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Chapter 3

Sexual f(r)ictions: women, sex and pornography .................................................................. 117

Pornography in Britain: definitions, contexts, debates .............................................................. 118

The Journal of Dora Damage: pornography’s feminist failures ................................................ 135

Fingersmith: pornography’s feminist potentials ........................................................................ 147

Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 159

Chapter 4

Pimping the neo-Victorian prostitute: the feminist politics of sex work............................. 161

Constructing the prostitute: discourses and politics ................................................................... 162

Re-colonising feminism: prostitution and Western superiority in The Linnet Bird ................... 177

Selling Sugar: the sexual and textual economies of The Crimson Petal and the White............. 190

Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 204

Chapter 5

Writing women’s lives: neo-Victorian fiction as feminist biography .................................. 206

Feminism and biography: writing the female subject ................................................................ 206

Girl in a Blue Dress: the feminist lives of Catherine Dickens ................................................... 221

Gendering art, space and identity: Keeping the World Away..................................................... 236

Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 247

Conclusions ............................................................................................................................... 249

Bibliography ............................................................................................................................. 258

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This thesis is the product of one of the University of Hull’s 80th Anniversary Doctoral

Scholarships in Neo-Victorianism, without which this project could neither have been

begun nor completed. I am grateful for the additional financial support provided by the

Carl Baron Memorial Fund, the English Department’s Research Student Support Fund,

and the Graduate School. This generous material assistance was matched by the advice,

encouragement and help I received from the academic and administrative staff at the

Department of English and the Graduate School. Particular thanks, however, must go to

my exemplary and inspiring supervisor, Ann Heilmann, for her indefatigable

enthusiasm, dedication, insight, guidance and patience.

Earlier versions of some sections of this thesis have appeared in the form book

chapters and journal articles as: ‘Hystoriographic Metafiction: Victorian Narratives of

Madness and Women’s Mental Health in 21st- Century British Fiction’, Gender Forum,

Special Issue: Literature and Medicine: Women in the Medical Profession, 25 (Autumn

2009); and ‘Not My Mother’s Daughter: Matrilinealism, Third-Wave Feminism and

Neo-Victorian Fiction’, Neo-Victorian Studies, Special Issue: Adapting the Nineteenth

Century, ed. by Alexia Bowler and Jessica Cox, 2:2 (Winter 2009/10), pp.109-136. I am

grateful to the editors – Carmen Birkle, Alexia Bowler and Jessica Cox, and Marie-

Luise Kohlke – and the anonymous peer-reviewers of these publications for their

insightful comments.

I am indebted to many colleagues and friends whose support has been vital to

my professional development as well as to the (partial) retainment of my sanity. Here,

particular thanks are due to Joel Gwynne, Mark Llewellyn, CWWA executive

committee member Helen Davies, FWSA executive committee members Stéphanie

Genz, Alison Phipps, Srila Roy and Katya Salmi, and to my wonderful University of

Salford colleagues, friends and mentors Janice Allan, Lucie Armitt, Scott Brewster,
 ii

Kristin Ewins, Sue Powell and Maggie Scott. Alexia Bowler, Kym Brindle and

Elizabeth Howard-Laity have willingly shared their PhD completion experiences with

me, and their motivational comments in the virtual world of social networking have

been more helpful than they know. Special thanks go to Jessica Cox and Claire

O’Callaghan, whom I admire both as academics and as women and whose ears and

inboxes have suffered greatly during the time it has taken me to research and write this

thesis. I am grateful to my parents for their support and for their selflessness in enabling

me not only to pursue my studies but to pursue them so far away from them. I thank

Peter Harrison for sharing and inspiring my bibliophilia willingly and shamelessly at all

times and for being one of the most inspiring readers I know. I dare not imagine the past

three years without Theresa Jamieson and thank her wholeheartedly for simply

everything, knowing she will insist that it was nothing. Finally, and most importantly, I

thank Nathan Harrison, who has had the patience to share with me six years of

emotional and academic highs and lows without ever faltering in his encouragement.
 iii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1 Untitled illustration by Adam Simpson © New York Times 2009

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

BD Gaynor Arnold, Girl in a Blue Dress (2008)

CP Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White (2002)

DD Belinda Starling, The Journal of Dora Damage (2007)

FS Sarah Waters, Fingersmith (2002)

HT Sebastian Faulks, Human Traces (2006)

IW Megan Chance, Inconvenient Wife (2004)

KtWA Margaret Forster, Keeping the World Away (2006)

LB Linda Holeman, A Linnet Bird (2004)

SHoW Kate Walbert, A Short History of Women (2009)

UW Hebe Elsna, Unwanted Wife (1963)

GENERAL NOTES

Emphases in quotations appear in the original unless otherwise stated in the relevant

footnote reference. A text’s original year of publication is provided in square brackets

after the author name(s) in footnotes and bibliography entries where relevant.
 1

INTRODUCTION
Through the looking glass: the feminist politics of neo-Victorian fiction

Figure 1.1 Illustration by Adam Simpson © New York Times 2009

There are few means by which the purpose of this thesis could be captured more

effectively than Adam Simpson’s visual evocation of a meeting between two women

who represent different stages in feminist history – one a suffragette, visibly marked by

her ‘Votes for Women’ sash, the other her mid-century successor, perhaps a feminist

too, yet not overtly identifiable as such. Simpson’s illustration, which accompanied a

New York Times review of Kate Walbert’s A Short History of Women (2009),1 implies

both a clear historical separation and connection between past and present: each woman

perceives the other as (and reaches out to) her mirror image in the looking glass, the

past seeing forward into the present (or her future) and the present recognising herself in

the past. At the same time, we, the contemporary beholders of this picture, too, gaze

1
Leah Hager Cohen, Review: A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert, New York Times (12
June 2009), Accessed: 1 October 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/books/review/Cohen-t.html.
 2

backward in history, hoping, perhaps, to achieve a better view of the features of our own

time through its reflection in the historical mirror. This thesis proposes that in the new

millennium neo-Victorian fiction has come to function as a literary manifestation of

precisely such a reflection. Considering specifically the genre’s representations of

women, gender and sex/uality, I argue that these returns to the nineteenth-century past

mirror and interrogate those feminist issues which not only featured prominently in the

Victorian period but which also continue to preoccupy the literary, cultural and political

landscapes of the twenty-first century.

In The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction (2005),

Jeannette King claims that ‘revisiting Victorian women’s lives provides an opportunity

to challenge the answers which nineteenth-century society produced in response to the

“the Women Question”’.2 Yet, novelists’ interest in such a project, she suggests, is also

rooted in a curiosity about ‘what the Victorian period can add to the modern reader’s

understanding of gender’, a question which ‘is as politically charged an issue now as it

was at the end of the nineteenth century, and continues to be debated in both the popular

and academic press’.3 Equally, Diana Wallace notes in The Woman’s Historical Novel,

1900-2000 (2005) that ‘the questions which some of the best [... historical] novelists [...]

ask about the relationships between gender, power, nationality, sexuality, religion and

violence are still, sadly, all too relevant’.4 However, despite these observations, critics

have largely neglected contemporary feminist theory as a framework for their readings

of neo-Victorian fiction. King clearly indicates the importance of such an approach

when she refers to the ‘“post-feminist” mood that prevails at the beginning of the

twenty-first century’,5 but what exactly this mood is, how the author defines the term

2
Jeannette King, The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p.6.
3
Ibid.
4
Diana Wallace, The Woman’s Historical Novel, 1900-2000: Women Writers (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p.228.
5
King, The Victorian Woman Question, p.6.
 3

which she carefully encloses in inverted commas, or how it might influence neo-

Victorianism remains unexplored.

In order to fill this critical gap and investigate recent neo-Victorian fiction’s

engagement with contemporary feminist concerns, this thesis introduces, first, the

current debates surrounding and the conceptual affiliations between twenty-first century

neo-Victorian fiction and the theories generated by the so-called third wave of

feminism, highlighting in particular the shared historiographic interests and practices of

these two turn-of-the-millennium phenomena and the problematic sexual politics arising

from those interests. The subsequent themed chapters then trace the histories of and

analyse through a third-wave lens the literary representations of five feminist issues

which have acquired particular significance within the neo-Victorian canon:

matrilinealism, mental health, pornography, prostitution and women’s life writing.

Instead of considering neo-Victorian fiction exclusively within the parameters of the

historical (con)texts it revisits, each of the chapters demonstrates that neo-Victorian

fiction and its rewriting of the nineteenth century functions as a textual mirror which

reflects as much, if not more, about the time in which it is conceived as about the period

to which it returns, as well as about the similarities and differences between the two.

Yet, at the same time, the novels discussed in this thesis also illustrate and often

question the very relationship between the object, the looking glass and the mirror

image; that is, they act as exemplifications of and, at times, critical comments upon the

problematic textual and sexual politics pertaining to the feminist issues they revisit and

which are evident in their own acts of representation and historical revision. By reading

twenty-first century neo-Victorian fiction through a contemporary, third-wave feminist

framework, the thesis explores the genre’s engagement with current theories and

debates surrounding women, gender and sexuality while also highlighting the

problematics and potentials of its feminist politics.

 4

Neo-Victorian fiction and third-wave feminism: beginnings and contexts

Since the publication of Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and John Fowles’ The

French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) – texts which are often cited as the first

contemporary examples of the genre –contributions to and scholarly interest in neo-

Victorian fiction have drastically increased in quantity.6 Following A.S. Byatt’s Man

Booker Prize-winning Possession (1990), neo-Victorian fiction has become a rapidly

growing literary phenomenon as well as ‘a catch-all term for many different kinds of

work: the romance version of the historical novel, post-modern fun and games with

period settings, lesbian romance for heterosexuals, lightweight commercial thrillers with

Jack-the-Ripper fog, gaslight and carriages’.7 Patricia Duncker’s evocation of this

literary landscape as a ‘cluttered maze’ of plots,8 narrative modes and settings illustrates

the sheer range of fictional works which have been labelled as neo-Victorian, rendering

it problematic to assign to them any characteristics more specific (or serious) than

Miriam Elizabeth Burstein’s mocking assortment of ‘Rules for Writing Neo-Victorian

Novels’, listed on her blog The Little Professor: Things Victorian and Academic.9

As in the case of neo-Victorianism, the theories, strategies and forms collated

under the label third-wave feminism are by no means straightforwardly demarcated or

coherent. This is at least in part because, not dissimilar to neo-Victorian fiction, the

third wave crosses cultural and generic boundaries and has been identified and practiced

6
As Marie-Luise Kohlke points out, neo-Victorian fiction, if primarily defined as being written after
the Victorian period but concerned with Victorian ideologies, is not an exclusively contemporary
phenomenon but can encompass texts published from 1901 onwards. See: Marie-Luise Kohlke,
‘Introduction: Speculations in and on the Neo-Victorian Encounter’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 1:1 (Autumn
2008), pp.1-18 (p.4).
7
Patricia Duncker, Abstract: ‘Neo-Victorian Fictions’, University of Essex (2009), Accessed:
21 February 2011, http://www.essex.ac.uk/sociology/about/news/seminar_docs/2008-2009/speaker_
info.aspx.
8
Ibid.
9
Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, ‘Rules for Writing Neo-Victorian Novels’, The Little Professor:
Things Victorian and Academic (15 March 2006), Accessed: 1 October 2011, http://littleprofessor.
typepad.com/the_little_professor/2006/03/rules_for_writi.html. Burstein observes, for example, that ‘any
novel based on an actual Victorian literary work must include considerable quantities of sex’, that ‘the
novelist must make the prose more antique by eliminating all contractions and using period slang
(whether or not it is actually appropriate)’, and that ‘the novel's publicist should use the adjective
“Dickensian” at least once’.
 5

in various, sometimes intersecting realms, ranging from popular culture to activism and

academia. Since Rebecca Walker first proclaimed ‘I am the third wave’ in a 1992 Ms.

magazine article,10 the term has been adopted by more feminists of colour, as is perhaps

best exemplified in the first-person narratives collected in Daisy Hernández and Bushra

Rehman’s Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism (2002). At the

same time, however, a variety of other women have equally appropriated the label, not

only in print publishing but also in popular culture, including girl-power advocates, the

punk movement’s Riot Grrrls, and ‘the Hello Kitty-accessorised and lipglossed Girlies

exemplified by the writers of zines such as Bitch and BUST’.11

Due to the often anecdotal and confessional nature of third-wave writing and its

frequent blurring of scholarly and popular forms and approaches,

some academic and second-wave feminists argue that these narratives are not
‘academic’ or ‘theoretical’ enough or are solely grounded in the personal […]
They do not view the personal as academic enough, despite the feminist mantra,
‘the personal is political’.12

In academic circles third-wave feminism has only reluctantly been accepted as a valid,

productive approach to feminist issues.13 While publications by self-identified third

wavers began to appear in the late 1990s,14 the first scholarly attempts to theorise third-

wave politics, praxes and writing did not appear until a decade later with publications

such as Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie and Rebecca Munford’s edited collection Third

Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration (2004), a product of the first academic

conference on the topic, and Leslie Heywood’s two-volume The Women’s Movement

10
Rebecca Walker, ‘Becoming the Third Wave’, Ms. (January/February 1992), pp.39-41 (p.41). For
other early occurrences of the term, see: Ednie Kaeh Garrison, ‘Are We on a Wavelength Yet? On
Feminist Oceanography, Radios, and Third Wave Feminism’, Different Wavelengths: Studies of the
Contemporary Women’s Movement, ed. by Jo Reger (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp.237-356.
11
Stacy Gillis and Rebecca Munford, 'Genealogies and Generations: The Politics and Praxis of Third
Wave Feminism', Women's History Review, 13:2 (2008), pp.165-182 (p.169).
12
‘academic feminism’, The Women’s Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third-Wave Feminism,
Vol.1, ed. by Leslie Heywood (London: Greenwood Press, 2006), pp.8-10 (p.9).
13
Gillis and Munford, ‘Genealogies and Generations’, p.170.
14
See: Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake (eds.), Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing
Feminism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); and Rebecca Walker, To Be Real: Telling
the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism (New York: Anchor Books, 1995).
 6

Today: An Encyclopedia of Third Wave Feminism (2006), which comprises a selection

of primary texts and a glossary of terms. For the past decade, third-wave feminism has

gained further momentum within the academy through various scholarly investigations

of and contributions toward its theories and practices in disciplines such as sociology,

women’s and gender studies, philosophy and mental health.15

Both within this thesis and in existing scholarship, literary manifestations of the

neo-Victorian span equally various kinds and combinations of re-visitations: Sarah

Waters’ Fingersmith (2002), for example, adapts the plots of canonical Victorian

works,16 while Megan Chance’s An Inconvenient Wife (2004), Michel Faber’s The

Crimson Petal and the White (2002), Sebastian Faulks’ Human Traces (2006), Linda

Holeman’s A Linnet Bird (2004) and Belinda Starling’s The Journal of Dora Damage

(2007) revisit specific cultural phenomena such as hysteria, prostitution and

pornography. Others utilise both historical and contemporary settings, like Margaret

Forster’s Keeping the World Away (2006) or Kate Walbert’s A Short History of Women

(2009), and some, such as Gaynor Arnold’s Girl in a Blue Dress (2008), reinvent the

lives of (in)famous or more obscure Victorians.17 Dianne F. Sadoff and John Kucich

ascertained in 2000 – in their introduction to one of the first essay collections dedicated

to the revival of the nineteenth century in contemporary literature and culture – that the

Victorians’ ‘prominence for postmodernism has [despite their evident popularity] yet to

become the subject of rigorous scholarly analysis’ and ‘is a cultural phenomenon that

15
See: Chris Bobel, New Blood: Third-Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010); Astrid Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister: Generational
Conflict and Third-Wave Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); and Ellyn Kaschak
(ed.), The Next Generation: Third Wave Feminist Psychotherapy (Binghampton: Haworth Press, 2001).
16
The recent ‘zombifications’ of certain canonical titles also contributes to this first category. See:
Sherri Browning Erwin’s Jane Slayre (2010), A.E. Moorat’s Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter (2009) or
Adam Roberts’ I Am Scrooge: A Zombie Story for Christmas (2009).
17
There are, of course, several other neo-Victorian modes of returning to the nineteenth century,
including the transport of twenty-first century characters into the nineteenth century (see Selden Edwards’
The Little Book [London: Abacus, 2008]), or the insertion of historical figures into fictional narratives
(see Gyles Brandreth’s bestselling Oscar Wilde series [London: John Murrary, 2007-2011]).
 7

itself needs to be historicized – needs, indeed, simply to be acknowledged’.18

Redressing this ‘critical gap’ Kucich and Sadoff identified over a decade ago, the

subsequent years of the twenty-first century saw the founding of the academic journal

Neo-Victorian Studies as well as the publication of numerous articles, special journal

issues, essay collections and monographs on neo-Victorianism as a literary phenomenon

and as a significant aspect of (popular and material) culture, politics, education,

economy, the media and the arts.19

It is undoubtedly because of neo-Victorian fiction’s and third-wave feminist

writing’s formal and generic diversities that, with very few recent exceptions, no

universal definitions have been attached to either phenomenon. Neo-Victorian fiction

has only been loosely described in terms of the formal features and modes its authors

employ, notwithstanding the growing body of critical work which the genre has

inspired; equally, third-wave feminism frequently remains accused of a lack of

coherence and unity, despite some scholars’ recent attempts to furnish it with a more

defined theoretical identity.20 While this thesis does not endeavour to fill such gaps, the

following sections of this introduction outline two defining and shared characteristics of

neo-Victorianism and third-wave feminism which render the latter a suitable analytical

framework for the former.21 Establishing, first, the central role of history in the

18
Dianne F. Sadoff and John Kucich, ‘Introduction: Histories of the Present’, Victorian Afterlife:
Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century, ed. by John Kucich and Dianne F. Sadoff
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp.ix-xxx (p.x).
19
It is worth noting that in 2010 alone two new edited collections and three new monographs on neo-
Victorianism were published. See: Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham (eds.), Haunting and Spectrality in
Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Louisa Hadley,
Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative: The Victorians and Us (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010); Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-
First Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben
(eds.), Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma: The Politics of Bearing After-Witness to Nineteenth-Century
Suffering (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010); and Kate Mitchell, History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian
Fiction: Victorian Afterimages (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
20
Notable exceptions to this lack of definition for the terms ‘neo-Victorianism’ and ‘third-wave
feminism’ respectively are: Bobel, New Blood; Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie and Rebecca Munford (eds.),
‘Introduction’, Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2007), pp.xxi-xxxiv; and Heilmann and Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism.
21
These commonalities become apparent predominantly in recent academic work on third-wave
feminism, but they are also evident in a number of more popular publications aimed at audiences beyond
 8

terminologies and definitions which currently shape scholarly debates surrounding the

two fields, I argue that neo-Victorian fiction and third-wave feminism are characterised

by a keen interest in the relationship between past and present. Secondly, through an

exploration of their conceptions and constructions of this relationship, I illustrate that

neo-Victorian fiction’s and third-wave feminism’s historical and historiographic

concerns shape their ambiguous and arguably paradoxical sexual politics in relation to

sexualised Western consumer cultures.

Prefixing history: terminologies and definitions

In ‘What is Third-Wave Feminism? A New Directions Essay’ (2008), R. Claire Snyder

identifies what she views as some of the key features of third-wave feminism. Besides

displaying an emphasis on ‘personal narratives that illustrate an intersectional and

multiperspectival version of feminism’, ‘multivocality’ and ‘an inclusive and

nonjudgmental approach that refuses to police the boundaries of the feminist political’,

third-wave texts, she asserts, are often characterised by ‘an ignorance of history’.22

Whether Snyder derives this claim from a perceived unwillingness of third wavers to

engage with history or their alleged misrepresentation of it remains unclear in her

discussion, but neither flaw is universally apparent in writing by or about the third

wave. Indeed, third-wave feminism is characterised by a preoccupation with the

achievements, failures and potentials of previous feminist generations, with the manners

in which third wavers, other women and the media construct and represent the

feminisms of previous decades and centuries, and with contemporary feminists’

relationships to them. Rather than being ignorant of history, the third wave is both

deeply influenced by and inevitably connected to it.

the academy. While the majority of this thesis draws on academic publications by and on the third wave,
it also occasionally draws on other sources where appropriate.
22
R. Claire Snyder, ‘What Is Third-Wave Feminism: A New Directions Essay’, Signs: Journal of
Women in Culture and Society, 34:1 (2008), pp.175-196 (pp.175-176 and p.183).
 9

Indeed, it is its relationship to the past that sets third-wave feminism apart from

the contemporary competitor with which it remains most frequently conflated and

against which it is often defined: postfeminism. Terminologically as much contested as

the third wave, postfeminism has generally come to designate either a backlash against

the women’s movement of the 1960s and 70s, the so-called second wave of feminism,

or a new way of feminist thinking which is incompatible with the established feminist

theories and politics of those previous generations. Proponents of the former definition

insist that postfeminism’s temporal prefix signifies the arrival of an era in which

feminism belongs to the past, indicating either ‘an anti-feminist critique of the

misguidedness of feminism’ and hence the need to leave its ideologies behind, or ‘a pro-

feminist nod to feminism’s victories’ which, supposedly, render the movement

irrelevant to women today.23 In contrast to these perceptions stands the academically

popular argument that postfeminism is not an indication of feminism’s demise, but that

it instead signifies a combination of feminist and post-structuralist theories, thus

embodying, as Ann Brooks puts it, feminism’s ‘maturity into a confident body of theory

and politics, representing pluralism and difference and reflecting on its position in

relation to other philosophical and political movements similarly demanding change’.24

These understandings illustrate two overlaps between postfeminism and the third wave

which perhaps explain the frequent confusion of the two terms. As Stéphanie Genz

highlights, third-wave feminism, too, draws significantly on the ‘theoretical maturity of

academic poststructuralism’ and on the ensuing notions of ‘pluralism and difference’

which Brooks (and others, including Genz) ascribe to postfeminism.25

However, while this theoretical common ground creates a genuine link between

the third wave and its contender, their supposedly shared rejection of previous
23
Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister, p.19.
24
Ann Brooks, Postfeminisms: Feminism, Cultural Theory and Cultural Forms (London: Routledge,
1997), p.1.
25
Stéphanie Genz, ‘Third Way/ve: The Politics of Postfeminism’, Feminist Theory, 7:3 (2006),
pp.333-353 (p.339).
 10

feminisms – often regarded as inherent in their prefixes – is a misconception. Indeed, it

is here that we can identify the essential difference between these two branches of

contemporary feminism, a difference which, in turn, also supports the connection

between third-wave feminism and neo-Victorian fiction that I propose in this thesis: an

interest in both history and historiography. Third-wave feminism’s numerical departure

from its predecessor may superficially indicate a rejection of the second wave, but its

continuation of the wave metaphor signifies a far more complex relationship with

feminist history, one which, as the first chapter of this thesis demonstrates, closely

resembles neo-Victorian fiction’s connection to the nineteenth century. Postfeminism,

according to Heywood and Drake, ‘characterizes a group of young, conservative

feminists who explicitly define themselves against and criticize feminists of the second

wave’.26 Because postfeminists, unlike the third wave, do not conceive of themselves as

being connected to previous feminisms, the difference between the two

is to be found at the level of foundations, where these notions originate and their
loyalties lie. In this way, third wave feminism establishes itself as a political
movement that depends on a close dialogue with second wave feminism and its
organized opposition to women’s exclusion and oppression.27

Third-wave feminism, then, opposes the phenomenon which Genz sees as essential to

postfeminism: a backlash against the past and its politics.

It is this demarcation which has frequently caused literary (and) feminist critics to

suggest that neo-Victorian fiction and third-wave feminism each exclusively seek to

critique and, therefore, position themselves as superior to the predecessors against

whom they define themselves. This is perhaps most palpable in third-wave literature if

we consider that the term ‘“third-wave” has frequently been employed as a kind of

shorthand for a generational difference among feminists, one based on chronological

26
Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake (eds.), ‘Introduction’, Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist,
Doing Feminism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp.1-24 (p.1).
27
Genz, ‘Third Way/ve’, pp.340-341.
 11

age’.28 Such surprisingly rigid distinctions are all too evident in recent third-wave

writing, as Chris Bobel notes.29 In Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing

Feminism (1997), Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake assert that the third wave

comprises feminists who have come of age in the 1970s and 80s,30 while Jennifer

Baumgardner and Amy Richards, in Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism and the New

Future (2003), are only marginally more generous by including those ‘women who

were reared in the wake of the women’s liberation movement of the seventies’.31 Rory

Dicker and Alison Piepmeier, although ‘avoiding a demarcation based on age’,32

nevertheless apply generational characteristics to the women of the third wave when

they assume that their identity development occurred in ‘a world shaped by technology,

global capitalism, multiple models of sexuality, changing national demographics, [and]

declining economic vitality’.33

However, that there is a desire to maintain a close and productive link to the

feminisms of previous generations is indicated in the very term ‘third wave’. As Genz

suggests, by ‘mimicking the nomenclature of its predecessors, third wave feminism

acknowledges that it stands on the shoulders of other, earlier, feminist movements. Yet,

at the same time, its agenda does not mirror the preceding waves’ theories

straightforwardly and unquestioningly’.34 The third wave’s very name, then, indicates

its affiliation with feminist history, while its numerical break from its predecessors

suggests a desire to be different and to develop past and existing feminist politics and

theories for its own purposes; as Dicker and Piepmeier observe about the third wave’s

relationship to the second wave in particular: ‘at its best, the third wave [… makes] use

28
Genz, ‘Third Way/ve’, p.340.
29
Bobel, New Blood, pp.16-17.
30
Heywood and Drake, ‘Introduction’, p.2.
31
Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), p.15.
32
Bobel, New Blood, p.16.
33
Rory Dicker and Alison Piepmeier (eds.), ‘Introduction’, Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism
for the 21st Century (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003), pp.3-28 (p.14).
34
Genz, ‘Third Way/ve’, p.340.
 12

of the best of second wave theory and strategy as well as critiques of second wave

feminism’.35

Similar to these debates and demarcations, neo-Victorian fiction’s motivations for

returning to the nineteenth-century past, the relationships it establishes between the

Victorian and contemporary periods, and its own reflections on those relationships have

become the chief criteria according to which critics analyse and classify individual

texts. The utilisation of prefixes as descriptors of the connection between the Victorian

and the contemporary has been an equally divisive, if less politically charged, topic for

scholars of neo-Victorianism as it has been for the third wave. While ‘neo-Victorian’

has by now become the widely accepted term, early investigations into the phenomenon

employed a number of viable alternatives, including ‘post’, ‘retro’ and ‘faux-

Victorian’.36

The term ‘faux-Victorian’, which remains the least used of the four, implies

through its prefix a depthlessness and lack of engagement, suggesting a superficial

reproduction of the plots and forms of nineteenth-century fiction which is rooted in a

purely aesthetic – not intellectual or critical – pleasure.37 In the first monograph

dedicated to the field, working chiefly within the conceptual confines of pastiche and

parody, Christian Gutleben identifies neo-Victorian fiction as a form of ‘nostalgic

postmodernism’ and, correspondingly, utilises the term ‘retro-Victorian’ to denote what

he considers contemporary fiction’s nostalgic longing for the past and its detachment

from the present.38 Through their return to Victorian aesthetics and narrative

35
Dicker and Piepmeier, ‘Introduction’, p.10.
36
See: Mariaconcetta Constantini, ‘“Faux-Victorian Melodrama” in the New Millennium: The Case
of Sarah Waters’, Critical Survey, 18:1 (2006), pp.17-39; Georges Letissier, ‘Dickens and Post-Victorian
Fiction’, Refracting the Canon in Contemporary British Literature and Film, ed. by Susana Onega and
Christian Gutleben (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), pp.111-128; and Sally Shuttleworth, ‘Natural History:
The Retro-Victorian Novel’, The Third Culture: Literature and Science, ed. by Elinor S. Shaffer (Berlin:
de Gruyter, 1998), pp.253-268.
37
‘faux, adj.’, Oxford English Dictionary Online (September 2011), Accessed: 15 September 2011,
http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/249153.
38
Christian Gutleben, Nostalgic Postmodernism: The Victorian Tradition and the Contemporary
British Novel (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), p.10.
 13

conventions, he argues, the texts in question are inherently conservative rather than

progressive because their duplication of Victorian practices inevitably leads also to their

replication – rather than revision – of Victorian ideologies, meaning neo-Victorian

fiction’s return to the past results in ‘an aesthetic and ideological deadlock’.39

Consequently, Gutleben considers the ‘repetition [and] recycling’ of the past as a ‘want

of originality and creativity’ and as an indication that, in the form of neo-Victorian

fiction, ‘postmodernism returns to a period before modernism as if it were not able to

progress and had to turn around and step back’.40 Here, as Daniel Bormann argues, the

prefix ‘retro’ thus denotes a foregrounding of the past rather than of the present.41

In her detailed review of the terminology applied to what has become known as

neo-Victorian fiction, Andrea Kirchknopf concludes that the term ‘post-Victorian’ is

most suited to the literary phenomenon because it signals a connection to the

postmodern.42 Reminiscent of debates surrounding the politics of postmodernism and

postfeminism, ‘post-Victorian’ indicates both a distancing from as well as an inevitable

connection to the past, yet, despite this apparent conceptual appeal, it fails to

communicate one of the key processes involved in the writing of neo-Victorian fiction

which the prefix ‘neo’ adequately captures, that is, the act of ‘making new’ or rewriting

the past, the creation of something contemporary through the use of history. As

Bormann suggests, ‘neo’ implies a focus on the contemporary, on the new,43 and paired

with ‘Victorian’ it signifies both an engagement with the present as well as – and indeed

through – the past.

As these terminological clues reveal, neo-Victorian fiction and third-wave

feminism share a relationship to their pasts which demarcates them as contemporary,

39
Gutleben, Nostalgic Postmodernism, p10.
40
Ibid., p.29 and p.10.
41
Daniel Candel Bormann, The Articulation of Science in the Neo-Victorian Novel: A Poetics (And
Two Case-Studies) (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2002), p.61.
42
Andrea Kirchknopf, ‘(Re)Workings of Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Definitions, Terminology,
Contexts’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 1:1 (Autumn 2008), pp.53-80 (p.65).
43
Bormann, The Articulation of Science in the Neo-Victorian Novel, p.61.
 14

new and different as much as it acknowledges their productive connection with that

past. The term neo-Victorianism proclaims a return to the nineteenth century and a

simultaneous desire to see the contemporary through a remaking of the Victorian, while

third-wave feminism’s terminological pattern connotes a continuation of as well as a

break from previous feminisms. Neither the third wave nor neo-Victorianism reject the

histories to which they link themselves; rather, they demonstrate a willingness to utilise

them as a means of critically investigating their contemporary worlds, to assess and

acknowledge historical similarities and differences, and develop from those assessments

a productive and historically informed picture of the present. Both third-wave feminism

and neo-Victorianism can therefore indicate a fruitful bringing together of past and

present for the purpose of looking forward, rather than glancing back at history with

feelings of nostalgia or derision.

But this is not to suggest that such relationships to the past are void of or

circumvent conflict. Conceptually less sophisticated examples of third-wave and neo-

Victorian writing often unintentionally illustrate the difficulties and strains of their

connections to and treatments of the past, while more ambitious texts frequently

acknowledge and critically interrogate their own historiographic practices, that is, they

question how and why they narrativise their histories. As numerous critics have

illustrated, neo-Victorian fiction often demonstrates contradictory affiliations between

present and past, as does third-wave writing in its exploration of previous feminist

generations. Neo-Victorianism, Matthew Sweet claims, treads a fine line between

positing the Victorians as inherently different from our own age and representing them

as uncannily similar to ourselves. Indeed, he argues, ‘most of the pleasures we imagine

to be our own, the Victorians enjoyed first [in a culture] as rich and difficult and

complex and pleasurable as our own’.44 Heywood and Drake issue similar words of

44
Matthew Sweet, Inventing the Victorians (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), p.xxiii.
 15

caution in their introduction to Third Wave Agenda and propose that feminism can only

continue to develop – and indeed be effective – if the third wave acknowledges and

critically works through its similarities to and differences from its forebears: for third-

wave feminists, they argue, ‘being humble enough to realize that our ideas are not so

new is one fine way to fight paralysis’.45 Like Sweet in his discussion of neo-

Victorianism, Henry detects a conflict between alliance and difference in third wavers’

conceptualisations of past and present feminist waves. Discussing specifically the third

wave’s relationship to and construction of the feminist movement of the 1960s and 70s,

she observes that ‘younger feminists may not be able to write the story of the second

wave in such a way as to highlight our easy alliance with it, nor will we be able to

effortlessly posit the superior nature of our feminism’.46

What transpires in Sweet’s and Henry’s observations in particular is the notion

that neo-Victorianism’s and third-wave feminism’s constructions of their respective

(and partially intersecting) histories function as means of defining more clearly their

own present, a concept which becomes especially apparent in relation to their politics of

gender and sex/uality. It is the characteristics and problematics of these historiographic

practices which I trace in the following section, and which serve as further illustrations

of the conceptual connections not only between neo-Victorian fiction’s and third-wave

feminism’s relationships to their respective pasts but also between their sexual politics.

Defining the present through the past: the politics of writing history

For Bobel, the ‘[recurring] tension between past and present [...] is just beginning to

produce what makes the third wave distinctive’,47 and this tension is based on similar

conflicts between continuity and disruption, between identification and difference, as

45
Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake (eds.), ‘We Learn America like a Script: Activism in the Third
Wave; or Enough Phantoms of Nothing’, Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp.40-54 (p.54).
46
Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister, p.15.
47
Bobel, New Blood, p.17.
 16

those we witness in neo-Victorian fiction’s engagement with the nineteenth-century

past. Adopting Karl Mannheim’s theoretical work on generations,48 Henry illustrates

how recent feminist discussions of the relationships between feminist waves have

employed both ‘positivist’ and ‘romantic-historical’ models, meaning these discourses

indicate a celebratory sense of progress as well as a nostalgic feeling of decline towards

feminist history.49 If a positivist stance thus evokes a sense of superiority and

development in relation to a supposedly inferior past, and if a romantic-historical view

instils feelings of insufficiency, discontent and unfulfilled longing for a bygone period,

then it is inevitable to draw parallels, here, between third-wave conceptions of feminist

history and neo-Victorian fiction’s reimagining of the Victorians, both of which focus

heavily on the politics of gender and sexuality in their attempts to define themselves

against their predecessors.

Ever since the first decade of the twentieth century, the Victorians have been

(re)defined in terms of their sexual politics and conceptions of gender, a process which,

as Simon Joyce puts it, has been frequently accompanied by later generations’

‘recognition of a surprising (and perhaps frightening) proximity’ to their predecessors,

despite their usually positivist views of their relationship to them.50 As early as the

1910s, Lytton Strachey famously criticised Victorian gender conventions which

rendered sexuality taboo and, for the remainder of the first half of the twentieth century,

the period remained characterised, both in the public imagination and in scholarship, by

its repressive attitudes towards sex. For Strachey and the Bloomsbury group in

particular the construction of the Victorians as prudish, conservative and hypocritical,

and the ‘explicit or tacit rejection of the cultural preference and social mores of the

48
See: Karl Mannheim, ‘The Problem of Generations’, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed.
by Paul Kecskemeti (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952), pp.276-322.
49
Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister, p.5.
50
Simon Joyce, The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007),
p.16.
 17

Victorian world’,51 served as a convenient if inherently problematic means of

representing their own time and movement as progressive and modern.52

The 1960s, however, saw, among a more general resurgence of academic interest

in the nineteenth century, the uncovering of the Victorian sexual underground: Henry

Spencer Ashbee’s guide to pornographic books – Index Librorum Prohibitorum (1877)

– was republished in numerous editions,53 while texts such as Marcus Stevens’ The

Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century

Victorian England (1964) and H. Montgomery Hyde’s A History of Pornography

(1964) were followed soon after by Ronald Pearsall’s The Worm in the Bud: The World

of Victorian Sexuality (1969). All of these publications contributed to what Miles Taylor

has aptly described as the ‘[transformation] of what was known about the Victorians –

from suburbs to slums, religion to riots, drink and drugs, and class and sex in all their

varieties’.54 Yet, Marcus’ aim to ‘restore [the Victorians] for the first time to their full

historical dimensions’ was only partially achieved.55 Rather than diversifying their

image, the newly uncovered ‘contrast between the furtive gloom of the agonized and

repressed, and the gay life so evidently there for all to see’ served,56 according to

Kaplan, as ‘proof positive of the Victorians’ collective duplicity and double

standards’.57 Thus, similar to the motifs of Strachey and his contemporaries, the

Victorians ‘offered to the 1960s’ generation confirmation of its own modernity’, not

51
Kaplan, Victoriana, p.6.
52
Julie Anne Taddeo, Lytton Strachey and the Search for Modern Sexual Identity (New York:
Harrington Park Press, 2002), p.12 and p.14.
53
These new editions of Ashbee’s index have often been made more accessible for English-speaking
audiences through the omission of entries referring to Latin, Spanish or German texts, whilst, similarly,
the original title has been translated into English alternatives such as Bibliography of Prohibited Books
(New York: Jack Brussel, 1962), A Complete Guide to Forbidden Books (North Hollywood: Brandon
House Books, 1966), Index of Forbidden Books (London: Sphere, 1969) and Forbidden Books of the
Victorians (London: Odyssey Press, 1970).
54
Miles Taylor, ‘Introduction’, The Victorians Since 1901: Histories, Representations and Revisions,
ed. by Miles Taylor and Michael Wolff (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp.1-13 (p.8).
55
Steven Marcus, [1963] The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-
Nineteenth-Century Victorian England (London: Transaction Publishers, 2009), p.xix and p.xxi.
56
Ronald Pearsall, [1969] The Worm in the Bud: The World of Victorian Sexuality (Strout: Sutton
Publishing, 2003), p.xvii.
57
Cora Kaplan, Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism (London: Routledge, 2007), p.86.
 18

least because changing and increasingly tolerant laws and attitudes towards sex/uality

‘made the Victorians seem very old, different and, above all, very unenlightened’.58

Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman represents a fictional manifestation of this

notion: the novel engages, as Duncker notes, ‘with many discourses of Victorian

writing, fiction and non-fiction, if only to despise the Victorians and their sexual

hypocrisy’,59 and it does so without any apparent self-consciousness regarding those

constructions.

Fowles’ as well as Rhys’ literary critiques of Victorian gender politics (and, in

Rhys’ case, their intersection with racial identity) and studies such as Hyde’s, Marcus’

and Pearsall’s were indicators of both Victorianist scholarship’s and neo-Victorian

fiction’s focus on issues surrounding gender and sexuality, encouraged all the more by

the emergence of feminist and women’s studies in the 1960s and 1970s. From the 1980s

and 1990s onward novelists in particular began to turn to the nineteenth-century past at

a greater and, from then on, drastically increasing frequency. Angela Carter’s Nights at

the Circus (1984), Byatt’s Possession, Margaret Forster’s Lady’s Maid (1990), Michèle

Roberts’ In the Red Kitchen (1990) and Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things (1992) are only a

few examples of the rising tide of neo-Victorian fiction which was to flood the literary

market in the 1990s and the early 2000s and whose representations of the nineteenth

century have provoked the continuing interest of (feminist) literary critics in neo-

Victorianism’s sexual and textual politics. As Jeannette King observes, contemporary

neo-Victorian novels, more than any other kind of historical fiction, ‘tend to be

characterised by their engagement with gender issues’,60 an engagement which has

resulted in diverse analyses and responses by scholars over the past decade in particular.

Critics’ investigations have identified romantic-historical as well as positivist

58
Taylor, ‘Introduction’, p.8.
59
Duncker, ‘Neo-Victorian Fictions’.
60
King, The Victorian Woman Question, p.2.
 19

motivations in the genre’s obsession with issues surrounding sex and gender.

Gutleben’s proposition that the majority of neo-Victorian fiction published since the

1960s develops neither literary practice nor contemporary ethics suggests that these

textual returns to the past perform almost exclusively a romantic-historical notion of the

Victorians, that is, they express – through form and content – a yearning for a past

which, supposedly, they favour over the present in which they are conceived. Marie-

Luise Kohlke has been equally cautious regarding the progressive potentials of neo-

Victorian fiction’s acts of looking backward and suggests that many examples of the

genre – and particularly those focusing on issues of gender and sexuality – put forward

a positivist view of history. Neo-Victorianism, she argues, represents for our age what

Orientalism was for the Victorians, only that ‘a displacement occurs from the spatial to

the temporal axis’ in that the ‘unexplored geographical “dark areas”‘ of Orientalism are

replaced by the nineteenth-century past and its sexscape in what she terms the ‘new

Orientalism’.61 Therefore, Kohlke continues, this sexualisation of the Victorians

functions for the twenty-first century as it did for Strachey and, later, for the 1960s: as a

way to ‘conveniently reassert our own supposedly enlightened stance towards sexuality

and social progress’, establishing a positivist image of ‘insurmountable difference in

sexual sophistication between the Victorians – “them” – and us’.62

Positivist processes are also at work in third-wave and, indeed, second-wave

conceptions of feminist history, particularly in their utilisation of generational

metaphors, be they based on familial structures (as in the notion of feminist foremothers

and sisters) or rooted in the marine imagery of tides (as in the concept of feminist

waves).63 These metaphors exemplify a number of issues with generational conceptions

61
Marie-Luise Kohlke, ‘The Neo-Victorian Sexsation: Literary Excursions into the Nineteenth
Century Erotic’, Probing the Problematics: Sex and Sexuality, ed. by Marie-Luise Kohlke and Luisa Orza
(Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2008), pp.345-356 (p.352).
62
Ibid., p.345 and p.347.
63
Third-wave feminism’s continuation of the wave metaphor and of the genealogical
conceptualisation of women’s history has been subject of much scholarly debate and is discussed in detail
 20

of history because of the positivist relationship between past and present they establish.

Illustrating feminism in genealogical terms and mapping onto those genealogies the

dynamics of mother-daughter relationships in particular has frequently come to be

understood as a claim to the daughter’s superiority to her mother. While such metaphors

enable feminists to establish historical connections and to create a sense of continuity

for the feminist project, matrilineal and wave imagery also relies ‘on a positivist

understanding of generations founded on the idea of progress in which each generation

is understood to go beyond the generation which came before it’.64 Thus, the very

concept which enabled feminists of the 1960s and 70s to situate themselves within a

feminist history also made it possible for them to mark their perceived progress and

superiority toward their foremothers, indeed, to come into existence as the second wave,

and the same applies to feminism’s third wave. Within such a context, then, ‘“mothers”

are inevitably lacking so that “daughters” may succeed where they have failed’,65 and

each new wave exceeds the achievements of the previous one, meaning the present

always surpasses the past.

As with neo-Victorian fiction, these notions of superiority have predominantly

(although not exclusively) focused on issues surrounding sex and sexuality. Here, a

positivist understanding of feminist generations often necessitates the acceptance and

utilisation of the traditional gender roles feminists seek to challenge. As radical second-

wave voices such as Germaine Greer and Kate Millet were overshadowed by those who

associated ‘genital sexuality, promiscuity, emotional non-involvement, and

invulnerability’66 with men and equated women with ‘love, sensuality, humour,

tenderness [and] commitment’,67 feminists of the 1960s and 70s became almost

in Chapter One.
64
Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister, pp.59-60.
65
Ibid., p.72.
66
Ibid., p.86.
67
Robin Morgan, ‘Lesbianism and Feminism: Synonyms or Contradictions’, We Are Everywhere: A
Historical Sourcebook in Gay and Lesbian Politics, ed. by Mark Blasius and Shane Phelan (New York:
 21

universally identified as anti-sex. For third wavers, this representation functions as a

means of emphasising their own open assertion of their sexualities and their espousal of

an increasingly sexualised consumer culture as a site of potential empowerment despite

(and also because of) its commodification of women’s bodies. Rebecca Munford

highlights the tendency of third-wave writers such as Rene Denfeld to ‘[perpetuate] an

understanding of second-wave feminism where radical feminist anti-pornography

campaigners such as [Andrea] Dworkin, [Catherine] MacKinnon and [Robin] Morgan

stand in for all second-wave feminist activity’, a generalisation which, she continues,

is complicit with a broader erasure of the multifarious feminist approaches to

pornography, sex and sexuality in the 1970s and 1980s – ranging from the diverse
writings of Angela Carter and Nancy Friday to the contributions of feminist sex
workers such as Annie Sprinkle.68

Consequently, such attempts to define the third wave as sexually tolerant in contrast to a

supposedly prudish second wave leads, paradoxically, to the exclusion of feminist

voices which cannot so easily be categorised as pro or anti-sex.

Henry highlights that these positivist historiographic tendencies are manifestations

Routledge, 1997), pp.424-434 (p.430).

68
Rebecca Munford, ‘BUST-ing the Third Wave: Barbies, Blowjobs and Girlie Feminism’,
Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualization of Western Culture, ed. by Feona Attwood (London: I.B. Tauris,
2009), pp.183-198 (p.187). While Munford and other critics discuss the work of prominent writers of the
1990s, such as Denfeld, Katie Roiphe and Naomi Wolf, as representatives of the third wave (see: Bobel,
New Blood, p.15; Dawn Keetley [ed.] ‘Toward a Third Wave’, Public Women, Public Words: A
Documentary History of American Feminism, Vol. 3 [Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002], pp.430-439),
self-identified third wavers Heywood and Drake, and Deborah L. Siegel consider these authors as part of
what they see as an inherently conservative postfeminism (Heywood and Drake, ‘Introduction’, p.1; and
Deborah L. Siegel, ‘Reading between the Waves: Feminist Historiography in a “Postfeminist”
Movement’, Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism, ed. by Leslie Heywood and Jennifer
Drake [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997], pp.55-82). Astrid Henry argues that
Denfeld’s, Roiphe’s and Wolf’s negative attitudes toward second-wave feminism exemplify a distinct
difference between American third-wave feminism and its British counterpart (Astrid Henry, ‘Feminist
Identities: Waves, Generations, and Consumer Pleasure’, paper presented at Intergenerational
Perspectives: Mothers, Daughters, and the Feminine/Feminist, University of Oxford [13th September
2010]). Yet, other American third wavers (including Heywood and Drake, and Piepmeier and Dicker)
strongly advocate a productive relationship with the second wave, while British writer Natasha Walter
heavily criticised the women’s movement of the 1960s and 70s in The New Feminism (London: Virago,
1998). For the purposes of this thesis, I therefore propose a conceptual and chronological rather than
geographical distinction between these particular writers and other third-wave works. As I will discuss
shortly, earlier examples of third-wave writing tend to lack the historiographic awareness evident in later
third-wave writing. This is not to suggest that third-wave texts of the late 1990s and early 2000s do not
critique the second wave; rather, I argue that in the past decade the third wave has begun to be more
reflective regarding the (positivist) politics of such critiques.
 22

of Diane Fuss’ notion of ‘disidentification’,69 a concept which proves equally applicable

to neo-Victorian fiction (be it motivated by notions of superiority or, as Gutleben

suggests, nostalgia). Disidentification, Fuss proposes, describes ‘an identification that

one fears to make only because one has already made it’,70 a process which highlights

the identity politics implicit in third-wave and neo-Victorian constructions of the past.

Both are characterised by a tension created through the simultaneous desires to be

similar and yet different to their perceived predecessors. It is the desire to be different

which, as Kohlke and Henry have noted, often spawns positivist accounts of progress

and improvement, but all too often these narratives betray a fear of potentially sharing

and replicating the flaws assigned to the supposedly inferior past, be it feminist,

Victorian or both.

The desire to be ‘better’ than previous feminist movements or the Victorians is

thus also a desire sparked by the fear of being the same, of having failed to progress, of

repeating the perceived mistakes by other feminists, or of living, still, in a society in

which gender inequality is maintained and reinforced via social, cultural and political

structures and which is, potentially, uncomfortably similar to the nineteenth century.

Yet, in the past decade third-wave writers and neo-Victorian authors have turned a

reflective eye upon these historiographic practices and their blindspots, and these

critical reappraisals – influenced in particular by postmodern and poststructuralist

theorisations of history and identity – have become a defining feature of both

phenomena in the new millennium and have led critics to further consider the feminist

potentials of neo-Victorian fiction.

Beyond (dis)identification: historiographic potentials

For the third wave, as for neo-Victorian fiction, ‘history, like sexual identity, is textual:

69
Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister, p.14.
70
Diane Fuss, Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, 1995), p.7.
 23

constantly shifting, continually in production, and always open to question’.71

Consequently, feminist history, like neo-Victorian fiction in its depiction of the

Victorian past, presents us with a ‘mediated image’ consisting of constructions shaped

by the socio-cultural contexts and preoccupations of those who write it and.72 As

Deborah L. Siegel notes, ‘the question of whose story gets told is particularly loaded for

women’, and is, indeed, one of the prime motivators of feminist history and

historiography, driven as they are by the need to uncover stories which ‘have been

excluded from the master narratives of history’.73 As King highlights, historical fiction

can form ‘part of the wider project, pioneered by second wave feminism, of rewriting

history from a female perspective, and recovering the lives of women who have been

excluded and marginalised’.74

Since the 1990s, ‘feminist discourses within and outside the academy have taken a

self-reflexive turn’,75 leading feminists to interrogate more critically the selection and

construction processes involved in their own work as much as they heed these processes

in accounts that have traditionally silenced women.76 Therefore, at the turn of the new

millennium,

part of the ongoing project of feminism should be the attempt to map out and
assess which different pieces in the jigsaw of feminism get picked up and why;
it should also be asking, at any given time and place, who is selecting the
fragments, and however unintendedly – whose particular interests their delivery
serves.77

It is this critical engagement with feminist historiographic practice which renders third-

wave – rather than second-wave – feminist theory a fitting analytical framework for

neo-Victorian fiction. While the feminist history project was born out of the feminist
71
‘history, postmodern’, The Women’s Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third-Wave
Feminism, Vol.1, ed. by Leslie Heywood (London: Greenwood Press, 2006), pp.177-178 (p.177).
72
Joyce, The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror, p.4.
73
Siegel, ‘Reading between the Waves’, p.61.
74
King, The Victorian Woman Question, pp.3-4.
75
Ibid., p.59.
76
Ibid., p.61.
77
Lynne Segal, ‘Only Contradictions on Offer: Anglophone Feminism at the Millennium’, Feminist
Locations: Global and Local, Theory and Practice, ed. by Marianne DeKoven (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 2001), pp.37-59 (p.57).
 24

movement of the 1960s and 70s, the work generated in this period rarely engages with

the means through which it created an alternative history of women’s voices, and this is

not least because the second wave ran parallel to the development of those postmodern

theories which were later to become the very foundation of the third wave. Where the

second wave was, and very much had to be, preoccupied with the then revolutionary

task of writing women into history, third wavers of the 1990s were the first generation

who ‘experience[d] hard-fought feminist gains as fundamental rights’,78 while at the

same time the postmodern historiographic and poststructuralist theories of the 1970s

and 1980s had become embedded in their higher education.79 Heywood and Drake, for

example, describe themselves and their generation as ‘young feminists who grew up

with equity feminism, got gender feminism in college, along with poststructuralism’,80

while Deborah L. Siegel notes that ‘postmodernist, poststructuralist, and multiculturalist

critiques have shaped the form and the content of third wave expressions’.81 The result

is not only a continuation of the feminist history project but also an engagement with

the very processes employed in the task of creating these new histories as well as an

understanding of ‘feminist history as process, or […] as perpetually in motion’.82

It is this appropriation of postmodern historiography in particular which we also

find in neo-Victorian fiction of the late 1990s and early 2000s rather than in the earlier

examples of the genre published in the wake and at the height of the second wave, such

as Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea and Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which do

not share the preoccupation with historiographic concepts which characterises so much

78
Dicker and Piepmeier, ‘Introduction’, p.10.
79
Significant contributions to cultural history and postmodern historiography across disciplines
during this time include: Michel Foucault, [1978] The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: The Will to
Knowledge, trans. by R. Hurley (London: Penguin Books, 1998); Conal Furay and Michael J. Salevouris,
Methods and Skills of History: A Practical Guide (Wheeling: Harlan Davidson, 1988); Linda Hutcheon,
A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988); Hayden White,
Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (London: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1973).
80
Heywood and Drake, ‘Introduction’, p.3.
81
Deborah L. Siegel, ‘The Legacy of the Personal: Generating theory in Feminism’s Third Wave’,
Hypatia, Special Issue: Third Wave Feminisms, 12:3 (Summer 1997), pp.46-75 (p.46).
82
Siegel, ‘Reading between the Waves’, p.60.
 25

neo-Victorian fiction from the 1990s onward. As King notes:

what perhaps characterises more recent historical fiction [...] is its more direct
engagement with the historical process itself, often blending historical
documentation and events with its imagined narratives and characters. This
characteristic relates the new historical fiction to postmodern trends in
historiography itself.83

This relationship between recent historical fiction and postmodern historiography,

together with Linda Hutcheon’s concept of historiographic metafiction, form the very

basis of Heilmann and Llewellyn’s proposition for a more thorough definition of neo-

Victorianism and, by extension, of neo-Victorian fiction. Historiographic metafiction,

according to Hutcheon, consciously and explicitly ‘attempts to demarginalize the

literary through confrontation with the historical [...] both thematically and formally’ by

challenging history’s claim to truth ‘in historiography and by asserting that both history

and fiction are discourses, human constructs, signifying systems’.84 Accordingly,

Heilmann and Llewellyn suggest that neo-Victorianism equally involves ‘a series of

metatextual and metahistorical conjunctions’,85 meaning it is a text’s awareness of itself

as an artificial construct and its implicit or explicit comments on the processes through

which it (re)writes, and thus contributes to, history that renders it neo-Victorian and

‘more than historical fiction set in the nineteenth century’.86

Neo-Victorianism, or Victoriana, as Cora Kaplan has termed it, can therefore be

considered a ‘discourse through which both the conservative and progressive elements

of Anglophone cultures reshaped their ideas of the past, present and future’.87 Rather

than subscribing to Gutleben’s thesis that neo-Victorian fiction is inescapably nostalgic

and conservative, Heilmann and Llewellyn put forward that it is usually an engagement

with metatextuality and metahistory which distinguishes the progressive and often more

83
King, The Victorian Woman Question, p.3.
84
Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, p.108 and p.93.
85
Heilmann and Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism, p.4.
86
Ibid.
87
Cora Kaplan, Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism (London: Routledge, 2007), p.4, my
emphasis.
 26

liberal examples of the genre from those which fall under Gutleben’s category of

nostalgic postmodernism. Neo-Victorianism, then, exclusively encompasses those texts

which are ‘in some respect [...] self-consciously engaged with the act of

(re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision concerning the Victorians’,88 while

those which are ‘inherently conservative [...] lack imaginative re-engagement with the

period and instead recycle and deliver a stereotypical and unnuanced reading of the

Victorians and their literature and culture’,89 a definition which, as I discuss later on in

this introduction, is both more strict but also highly relevant to the definition this thesis

employs.

Neo-Victorian fiction and third-wave feminism, then, are capable of rewriting

previous versions of history as well as of investigating their own accounts of the past

and the very concepts and structures they utilise in those representations. Third-wave

writers and critics have, in recent years, turned a particularly critical eye on the

limitations and potentials of the notion of feminist generations, highlighting that it can

be problematic, if not even self-defeating, as it excludes women who came of age

between the 1920s and the 1960s and, equally, does not account for feminists of the late

1970s and 80s, ‘who can be understood as neither “mothers” nor “daughters” within

feminism’s imagined family structure, [...] are frequently absent from recent discourse

on feminism’s (seemingly two) generations’.90 Neo-Victorianists have been equally

cautious about the artificial lineage their objects of study potentially create. As Joyce

notes, the conventional concept of historical emergence and the ‘temporality of

historical rupture’ are tempting ways of establishing and reading the relationship

between the Victorians and later generations, but they simplify the complex ‘multiple

overlapping processes of [historical] transition’.91 What ambitious authors of neo-

88
Heilmann and Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism, p.4.
89
Ibid.
90
Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister, p.4.
91
Joyce, The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror, p.7.
 27

Victorian fiction thus aim to do, is to question, and even subvert, ‘the conventional

modernist historiography, which sees “the Victorian” as superseded by something else –

variously termed “the modern,” “the Edwardian,” or “the Georgian”‘.92

It is because of this historiographic self-consciousness that, despite as well as due

to their attention to the past and their constant self-interrogation of their relationship

with history, both neo-Victorianism and third-wave feminism are undeniably and

inherently concerned with the present both as a problematic continuation and rupture

from the past. Several critics who have immersed themselves in the analysis of neo-

Victorian fiction in the past two decades have commented on this binary perspective.

Peter Widdowson, in his discussion of what he calls ‘contemporary re-visionary

fiction’, notes that ‘novelists are using fiction as history to explore how the scars of the

past persist into the present, how the past’s presence in the present determines the nature

of that present’.93 Heilmann and Llewellyn equally highlight that neo-Victorianism

‘[negotiates] the present […] through a range of (re)interpretations of the nineteenth

century’.94 Third-wave feminism, while frequently accused of being too preoccupied

with its history and feminism’s internal divisions, utilises the past to an equally

productive effect by using it to look forward and to engage more vigorously with its

own present by constructing a feminist past which is as problematic as it is

emboldening.95 Both neo-Victorian fiction and third-wave feminism, then, have the

potential, in Gillis, Howie and Munford’s words, to ‘indicate a crossroads where the

past and present meet in order to mark our trajectories for future feminist praxis’.96

92
One example, here, is Michel Faber’s sequel to The Crimson Petal and the White, a collection of
short stories which approaches the notion of historical periods with caution and humour when one of its
protagonists tells us he was ‘born on the day Queen Victoria died’ and insists, consequently, that he is not
a Victorian, but an Edwardian and possesses none of the characteristics usually attributed to the
Victorians. See Michel Faber, The Apple: New Crimson Petal Stories (London: Canongate, 2006), p.137.
93
Peter Widdowson, ‘Writing Back: Contemporary Re-visionary Fiction’, Textual Practice, 20:3
(2006), pp.491-507 (p.492).
94
Heilmann and Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism, p.3.
95
Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister, p.87.
96
Gillis, Howie and Munford, ‘Introduction’, p.xxxi.
 28

Consuming women: neo-Victorianism, third-wave feminism and the sexualisation

of culture

One issue in particular on which both neo-Victorian fiction and third-wave feminism

reflect through their representations of the sexual politics of past and present is their

simultaneous contribution to and critique of an increasingly sexualised culture of

consumerism. Third-wave politics in particular are often frame as both as a response to

and participation in what has variously become known as ‘striptease culture’,97

‘pornographication of the mainstream’,98 or the ‘sexualization of culture’,99 that is, the

increasing presence and visibility of sex in the public sphere, and particularly within all

areas of consumer culture, including for example the increasing use of nudity and

sexually explicit or pornified imagery in advertisement, WHSmith’s promotion of a

Playboy stationary range aimed at pre-teens, and fitness clubs that offer pole dancing

classes as a form of exercise.100 For third-wave feminists, the acceptance of postmodern

identity politics – that is, of identity as a constantly shifting construct ‘always inflected

by race, class, sexuality, religion, and educational status’101 – has, according to Danzy

Senna, provided ‘an awareness of the complexity and ambiguity of the world we have

inherited’.102 Like feminists of the second wave, third wavers actively critique

capitalism and the gendered power structures it enforces in the form of consumer and

beauty cultures. However, in contrast to their predecessors, they simultaneously

acknowledge that they play active parts in these structures and take pleasure from

participating in them. As Michele Miller puts is,

97
Brian McNair, Striptease Culture: Sex, Media and the Democratization of Desire (London:
Routledge, 2002), p.1.
98
Ibid., p.12.
99
Feona Attwood (ed.), ‘Introduction: The Sexualization of Culture’, Mainstreaming Sex: The
Sexualization of Western Culture (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), pp.xiii-xxiv (p.xiii).
100
See: Attwood, ‘Introduction’, p.xiv-xv; Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender,
Culture and Social Change (London: Sage, 2009); and Natasha Walter, Living Dolls: The Return of
Sexism (London: Virago, 2010).
2010)
101
Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister, p.44.
102
Danzy Senna, ‘To Be Real’, To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism,
ed. by Rebecca Walker (New York: Doubleday, 1995), pp.5-20 (p.20).
 29

within the third wave, feminists focus on a body politics that celebrates the
strength of the female sexual body, while recognizing that there are structural
forces, such as patriarchy and capitalism, applying power on them and
constraining the way they are expected to behave in the world. Instead of
rejecting beauty and sexuality, third wave feminists focus on asserting their
sexual selves, not necessarily for the male gaze but for themselves, allowing
them to be both subject and object in their own sexual lives.103

Third-wave feminists, then, attempt to critique – from the inside, as it were – an aspect

of contemporary culture from which, at the same time, they happily benefit and to

whose maintenance they at the same time eagerly contribute.104 Thus, ‘in the third-wave

paradigm, you could be a feminist aerobics instructor, a feminist exhibitionist, or a

feminist supermodel’,105 as Deborah Siegel suggests.

While several critics have attacked this supposedly contradictory practice, third-

wave feminists insist that although they are conscious that ‘shopping and buying

recreates the sexism, classism, heterosexism, racism, and imperialism that [they

struggle] against’, their participation in consumer culture also enables them to be agents

rather than objects, and to utilise that participation, therefore, to ‘form individual and

group identities and help to tell the world who we are, what we think, and what we

believe in’.106 The argument, then, is that women can only make themselves heard if

they utilise and manipulate existing structures for their own ends. As Judith Lorber puts

it, ‘third-wave feminism valorizes women’s agency and female sexuality as forms of

power’.107

This emphasis on agency is directly connected to two of third-wave feminism’s

most central and frequently debated concepts: individualism and choice. Because of the

third wave’s inclusiveness, its acceptance of multiplicity and contradiction, it must, by

103
Michelle Miller, Branding Miss G: Third Wave Feminists and the Media (Toronto: Sumach Press,
2008), p.67.
104
See also: Bobel, New Blood, p.22; Genz, ‘Third Way/ve’, p.340.
105
Deborah Siegel, Sisterhood Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p.147.
106
‘consumerism’, The Women’s Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third-Wave Feminism,
Vol.1, ed. by Leslie Heywood (London: Greenwood Press, 2006), pp.67-69 (p.67).
107
Judith Lorber, Gender Inequality: Feminist Theories and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005), p.275.
 30

extension, accept whatever political or sexual choices women make. As Snyder notes,

‘because politicized debate about sexuality once shattered the feminist movement

[during the so-called sex wars of the 1970s and 80s], third-wave feminism completely

embraces nonjudgmentalism and choice, sometimes to the point of blunting its critical

edge’.108 Consequently, women’s participation in pole dancing classes, their preference

for masochistic sexual practices, or their entry into sex work via prostitution or

pornography, are all, from a third-wave point of view, valid – and potentially even

feminist – choices providing women gain pleasure and/or a form of perceived

empowerment from them.109 However, without a critical examination of how these

choices are made, what desires propel them, and what their consequences are, the third

wave runs risk of becoming ‘an ideology of individual empowerment to make choices,

no matter what those choices are’.110

Perhaps surprisingly, neo-Victorian fiction’s return to the nineteenth century is

subject to similar complexities and paradoxes when it comes to the politics of

representation. Gutleben argues that neo-Victorian fiction’s seemingly progressive

denunciation of ‘the injustice towards some of [the nineteenth century’s] ill-used or

forgotten representatives such as women, the lower classes or homosexuals’ is not a

means of genuine subversion but functions, instead, as a ‘[posture] of indignation’

produced in line with market demands for ‘an aesthetics of the politically correct’.111

The critical and intellectual capabilities of such literary recoveries are, therefore, limited

to ‘the enterprise of rectification, rather than giving rise to an analysis of the flawed

situation’.112 In line with his perception of neo-Victorian fiction as a form of nostalgic

postmodernism, Gutleben’s verdict is that the genre’s return to the past is an

108
Snyder, ‘What Is Third-Wave Feminism’, p.191.
109
The concept of choice is further explored in relation to sex work in Chapter Four, which
investigates neo-Victorian fiction’s representation of prostitution.
110
Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister, p.45.
111
Gutleben, Nostalgic Postmodernism, p.10 and pp.11-12.
112
Ibid., p.169.
 31

unproductive one, both in light of its engagement with the past (which is an inherently

conservative one) and its treatment of the present, which apparently it fails to consider

at all. ‘A majority of these contemporary novels’, he argues, ‘are totally bereft of any

narrational or diegetic consideration about the present situation’ and ‘[feel] exempt from

any other political responsibility’ than the superficial rectification of historical wrongs

and absences.113 Consequently, ‘the ill-treatment of women, homosexuals or the lower

classes is not at all shocking or seditious’ and, far from being a taboo, has become,

instead, a neo-Victorian trope.114 Both implicitly and explicitly, Gutleben’s argument,

then, is based on the assumption that there is no connection between the Victorian past

and the present and, more importantly, that the issues to which neo-Victorian fiction

returns so repetitively (and, according to Gutleben, for no purpose but marketability),

are being returned to exclusively for an increase in sales figures.

To a certain extent, Gutleben raises an important issue in questioning the

motivation behind and effect of neo-Victorianism’s rewriting of women’s histories and

issues surrounding gender and sexuality. Its ethical motivations, due to neo-

Victorianism’s success on page as well as on screen, are an inherent and unavoidable

aspect of neo-Victorian fiction and have also been addressed by Heilmann and

Llewellyn, who draw attention to ‘the marketing and marketability of the contemporary

Victorian adaptation’ in television and film, particularly in relation to the

heteronomatization of Sarah Waters’ lesbian-centred neo-Victorian novels in their

adaptation to the small screen. But what is lacking in Gutleben’s analysis specifically

(and what is, in contrast, very much evident in Heilmann and Llewellyn’s as well as, to

a lesser extent, in Kohlke’s work) is an attention to neo-Victorian fiction’s potential for

self-conscious interrogations of its own constructions of the Victorians, and, more

specifically, of the manner in and means through which it rewrites that past, including

113
Gutleben, Nostalgic Postmodernism, p.169.
114
Ibid, p.11.
 32

the politics of its own profitability and status in sexualised consumer culture.

While Kohlke also acknowledges that the genre can ‘[comment] on our own

cultural obsession with sex’, she nevertheless criticises it for ‘reveal[ing] less about our

forebears and more the present-day sexual fantasies’,115 as if uncovering and conveying

knowledge of the Victorian past must be neo-Victorian fiction’s primary aim, and the

fictionalisation of and contribution to Victorianist scholarship its ultimate function. If

‘even overtly political uses of the sex trope in neo-Victorian fiction thus remain

questionable as avenues to genuine knowledge of the past’, then the implicit assumption

here is that authors create and readers expect an erotic lesson in the ‘true’ history of

sexuality from neo-Victorian fiction.116

Setting aside the fact that neo-Victorian fiction lays no claim to deliver such

‘genuine knowledge of the past’, we also need to ask what does. Is not the increasing

scholarly work on sex and the Victorians since the 1960s as motivated and influenced

by the new sexualisation of culture as neo-Victorian fiction is, and does not scholarship,

however unintentionally, also ‘[bear] risks of inadvertent recidivism and

obfuscation’?117 As Mark Llewellyn asks, ‘are not both groups of researchers

[Victorianists and neo-Victorianists] actually engaged in a similar, if not identical, task?

Is not the locus of their dual perspectives an approach to understanding the impact of

the nineteenth century and its enduring legacy into the present?’118 Kohlke’s insistence

that ‘we need to begin to ask not only what we know about sexuality, but how we know

it, and what “knowledge” derives only from eroticised fantasies of the Other’ hence

needs to be explicitly extended beyond neo-Victorian fiction and to the ‘sexsation’ of

scholarship.119

115
Kohlke, ‘The Neo-Victorian Sexsation’, p.348.
116
Ibid., p.350.
117
Ibid., p.353.
118
Mark Llewellyn, ‘What is Neo-Victorian Studies’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 1:1 (Winter 2008),
pp.164-185 (p.169).
119
Ibid., p.354.
 33

That studies of nineteenth-century sexual culture, like neo-Victorian fiction, can

function as historical peep-shows for researcher and reader alike is evident in the

playful paratext of the 2001 Faber & Faber hardback edition of Ian Gibson’s The

Erotomaniac,120 a biography of Henry Spencer Ashbee, the perhaps best-known and

most important Victorian collector and bibliographer of pornography. The front of the

dust jacket which fashions Gibson’s text contains a cut-out in the shape of a keyhole,

implying that opening this book and discovering its contents will allow us, the readers,

to peep through the hole and see something which we are not supposed to see,

something forbidden which would otherwise remain concealed behind closed doors.

Visible through the keyhole is, of course, the front of the book’s hardcover, but rather

than being blank, it reveals an indistinct black and white shape. Removing the dust

jacket, we discover a drawing of a woman whipping a man with a birch, and it becomes

clear that the shape we spied is, in fact, the man’s naked bottom together with a part of

his coat, which his punisher lifts up in order to expose his behind. What we see through

the keyhole is, then, merely a fragment with little or no meaning which gains

significance only if we uncover the whole picture, if we put it into context, as Gibson

does with Ashbee and Victorian pornography and society; but this physical play of

images also draws attention to the sexsation of the scholarship we encounter between

the covers.

In fiction, too, we find intertextual and metafictional allusions to neo-Victorian

fiction’s reputation for an abundance of sex. Brian Thompson’s highly self-referential

The Widow’s Secret (2008), for example, features a London-based upper-class heroine,

Bella Wallis, whose sensational novels – published under the male synonym Henry Ellis

120
A paratext, as defined by Gérard Genette, constitutes ‘all of the marginal or supplementary data
around the text. It comprises what one could call various thresholds: authorial and editorial (i.e., titles,
insertions, dedications, epigraphs, prefaces and notes); media related (i.e., interviews with the author,
official summaries) and private (i.e., correspondence, calculated or non-calculated disclosures)’. See:
Gérard Genette and Amy G. McIntosh, ‘The Proustian Paratexte’, SubStance, 17:2 (1988), pp.63-77
(p.63).
 34

Margam – frequently cause gentlemen to experience ‘uncomfortable stirrings in the

trouser department’.121 Thompson’s novel concerns itself with the act of writing such

fictions, and as readers we are repeatedly teased with sexually promising scenes, but,

conscious of the expectations of the genre’s sensationalism,122 Thompson refuses to

fulfil the expectation he raises. Early on in the novel, we learn that Bella is in a lesbian

relationship with Marie Claude, a beautiful French woman, and we are soon provided

with a promising view of her lover:

Lying in the bath was a pale young woman […] Her skin was the colour of
pearl, as though at any moment it would become completely translucent, which
only served to emphasize how delicately formed she was, how angelically
perfect. There was not a single blemish on her nakedness save one – a mole that
kept coy company with her navel.123

Yet, our hopes for a lesbian sex scene à la Sarah Waters are almost instantly

disappointed when we read that ‘Bella was in no mood for aesthetic ecstasies’.124

Neo-Victorian fiction and third-wave feminism, then, both occupy a paradoxical

position within sexualised Western consumer cultures as they contribute to as well as

benefit from it but at the same time also have the capability and willingness to

interrogate and critique their participation in the structures and politics of these

sexualised economies. This has become an almost inherent trait of third-wave feminist

writing, but in neo-Victorian fiction this kind of self-reflexive engagement with the

genre’s sexual politics as well as with its historiographic potentials remains, for the

most part, reserved for the more sophisticated and literary texts which fall into

Heilmann and Llewellyn’s definition of term ‘neo-Victorian’, while others provide

merely unquestioning illustrations of the phenomenon that has become the neo-

Victorian sexsation.

121
Brian Thompson, The Widow’s Secret (London: Atlantic Books, 2008), p.25.
122
Kohlke, ‘The Neo-Victorian Sexsation’, p.1.
123
Thompson, The Widow’s Secret, p.12.
124
Ibid.
 35

The feminist politics of neo-Victorian fiction: chapters and themes

This thesis restricts itself to neither the highly literary and sophisticated nor the purely

sexsational examples of neo-Victorian fiction. Rather, as the following chapters

demonstrate, the texts discussed here show that neo-Victorian fiction, through its

historical settings and/or references to the past, can function as an indicator of feminist

issues of the present independent from its intellectual ambitions, be it through an

unconscious replication of the Victorian discourses or practices which these texts set out

to critique, or be it through a critical and self-conscious interrogation of the issues they

thematise as well as of the means through which they do so. Unlike Heilmann and

Llewellyn, then, I use the term ‘neo-Victorian fiction’ to refer to texts which return to

the Victorian past through their settings, plots and/or themes, be they set in the

nineteenth century, or be they set after 1901 or even in the present day, whether they

function on metafictional or metahistorical levels or not.

Despite the conceptual allegiances and shared concerns of third-wave feminism

and neo-Victorianism which this introduction has outlined, the aim of this thesis is

certainly not to lay claim to neo-Victorian fiction as a third-wave feminist genre or to

argue that its authors engage explicitly and directly with third-wave feminist theory

outright. Rather, the following chapters investigate neo-Victorian fiction’s

representations of feminist issues from a contemporary feminist perspective by using

third-wave theory, both because of its conceptual commonalities with neo-Victorianism

and its direct engagement with the respective themes each of the five chapters explores.

In doing so, the thesis highlights neo-Victorian fiction’s concern not only with the

history of the feminist themes it addresses but also with their continuing prevalence in

Western culture and feminist theory.

Chapter One will continue some of the discussions already begun in this

introduction by considering matrilineal narratives both as a significant concept in

 36

feminist theory and as a recurring motif in recent neo-Victorian fiction, most notably

Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith (2002) and Kate Walbert’s A Short History of Women

(2009). In doing so, it proposes that matrilineal narratives in neo-Victorian fiction can

function as comments on the (dis)continuities between feminist pasts and presents at the

turn of the millennium and, at the same time, as metafictional reflections on the nature

neo-Victorian fiction’s relationship to nineteenth-century history.

One concern which characterises both Walbert’s and Waters’ novel is the notion

of hereditary mental illness in women, and Chapter Two turns to this issue, which for

the Victorians was so intrinsically linked to female genealogy, by focusing on neo-

Victorian fiction’s representation of the madwoman. Investigating not only the

representation of this infamous Victorian figure but also the power structures inherent in

her treatment and the narrativisation and pathologisation of the female body, I argue that

Sebastian Faulks’ Human Traces (2005) and Megan Chance’s An Inconvenient Wife

(2004) can be considered as hystoriographic metafictions, that is, they contribute to the

writing of the history of hysteria while also reflecting contemporary issues surrounding

feminist therapy and women’s mental health.

Returning once more to Waters’ Fingersmith but considering also Belinda

Starling’s The Journal of Dora Damage (2007), the third chapter turns away from

medical narratives of women’s bodies to the representations of their sexualities in

pornography. Starling and Waters, I suggest, return to the nineteenth-century

pornography trade not only to explore the roots of today’s vast sex trade as a feminist

concern but also to interrogate women’s relationships to pornography, including the

liberatory and exploitative potentials it may hold for them. Yet, in doing so, both novels

also reflect on the textual politics of their own sexsationalism.

Moving from the representational politics of textual, imagined sex to its physical

sale, Chapter Four explores the economies of prostitution by investigating more closely
 37

neo-Victorian representations of sex work in Linda Holman’s The Linnet Bird (2004)

and Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), texts which, to different

extents, illustrate and explore the correlation between Victorian and twenty-first century

(feminist) discourses on sex work and which ‘pimp’ the neo-Victorian prostitute for

their own ambiguous textual and political purposes.

The final chapter of this thesis, then, traces turns to a combination of the issues

addressed in previous sections by considering the gendered developments and

problematics of life writing. Through an analysis of Gaynor Arnold’s Girl in a Blue

Dress (2008) and Margaret Forster’s Keeping the World Away (2006), I argue that neo-

Victorian fiction can function as third-wave feminist biography, that is, as biography

which utilises as well as critically engages with the potentials and challenges that

postmodernist and third-wave theories surrounding history, gender and identity pose to

the genre of life writing and its practices.

The conclusion to this thesis will synthesise the feminist politics of neo-Victorian

fiction and review the effectiveness of the genre as a form of feminist enquiry, before

then turning to some of the blind spots of the textual mirror which I evoked in the first

pages of this thesis in order to point towards areas of investigation which remain

un(der)explored.
 38

CHAPTER ONE
(Re)Writing genealogies: matrilinealism, third-wave feminism and
neo-Victorian fiction

If the daughter is a mocking memory to the mother – then the mother

is a horrid warning to her daughter. ‘As I am, so you will be.’

Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman (1979)1

In The Sadeian Woman, Angela Carter explores the significance of women and their

sexualities in the pornographic writings of the Marquis de Sade, as well as discussing

the role of the pornographer himself. Through an analysis of these works’ protagonists

(the female libertine and the virtuous female victim), Carter considers, among other

issues, de Sade’s representations of relationships between mothers and daughters. In the

epigraph above, she illustrates the potential influence a matrilineal history can have on a

daughter’s life. Both the idea of the daughter as ‘a mocking memory’ and the notion of

the mother as ‘a horrid warning’ acknowledge that a daughter’s awareness of her

mother’s past and her consciousness of being her mother’s progeny can have a

significant impact on the way she performs her own identity. As Carter suggests, this

performance is characterised by a paradoxical connection between imitation of and

escape from the inherited maternal narrative, since the daughter can re-enact as well as

alter it, but can never wholly free herself from her existence as her mother’s sequel.

It is in this capacity – as a relationship congenitally defined by simultaneous

proximity and distance, a tension between past and present, between similarity and

difference – that the matrilineal metaphor has gained significance both in feminism and

neo-Victorian fiction. Charting first the history and development of the matrilineal

metaphor in feminist discourse, this chapter then moves on to an analysis of the

1
Angela Carter, [1979] The Sadeian Woman (London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2006), p.144.
 39

matrilineal narratives in Kate Walbert’s A Short History of Women (2009) and Sarah

Waters’ Fingersmith (2002) in order to explore two interrelated functions of

matrilinealism in neo-Victorian fiction: first, the ways in which it facilitates the

exploration of female and feminist identities and issues in the present through the

establishment of a relationship with the past while at the same time prompting the

interrogation and destabilisation of a generational conception of that relationship;

second, the chapter investigates matrilineal narratives in their function as metafictional

comments on neo-Victorian fiction’s relationship to the (nineteenth-century) past in

order to further highlight the genre’s historiographic similarities to third-wave feminism

and, hence, its suitability as a critical framework for the exploration of feminist issues in

neo-Victorian fiction.

Feminist genealogies: histories and contexts

Entwined with the image of feminist ‘waves’, the ‘matrophor’ was first adopted by the

women’s movements in Britain and the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s.2 In contrast, the

nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century predecessors of this self-designated ‘second

wave’ had favoured imagery which reflected the notion that their movement was an

unprecedented but inevitable development in women’s history, and hence they

employed images of eruption and ignition, such as ‘volcanoes, lava, and fire’,3 to

characterise their work.4 Initially, neither American nor British second-wave feminists

looked to their nineteenth and early-twentieth-century predecessors when their

2
Rebecca Dakin Quinn, ‘An Open Letter to Institutional Mothers’, Generations: Academic
Feminists in Dialogue, ed. by. Devoney Looser and E. Ann Kaplan (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1997), pp.174-182 (p.179). Quinn uses the term ‘matrophor’ to denote ‘the persistent
nature of maternal metaphors in feminism’ (p.179).
3
Marlene LeGates, In Their Time: A History of Feminism in Western Society (London: Routledge,
2001), p.188.
4
This choice of imagery – of a volcano, which can erupt repeatedly, and of lava, which spreads at a
rapid pace after an eruption – appears particularly suitable considering the multiple generations of women
involved in this first wave of feminism between the mid-nineteenth century and the 1910s. New Woman
writers such as Sarah Grand did also employ wave metaphors, but not to the same effect as feminists of
the 1960s and 70s.
 40

movements emerged: feminists in the U.S. saw their origins in the New Left and civil

rights movements of the 1960s,5 while those in Britain – for whom ‘the most prominent

social division centred on class rather than race’ – primarily identified with radical left-

wing politics.6 The New Left, however, did not consider women’s issues a priority,7

and, as Juliet Mitchell demonstrated in ‘Women: the Longest Revolution’ (1966),8

Marxism, while focused on issues of social class, failed to recognise the oppression of

the female sex entirely.9 As a consequence, it was during the early years of the second

wave that, in Astrid Henry’s words, ‘women began to identify the previous century’s

movement as their history and their political foundation’.10 In both the U.S. and Britain

feminists established a generational and familial framework which, through the wave

metaphor and the matrophor, categorised the feminist activities of the nineteenth and

early twentieth centuries and of the 1960s and 1970s as ‘two moments in the same

movement’.11 This generational conceptualisation has since dominated discourses

surrounding feminism’s history and development and has become a crucial means of

describing shifts in feminist politics.

For second-wave feminists, designating the women’s movements of the

nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries as their foremothers enabled them to locate

their cause ‘within the longer trajectory of feminism’s history’ and to ‘validate

feminism at a time when it was often ridiculed as silly and not politically serious’.12

Identifying themselves as part of a feminist genealogy thus also encouraged the feminist

movement of the 1960s and 70s to seek empowerment through the recovery of women’s

5
Astrid Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister: Generational Conflict and Third-Wave Feminism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), p.52.
6
Sue Thornham, ‘Second Wave Feminism’, The Routledge Companion to Feminism and
Postfeminism, ed. by Sarah Gamble (London: Routledge, 2001), pp.29-42 (p.28).
7
Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister, p.53.
8
See: Juliet Mitchell, ‘Women: The Longest Revolution’, New Left Review, 40 (December 1966),
pp.11-37.
9
Thornham, ‘Second Wave Feminism’, p.38.
10
Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister, pp.57-58.
11
Ibid., p.53.
12
Ibid., p.58 and p.53.
 41

narratives from the past, which in previous decades had remained invisible or even

purposely concealed. How substantial such recoveries and reconstructions were to the

conception of second-wave feminist identities and ideologies is evident in the amount of

first-wave writing included alongside second-wave pieces in publications of the time as

well as in second wavers discussions of their predecessors’ politics.13

However, unlike the close generational connection between second and third-

wave feminism upon which the mother-daughter dyad can be mapped with relative ease

and to which it often applies literally, the relationship second wavers established

between themselves and the first wave ‘cannot so easily be represented as familial’.14

Consequently, in order to designate their political heritage in the women’s movement of

the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, feminists of the 1960s and 70s first had

to denounce the ‘wasted generation’ of their biological mothers by committing,15 as

Phyllis Chesler puts it, psychological matricide.16 By claiming that feminism died in the

1920s instead of ‘recognizing the ways in which [it] continued to exist [... and] may

have been transformed’ after many suffragettes had given up their struggle at the onset

of World War I,17 second wavers were able to claim that feminism was ‘reborn’ with

their movement,18 rendering them the daughters of what they considered the only other

feminist period in history, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Paradoxically, to

establish their place in feminist history and reinforce the validity of their concerns, they

felt the need to relinquish their biological mothers’ and their grandmothers’ generations

in order to claim their matrilineage in the more distant past and, therefore, their

identities as feminists in the present.19 For many second-wave feminists, then, feminism

13
Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister, pp.73-74.
14
Ibid., p.3.
15
Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Bantam
Books, 1970), p.15.
16
Phyllis Chesler, Letters to a Young Feminist (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1997), p.55.
17
Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister, p.71.
18
Ibid., p.66.
19
Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister, p.72.
 42

provided the opportunity to not become like their biological mothers and they perceived

their denunciation of them as a vital step in defining themselves as feminists. Here, the

matrophor’s problematic emphasis on age differences proves self-defeating to the

project of feminist history as it facilitates the exclusion of these biological mothers, that

is, of four decades of women, thus supporting the notion that feminism can simply

disappear or die as quickly as it has come into existence.

Although the first wave ‘had shown how effectively [women] could mobilise to

campaign for specific reforms in the areas of matrimonial law, property ownership,

child custody rights, work and educational opportunities, and government regulation of

sexual morality’,20 the matrilineal relationship second-wave feminists established so

selectively with these women through the utilisation of the matrophor was by no means

straightforward. As Marlene LeGates notes, that so many of these issues were still on

the agenda of the second wave led feminist historians of the late 1960s and early 1970s

to criticise their fin-de-siècle predecessors for not having achieved more than they did.21

Such frustration is palpable, for example, in Eva Figes’ Patriarchal Attitudes (1970)

and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1971). Figes highlights the alleged superior

insight of feminism’s second wave when she remarks that ‘it did not occur to’ Florence

Nightingale that ‘for an intelligent, educated woman, nursing was not so much a career

as a form of martyrdom’.22 Equally, Greer invalidates the first wave’s achievements by

juxtaposing the outdated ‘genteel middle-class ladies’ and ‘old suffragettes’ of the

previous era with the ‘middle-class women’ of her ‘new’ and ‘younger’ wave.23

Continuing the utilisation of the wave metaphor and the matrophor, third-wave

feminists have profited from its use in comparable ways. By representing their feminism

as part of an ongoing history of political struggle, ‘[t]his generation enters into

20
Valerie Sanders, ‘First Wave Feminism’, The Routledge Companion to Feminism and
Postfeminism, ed. by Sarah Gamble (London: Routledge, 2001), pp.16-28 (p.26).
21
LeGates, In Their Time, p.237.
22
Eva Figes, Patriarchal Attitudes (London: Virago, 1978), p.155.
23
Germaine Greer, [1970] The Female Eunuch (London: Granada Publishing Limited, 1971), p.11.
 43

feminism through both rejecting the imagined post-feminism of their immediate

predecessors (and some of their peers) and reclaiming the feminism of the early second

wave’.24 One obvious but crucial difference to the second wave’s relationship to its

feminist foremothers is that women of the third wave are contemporaries – and often

both the biological as well as figurative daughters – of the second-wave generation

(who themselves were much less likely to have to face their foremothers directly). This

generational proximity has facilitated dialogue between feminists of both wave, and

since the turn of the millennium cross-generational conversation has become a popular

form in feminist scholarship in particular.25 While such pieces usually illustrate second

and third-wave feminists’ perceived similarities and differences between one another

within a context of mutual respect as well as scrutiny, they also frequently highlight the

assumptions and constructions on which each wave’s perception of the other is founded,

that is, the ways in which women construct images of their feminist mothers and/ or

daughters in accordance with or in contrast to their perceptions of themselves.

But while the third wave, due to this close, existing biological and figurative

relationship with a previous feminist generation, has no need to commit psychological

matricide, it nevertheless feels the need to reject the decade which, to many third

wavers, has by now become almost universally identified with backlash and as the

period when feminism, once again, was dead: the 1980s.26 Emulating the exclusion

from feminist historical records which the second wave had forced upon the period of

and between World War I and World War II, third wavers’ utilisation of a generational

framework and their construction of the 80s as an era of backlash supports the idea that
24
Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister, p.26.
25
Such pieces are numerous, and examples include: Roxanne Harde and Erin Harde, ‘Voices and
Visions: A Mother and Daughter Discuss Coming to Feminism and Being Feminist’, Catching a Wave:
Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century, ed. by Rory Dicker and Alison Piepmeier (Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 2003), pp.116-137; and Anne Firor Scott et al., ‘Women’s History in the
New Millennium: A Conversation across Three “Generations”’, Feminist Waves, Feminist Generations:
Life Stories from the Academy, ed. by Hokulani K. Aikau, Karla A. Erickson and Jennifer L. Pierce
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), pp.87-108.
26
See: Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women (London: Chatto and Windus,
1992).
 44

the women who were in their twenties and thirties during this time ‘can be understood

as neither “mothers” nor “daughters” within feminism’s imagined family structure’,27

and therefore they must ‘be metaphorically exiled from feminism’s [fictional] family’ in

order for the third wave to establish itself as the (sometimes proud and at other times

embarrassed) progeny of the second.28

Perhaps most prominently during its earlier years, the numerical identification of a

new wave also prompted some writers to declare their outright rejection of as well as

their perceived superiority over their second-wave mothers. Not dissimilar to Figes’ and

Greer’s attitudes towards the first wave, early third-wave writers such as Katie Roiphe

and Naomi Wolf – and shortly after also Rene Denfeld and Natasha Walter – have

striven to advocate the second wave as outdated, erroneous and as inappropriate for the

cultural landscape of the late-twentieth-century Western world.29 To varying degrees, all

four authors claim that feminism (a term which they frequently use as a synonym for

radical second-wave feminism) has created more problems than it has remedied and has,

in fact, itself become the issue. As Imelda Whelehan puts it, for these women ‘the more

potent legacies of feminism lie forgotten and the Second Wave comes instead to be

remembered as that of whining victimhood and passivity’.30 Once again, then, the

(literal and figurative) feminist mother is identified as old and unsuitable, serving as a

means to emphasise the daughter’s embodiment of innovation and improvement, even

leading Walters to baptise her particular brand of feminism ‘the new feminism’.31 In

27
Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister, p.27.
28
Ibid., p.4.
29
See: Katie Roiphe, The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism (London: Back Bay Books,
1993); Naomi Wolf, Fire With Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1993); Natasha Walter, The New Feminism (London: Virago, 1998); Rene
Denfeld, The New Victorians: A Young Woman’s Challenge to the Old Feminist Order (New York:
Warner Books, 1995).
30
Imelda Whelehan, The Feminist Bestseller: From Sex and the Single Girl to Sex and the City
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p.166.
31
Walter, The New Feminism, p.4. Walter later realigned her opinions on the relevance of second-
wave feminist politics in the twenty-first century in Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (London: Virago,
2010), where she comments that she ‘was entirely wrong’ when proclaiming that there was no longer a
need for feminism to focus on ‘how women made love, how they dressed, whom they desired’ and
 45

Roiphe’s case, feminism represents a set of restrictive rules established by older women

for younger women, ‘a stern mother telling [them] how to behave’.32 Henry reads this

attitude as a sign that feminists’ focus on their own generational differences can lead to

the dangerous assumption that ‘feminism itself [...] has become the enemy’ and that

within the figurative feminist family, mothers and daughters now tend to forget its

‘absent father’.33

Nevertheless, positions such as Roiphe’s must also be considered in connection

with the discourses to which they responded because, in contrast to the second wave’s

relationship with the first wave, the mother figure criticised is still very much alive and

active in the debate. Madeleyn Detloff, for example, illustrates how at the 1995 NWSA

(National Women’s Studies Association) conference in the U.S. ‘many of the younger

women [...] felt misrepresented, spoken for and spoken at but not heard’,34 echoing

Ellen Neuborne’s claim that ‘[y]oung feminists have long felt we needed to be invited

to our mothers’ party’.35 As a number of critics have pointed out, a prime example of

some second wavers’ (outrightly) patronising and authoritarian attitude toward younger

feminists can be found in Phyllis Chesler’s Letters to a Young Feminist (1997).

Addressing a nameless young female reader with the doomed introductory phrase

‘When I was your age’, Chesler explains how ‘I did not know what I needed to know in

order to understand my life – anybody’s life’, presuming that she is aware and in

possession of the knowledge her (supposedly unknowledgeable) young feminist readers

require and, apparently, crave. Gloria Steinem reinforces Chesler’s approach by praising

the text as an ‘irresistible guide’ in which the author ‘marks with flowers of wisdom the

insisted that ‘feminists could now concentrate on achieving political and social and financial equality’
(p.8).
32
Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister, p.1.
33
Ibid., p.39 and p.183.
34
Madelyn Detloff, ‘Mean Spirits: The Politics of Contempt Between Feminist Generations’,
Hypatia, 12: 3 (Summer 1997), pp.76-98 (p.77).
35
Ellen Neuborne, ‘Imagine My Surprise’, Listen Up: Voices of the Next Feminist Generation, ed.
by Barbara Findlen (London: Seal Press, 1995), pp.29-35 (p.35).
 46

path she helped clear’.36 Young women, then, are expected – at least by Chesler – to

take their place in a hierarchical system in which they are inferior to second-wave

feminists and must consequently sit, listen and learn, even though their predecessors

claim to reject such authoritarian approaches. As Henry puts it, ‘Chesler’s

presumptuousness is illustrative, if not typical, of a particular kind of generational

relationship, one in which young feminists are expected to benefit from the wisdom of

their elders’.37

Both the second and third wave’s selective acts of rejection and identification with

their respective foremothers – biological or figurative – can be read as a manifestation

of what Adrienne Rich has termed ‘matrophobia’, a concept similar to Fuss’ notion of

disidentification in that it describes an attempt at rejection which is predicated upon the

fear of an already established (although not necessarily consciously acknowledged)

identification. Matrophobia, Rich suggests, is the ‘fear not of one’s mother or of

motherhood but of becoming one’s mother’, caused by ‘a deep underlying pull toward

her, a dread that if one relaxes one’s guard one will identify with her completely’.38 For

both second and third-wave feminists, attitudes towards sex/uality as well as

commonality and diversity have been key to their matrophobic definitions of their

respective foremothers as well as of themselves. Figes, for example, deemed the first

wave’s efforts against sexual double standards self-defeating and futile:

In the nineteenth century the backlash came from many sternly moral feminists,
who protested against the double standard of morality, but did not claim sexual
freedom for themselves – instead they wanted the male to be as virtuous and
restrained as they were themselves required to be.39

Betty Friedan similarly rendered the second wave superior by representing its feminist

foremothers as sexually unaware when, in The Feminine Mystique (1963), she

36
Gloria Steinem, Review: Letters to a Young Feminist by Phyllis Chesler, The Phyllis Chesler
Foundation, Accessed: 1 July 2010, http://www.phyllis-chesler.com/books/letters-to-a-young-feminist.
37
Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister, p.8.
38
Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: W.W.
Norton and Company, 1976), p.236.
39
Figes, Patriarchal Attitudes, pp.87-88.
 47

proclaimed that in the second half of the twentieth century ‘women also had to confront

their sexual nature, not deny or ignore it as earlier feminists had done’.40

It is ironic, Henry points out, that the second wave, having argued its newness

largely on the basis of its progressive attitudes toward sex/uality, would be considered

as conservative by subsequent generations on exactly those grounds. Within a

movement which attempts to challenge traditional gender roles, the application of the

matrophor, then, defeats this central purpose since it evidently reinforces the notion that

the mother – even if figurative – can never be sexual. This restriction also extends to

lesbian feminisms, despite their reliance upon sexuality as a means of distinguishing

themselves from other strands of the feminist movement: as Henry observes,

‘transforming lesbian feminism – and feminism generally – into a mother requires that

she be stripped of her sexuality; in fact, she must be asexual, if not explicitly anti-sex, to

represent the maternal’.41

Third wavers’ awareness of and insistence on individuality among women has

been the main reason for its rejection of its ‘mother’s’ notion of feminist sisterhood.

Because of their ‘preference for defining feminism in their own terms – that is, for each

individual feminist to define feminism for herself individually’,42 their politics and

practices have been frequently critiqued for not ‘mov[ing] beyond [...] individual

assertions of identity to a larger, collective political identity’ and for focusing too much

on women’s ability to make choices and, in turn, marginalising the potential

consequences of these choices.43 Yet, optimistic assertions such as Susan Fraiman’s

assertion that collections such as Heywood and Drake’s Third Wave Agenda ‘fully

[direct] our attention away from mother-daughter tensions and back to sisterly ties’

40
Betty Friedan, [1963] The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2001),
p.521.
41
Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister, p.14.
42
Ibid., p.43.
43
Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister, p.44 and p.45.
 48

should be received with caution.44 While the mother-daughter trope may certainly have

its disadvantages in that it overemphasises differences within and across generations,

the concept of feminist sisterhood and its focus on generalisation ‘seems to offer us the

opposite problem’,45 that is, it promotes a sense of commonality at the expense of

diversity.

Within feminism, then, the matrophor – as a means of conceptualising and

chronicling the (ongoing) history of feminism and its developments – has attracted both

support and criticism, and Henry speculates that ‘the 1990s may well be remembered as

a decade defined by the notion of feminist generations’.46 Besides its controversial

replication of positivist understandings of (feminist) history and its reinforcement of the

image of the mother as an unsexed being, the matrophor imposes further restrictions on

feminism because it suggests that feminists can never be anything but mothers and

daughters and that their relationship to each other is confined to the paradigms of these

particular familial ties. Therefore reducing the possible connections between women to

one another, the matrilineal metaphor does not allow for ‘various ideological and

political differences among and between feminists and feminisms, reducing such

differences to the singular difference of age and generation’.47 Consequently, as Stacy

Gillis and Rebecca Munford argue, any generational understanding of feminism posits

the problem of women being ‘set up in competition with one another’, an issue which

ultimately ‘paralyses feminism’ and renders familial metaphors ‘merely another tool of

the backlash’.48 Yet, by enabling women to establish a feminist genealogy and, thus,

history, the matrilineal metaphor can also facilitate an empowering cross-historical

identification for feminist daughters by ‘granting them authority and a generational

44
Susan Fraiman, ‘Feminism Today: Mothers, Daughters, Emerging Sisters,’ American Literary
History, 11:3 (Fall 1999), pp.525-544 (p.543).
45
Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister, p.182.
46
Ibid. p.3.
47
Ibid., p.182.
48
Stacy Gillis and Rebecca Munford, ‘Genealogies and Generations: The Politics and Praxis of
Third Wave Feminism’, Women’s History Review, 13:2 (2004), pp.165-182 (p.176, p.165 and p.178).
 49

location from which to speak’.49 As with other familiar metaphors, Fraiman suggests,

the matrophor can thus potentially also contribute to the articulation of and dealing with

conflicts between feminist groups and generations, ‘not exacerbat[ing] tensions so much

as [… helping] to get a handle on them’.50

What becomes clear here is that within the context of feminism the matrilineal

metaphor, including its positive and its negative potential, is inextricably linked to

issues of historiography, that is, questions surrounding the ways in which we construct

the past and those whom we perceive as our predecessors, how such constructions are

inevitably shaped by the present and how they signal a simultaneous identification with

and rejection of the history we write. Due to their engagement with and espousal of

postmodern theories surrounding history and identity, third-wave feminists continually

interrogate and destabilise the genealogies through which they define themselves. For

the third wave, ‘feminism is as disparate and multifaceted as the feminists who purport

it, and the multiple histories of feminisms must [hence] be written, critiqued, and

rewritten as such to effectively disrupt false boundaries and to destabilize traditional,

monolithic history to expose diverse and often opposing experiences and positions’.51

It is these historiographic issues and their articulation through matrilineal

genealogies which comprise the very core of both third-wave feminism and neo-

Victorian fiction. If, as Henry suggests, the matrophor in feminist discourse facilitates

constructions of the past which display a longing for that past at the same time as they

also signal that the passing of time equals progress,52 then those ambiguities certainly

resemble the notions of nostalgia and moral disdain which have variably been attributed

to neo-Victorian fiction’s portrayal of the nineteenth century and which also perpetuate

the mother-daughter relationships with which it concerns itself. As Tess Cosslett has
49
Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister, p.3.
50
Fraiman, ‘Feminism Today’, p.527.
51
‘history, postmodern’, The Women’s Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third-Wave
Feminism, ed. by Leslie L. Heywood (London: Greenwood Press, 2006), pp.177-178 (pp.177-178).
52
Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister, p.5.
 50

observes, matrilineal narratives and the matrilineal metaphor have frequently been

utilised in women’s fiction of the 1980s and early 1990s, often ‘figur[ing] feminist

progress, and/or a way to a powerful female past’.53 Within the familial metaphor, the

mother is usually representative of feminism’s second wave of the 1960s and 1970s,

whereas the figure of the daughter has come to stand in for the third wave, which

arguably has its beginnings in the 1990s. While, according to Cosslett, in earlier

women’s fiction, according to Cosslett, there is an implicit possibility that ‘the mother is

also a sister, another woman with whom there can be a feminist solidarity’, in more

recent examples of the genre she ‘is often the prosaic figure in the middle [and] the

grandmother and the daughter can be points of mystery and potential, leading off into

the unknown future or past’.54

In neo-Victorian fiction, however, it is the mother and grandmother who

constitute the ‘points of mystery’ and whose identities are pivotal both to the discovery

of a hidden past and to the daughter personifying the present and an unknown future. In

this function, matrilineal narratives have become a prominent theme in neo-Victorian

fiction of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, where they are not

necessarily limited to the mother-daughter dyad but can also exist in the form of

mother-son relationships. In Sebastian Faulks’ Human Traces (2005), for example,

Jacques Rebiere desires to cure his older brother Olivier from his mental illness because

Olivier is the last person alive from whom Jacques can obtain knowledge about their

dead mother, knowledge he considers the key to his own identity. Similarly, the frame

narrative of John Harwood’s The Ghost Writer (2004) relies on the protagonist’s

obsession with the secrets surrounding his mother’s family tree and the significances

these secrets may have for him. Sarah Blake’s Grange House (2000), Michel Faber’s

53
Tess Cosslett, ‘Feminism, Matrilinealism and the “House of Women” in Contemporary Women’s
Fiction’, Journal of Gender Studies, 5:1 (March 1996), pp.7-17 (p.8).
54
Ibid., p.8.
 51

The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), Emma Darwin’s The Mathematics of Love

(2006), and Jane Harris’s The Observations (2006) are only a few of the numerous

further examples in which matrilineal narratives play a considerable role in the

protagonists’ constructions of their sense of self.

Walbert’s A Short History of Women and Waters’ Fingersmith – although

distinctly different in setting and form – are inherently driven by their female

protagonists’ genealogies. These matrilineal narratives, I argue, serve to illustrate and

explore the problematics and potentials of both the genealogical conceptions of feminist

history and of neo-Victorianism’s relationship to the nineteenth-century past. While

Walbert attempts to redress the gaps the matrophor has created in feminist history,

Waters seeks to disrupt artificial feminist and historical genealogies; yet both texts

represent the past its flawed genealogical conceptions as inescapable.

‘And what of history?’55: The feminist genealogies of A Short History of Women

A Short History of Women tells the fragmented narratives of five generations of women

in the form of disjointed short stories connected principally through the shared lineage

of the women they portray.56 In random rather than chronological order, we meet

Dorothy Trevor (later Trevor Townsend), a suffragette enrolled at Girton College,

Cambridge; her daughter Evelyn, who lives through the two world wars and becomes a

chemistry professor at Barnard College, New York; Evelyn’s niece, Dorothy Townsend

Barrett, who takes part in consciousness raising groups in the 1970s, later divorces her

husband, develops a research interest in Florence Nightingale, protests against the Iraq

War and starts blogging at the age of 78; her daughters Caroline and Elizabeth –

Caroline a divorcee who struggles to comprehend her mother’s political actions,

55
Kate Walbert, A Short History of Women (London: Scribner, 2009), p.41. Hereafter this text is
referred to as SHoW after quotations in the text.
56
While Walbert purposely refuses to order the segments of her narrative chronologically, my
analysis will do exactly that for the purpose of examining how the novel characterises generational
relationships and (dis)continuities.
 52

Elizabeth a married potter artist and busy mother of three living in an anxiety-ridden

post 9/11 New York City; and, finally, Caroline’s daughter Dorothy, a Yale student who

chooses to be known as Dora, taking her inspiration from Picasso’s mistress and muse

Dora Maar.57 Despite its predominantly twentieth-century settings, Walbert’s novel is

inherently concerned with the ways in which these contemporary stories connect to and

are informed by the narrative of their suffragette foremother.

World War I, as historians have frequently noted, marked the beginning of the end

of the struggle for women’s suffrage and the first-wave feminist movement. The

common perception is that ‘the majority of feminists in all countries,’ as LeGates

explains, ‘placed war activities before suffrage work,’ and the subsequent inter-war

years have been generally characterised by ‘[t]he absence of highly visible and effective

organized feminist movements’.58 While historians have recently begun to revisit and

redress such claims,59 Kate Walbert’s A Short History of Women also questions, from

the very outset, the definitions of feminism’s various ends and beginnings, deaths and

(re)births. The novel neither opens in the heyday of feminist activism nor with an

account by a suffragette or first-wave feminist. Rather, we are introduced to Dorothy

Trevor Townsend in 1914, in the early days of the First World War, through the

perspective of her young daughter Evelyn, whom we first meet when she recollects her

mother’s deathbed, remarking: ‘Mum starved herself for suffrage’ (SHoW, 3). Walbert

begins her novel with what appears to be an end – the imminent death of a feminist

mother and, by extension, of the first generation of the feminist movement – while at

57
Dora Maar (1907-1997), a Croatian-born photographer, was Picasso’s muse for several years in
the 1930s and 1940s. Maar suffered from mental health problems throughout her relationship with the
famous painter, partly because of his treatment of her and partly because she discovered she was sterile
(prompting Picasso’s portrayal of her as Weeping Woman in 1937). See Mary Ann Caws, Dora Maar
with and without Picasso: A Biography (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000) and Picasso's Weeping
Woman: The Life and Art of Dora Maar (London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2000), as well as James
Lord, Picasso and Dora: A Memoir (London: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).
58
LeGates, In Their Time, p.283 and p.281.
59
See, for example: Anne Logan’s Feminism and Criminal Justice: A Historical Perspective
(Bastingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), which considers the continuations of feminism between the
1920s and the 1970s.
 53

the same time introducing that ending through a figure who marks a beginning –

Dorothy’s daughter – and it is precisely this blurring of distinctions between

generations, the recognition of (dis)continuities, the constant subjective revision and

perpetual presence of the past, which lie at the heart of the novel.

In Dorothy’s first-person accounts we learn that, when studying at Girton College

in 1898, she perceives her education there as another version of women’s institutional

incarceration rather than as a glimpse toward their liberation. Plagued by traumatic

memories of her childhood friend Hilda’s rape by a group of boys at the age of twelve

and Hilda’s death in childbirth a few years later (SHoW, 64-66), Girton’s treatment of

women continues and reinforces Dorothy’s experience of their oppression: ‘the

Building Committee’, she recalls, ‘had originally considered iron bars for the girls [...]

but these were sixty pounds and so they counted on watchdogs’ (SHoW, 59). Unable to

achieve a recognised degree at Girton due to her sex and after a failed relationship with

a Cambridge anarchist who, ironically, follows his influential father’s instructions by

agreeing to a socially advantageous marriage and taking up a government post,60

Dorothy – ‘a contributor to the National Society for Women’s Suffrage’ – marries Ted

Townsend,61 a member of the university’s Explorers Club, despite having previously

proclaimed: ‘I might jump out of my own skin first’ (SHoW, 60 and 63). Ted vanishes

shortly after the birth of their first child, and at the onset of the First World War in 1914

Dorothy finds herself dissatisfied with the suffragettes’ declining focus on the vote. At a

fundraising event, she observes how the women at her table ‘wear the requisite

lavender, or cream in support of woman’s suffrage, though their attentions have been

diverted to war [...] their labor evidence of their patriotic intent and good, bloody

60
Women were not admitted to full membership – and thus full degrees – at Cambridge until 1948.
See Rita McWilliams Tullberg, Women at Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
61
The National Society for Women’s Suffrage was founded in 1867 to ‘co-ordinate the activities and
policies’ of already existing local women’s suffrage groups in Sheffield, London and Manchester. See
Sophia A. Van Wingerden, The Women's Suffrage Movement in Britain, 1866-1928 (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), pp.x-xi.
 54

conscience’ (SHoW, 20-21). Telling herself ‘she’s too hard on all of them’ (SHoW, 19),

Dorothy considers the role she is expected to fill, that is, whether ‘to advance [men’s]

comfort is her job. She could do that, couldn’t she? Be useful that way. Women want to

be useful, after all, and young boys are dying. They’re bred to be useful, or maybe,

they’re bred to breed?’ (SHoW, 29). Unable to accept this definition of women’s duty,

she continues her fight for the vote by starving herself, ‘her Votes for Women sash like

some kind of badge from an undeclared war’ (SHoW, 78), and painfully aware that

it is brutal, unimaginable, to think of what she is doing, what she has already done
to the children, to think of what the children may grow into, given her absence,
given their father’s absence. Could she explain to them that she had no other
choice? That she had nothing else to sacrifice but her life? (SHoW, 69)

Dorothy’s death, like the suffrage movement, is overshadowed by the war, and

considered to have been ‘brought on by modern ideas, pride, a certain vanity or rather

unreasonable expectations’ (SHoW, 76). In the papers, ‘her pursuit of dying’ is

expressed only implicitly because of ‘the hysterical and copycat tendencies of the

Women’s Social and Political Union, and of the precedence of the war news above all

else’ (SHoW, 78-79). In her habituary, her likeness is included not as that of a heroine,

but rather ‘with those of Sir William Whitehead, [...] husband of fifty-two years to

Gwenyth [...]; and Alfred Branford, gardener of the high estates and designer of the

mazes’ (SHoW, 79). Shortly before her death, Dorothy is told by a hospital attendant

that the drip connected to her veins is ‘intended for dying soldiers [...], wasted on a

woman by her own hand’ (SHoW, 3). Dorothy’s death and, by extension, women’s

struggle for equality, must thus give way to an event perceived as more important and

worthy, a war caused, led and fought by more deserving men, an effect which, as we

shall see, repeats itself in each of the lives of Dorothy’s successors.

It is the narrative of this woman who starved herself for suffrage which variably

haunts subsequent generations of Dorothy’s family. For Evelyn, her mother’s death

was, like for many of her contemporaries, not an act of heroism or strength, but rather
 55

quite the opposite, a sign of weakness and a way of giving up. She recalls how starving

for suffrage literally made her mother voiceless, how there was initially a time

when she was still speaking, or when she still could be heard, before she twisted
into a shape reserved for cracked sticks and hard as that [...] Then I was afraid I
might break Mum if I breathed, or spoke a word. Before I had tried and tried.
Then I gave up like Mum did and went quiet. (SHoW, 3)

Evelyn is surrounded by voices which disapprove of her mother’s actions. Her

grandmother claims that ‘it was just like Mum to take a cause too far’, that Dorothy was

‘too smart to be so stupid’ and that ‘nobody is paying a damn bit of attention’ (SHoW,

3-4). At the same, however, Evelyn is also told that she resembles her mother, that she

is ‘a fighter [...] just like her, and stubborn as a goat, and wilful and determined and

entirely lacking [...] in female wiles’ (SHoW, 14), that she has ‘inherited Mum’s will,

not to mention her temper’, something which, she recalls her aunt saying, ‘could either

float me in good stead or kill me’ (SHoW, 12). Dorothy’s death therefore results in both

sadness and anger for Evelyn, who expresses her frustration in an encounter with a

caged bird which she attempts to set free, but which is too accustomed to its

confinement to seek freedom:

The little door swings open on its tiny brass hinges but the bird does not move nor
sing nor ungrip its maddeningly rigid claws from its swing [...] I shake the cage
hard. The door is open [...] It could have done it itself, idiot, no trick to this. It
could have used its thorn beak to lift the latch, but it is an idiot bird, an idiot
canary, a birdbrain, an imbecile [...] I pull it out, yank it out and it bites the skin of
my thumb [...] and that hurts so much I fling it off toward the tree so that it falls a
bit into it, then up, flying! And then it’s gone. [...] And when the bird flies away I
am not as happy as I imagined I would be. I would do anything to bring it back.
(SHoW, 15)

As with the caged bird, Evelyn feels anger toward her mother, who has the ability to

release herself from her suffering, yet when Dorothy dies, Evelyn wishes she was still

alive, if in her a weakened (or caged) state.

When Evelyn, gifted in Mathematics, leaves for New York to take up a refugee

scholarship at Barnard College, she intends to become a ‘blank slate’ (SHoW, 97) and

rejects both her association with her mother and with Dorothy’s cause. When a group of
 56

women pacifists approaches her during the passage to America and enquires whether

Evelyn’s name is Townsend, Evelyn denounces her mother – and her feminist heritage

– claiming, ‘“No relation,” [...] I have sworn I’ll start from nothing; that I am now no

one’s daughter’ (SHoW, 92). For her, the rejection of the women’s movement is the

rejection of that which, in her perception, weakened rather than strengthened and

eventually killed her mother. This disidentification with Dorothy becomes perhaps most

pertinent when, having paid for her journey, Evelyn finds herself unable to purchase

food aboard the ship and, due to malnourishment, eventually faints upon her arrival at

Barnard College. Ironically, then, Evelyn replicates her mother’s actions by starving

herself (if less intentionally) in order to take the opportunity to receive a university

education, that is, to enable her to pursue the path which the women of her mother’s

generation have paved for her. Yet, when Evelyn looses consciousness and encounters

her mother in a vision she still is unable to acknowledge her mother’s suicide as a form

of resistance: ‘pale, beautiful, raven-haired, they would have called her, had she been a

heroine, though she was not, I could have told her; neither then nor now – not to me, not

to anyone. No one will remember you, I want to say to her. No one’ (SHoW, 93-94).

Evelyn’s journey to America reflects the effect of the first wave’s gains through

women’s increased access to higher education, while the physical sacrifice required of

her along the way indicates literally and metaphorically the continuation of her mother’s

struggle, no matter how much Evelyn attempts to dissociate from it.

Benefitting from the achievements of her mother’s generation, Evelyn’s aim is to

counter what she perceives as her mother’s self-imposed silence by being remembered,

by making her mark in the world of science, but despite certain formal advantages, the

problems she faces at Barnard still resemble, to a large extent, Dorothy’s days at Girton.

Taught by a female professor, one of Evelyn’s first lessons is: ‘You must be fast [...]

You must do things that much quicker than the boys do. And you must understand that
 57

you will do them alone, that no one will pay attention. If they do, they will not be

pleased’ (SHoW, 166). Having lived with Stephen Pope – her ‘compatriot, of sorts’

(SHoW, 233) – ever since her arrival in the U.S. and having become a professor in

chemistry, Evelyn does manage to be heard and receives recognition for her work.

Nevertheless, just as Dorothy’s actions were overshadowed by World War I, a

celebratory talk for Evelyn’s first Science cover is cancelled in 1945 due to the

surrender of the Japanese in World War II.

As a university professor, Evelyn also witnesses a new generation of aspiring

female academics, and while ‘these scholarship girls have summer internships on

campus – typing, filing – every hour repaying what has been given them in tuition’

(SHoW, 170), they also, she notices, have new outlooks and ambitions. Thus, when in

the midst of V-J Day celebrations the young Helen notifies Evelyn that she has become

engaged but is still planning to become a doctor, Evelyn observes how ‘to Helen I am a

blur, the vague outline of a woman too old to understand’ (SHoW, 174). Though not

part of an organised women’s movement and not a mother, Evelyn’s life and career do

illustrate a commitment to women’s equality, both through her academic achievements

in a male-dominated field and in her function as a mentor to female students. At the

same time, however, she – unlike her academic charges – perceives it as essential to the

success of her career that she remain both unmarried and childless, that she reject the

roles of wife and mother whose moral duties Dorothy, her suffragette predecessor,

found so incompatible with her struggle for women’s equality. This decision –

alongside war – remains a central concern for the generations of her niece, Dorothy

Townsend Barrett, and Dorothy’s daughters.

Dorothy – named after her suffragette grandmother – is the only child of Evelyn’s

brother Thomas, a musical genius as well as an alcoholic. Born in 1930 and part of the

generation which fell victim to the second-wave’s matricide, Dorothy takes part in rap
 58

sessions in the 1970s, but perceives that, being in her early forties, ‘she cannot keep up

with the modern, liberated woman’ (SHoW, 120): ‘I feel like a hollow bone [...] as if I

echo, or rather, feel in myself an absence [...] as if I’ve forgotten something, as if there’s

a question I’ve forgotten to answer’ (SHoW¸ 151), she seeks a new sense of self beyond

motherhood and marriage, and does so by looking back to the past, to Florence

Nightingale, but also to her own family history. Dorothy, whose mother left and

remarried when she was a child, researches her suffragette grandmother and attempts to

trace her aunt, Evelyn, with whom her father lost contact after their mother’s death by

starvation in 1914. Having discovered her grandmother’s narrative, Dorothy – unlike

Evelyn – has the desire ‘to flaunt the new lineage, to be the lineage [... which allows her

to] stand for something other than mother’ (SHoW, 49). What to Evelyn was the

traumatic experience of her mother’s self-inflicted death is, to Dorothy, a selfless

sacrifice: her suffragette predecessor, ‘a woman she had never met nor heard much of’

from her father, ‘had given her life so that women might, quite simply, do something’

(SHoW, 129-30). For Dorothy, then, her grandmother’s suicide functions as powerful

message rather than a self-defeating, silent act: ‘it changed things then [...] to do

something’, she remarks about her grandmother’s suicide; ‘she made up her mind; she

took a stand [...] The point is she did something’ (SHoW, 38). Here, the keys to a female

– and indeed to a feminist – identity in the present are lineage and history: ‘[o]ne must

always look for antecedents [...] You have to start somewhere’ (SHoW, 130).

Dorothy, like her grandmother at the onset of the First World War, eventually

finds herself disillusioned. In the early 2000s, she stages one-woman protests against

the Iraq War and is, as a consequence, imprisoned several times, only to be bailed out

by daughter Caroline, who urges her mother to ‘get a life’ (SHoW, 38). Frustrated with

what she perceives as the apathy of her daughters’ generation, Dorothy reminds

Caroline that her ‘great-grandmother starved to death on principle’, yet Caroline, like
 59

most of the political leaders and the medical establishment of the first-wave periods,

considers her great-grandmother’s behaviour as a potential symptom of hysteria:

‘“Anyway, you said she might have been unbalanced. A bit insane, wasn’t she? You’ve

said that before. She might have been suffering from –” “Hysteria?” Dorothy said,

hearing her own tone of voice – hysterical’ (SHoW, 38).62 While Walbert redresses the

supposed absence of feminism in the interwar period and during World War II, the

novel’s illustration of Caroline purports a stereotypical image of the backlash generation

who came of age in the 1980s. To Caroline, activism – pacifist, feminist or otherwise –

is associated with women who cannot ‘find another project’ (SHoW, 47) and who lack

purpose in their lives. Having grown up with (and used to) the benefits which the

Women’s Liberation Movement afforded her, Caroline ‘read Susan Brownmiller [...],

spent Wednesday afternoons counseling rape victims [...], had made it into Yale [...as

part of] one of the first class of women to be allowed, and was soon to graduate magna

cum laude’ (SHoW, 214). Yet, the university environment represents once again only

partial empowerment as Caroline reflects on an affair with one of her professors, aware

that as a student she was ‘no one her mother would have imagined her to be: an

undergraduate spread-eagled on the floor of his [Professor Edwards’] office, a scratchy

Tibetan prayer rug against her bare skin’ (SHoW, 214). Later, Caroline is ‘named VP

only a few years out of business school’ (SHoW, 222) and while her mother votes

ideologically, for Caroline the professional is the political when she notes that she must

‘consider my client base’ (SHoW, 39) and that ‘I should have never told you [Dorothy] I

voted for him [George W. Bush]’ (SHoW, 39). Clearly, Caroline is aware of the

contradictions in her life; contradictions which she feels are not accommodated in her

mother’s or in feminism’s expectations.

62
This association of feminist activism with mental illness recurs when Dorothy describes how the
soldiers attempting to stop her protests talk to her: ‘Clearly there’s a manual on How to Speak to the
Protesters and/or the Criminally Insane’ (SHoW, 43).
 60

When we discover that, in her late seventies, Dorothy begins to write and publish

an online blog – ‘A Proclamation: Ruminations on Florence Nightingale, Old Age, and

Life by Dorothy Townsend Barrett, aged 78’ (SHoW, 108) – we do so not through

Dorothy’s but through Caroline’s story. Ironically, Caroline becomes aware of her

mother’s blog when searching, not for the first time, the internet for ‘the original

Dorothy’, her suffragette great-grandmother whose ‘dozen or so entries [… and] place

in various footnotes of current scholarship’ (SHoW, 207) she has memorised. Hoping

‘to find further mentions, a recent book from some feminist press’ (SHoW, 208), she

instead comes across her mother’s blog. To her and her sister Liz, the idea that Dorothy

participates in an interactive online culture does not resonate with her maternal role. DT

(Dorothy’s screen name), is ‘a woman once her mother, a blogger’ (SHoW, 210),

identities which are, in the daughters’ views, incompatible. It is, however, because of

this virtual existence of her mother that Caroline finds it possible to respond to her posts

– first anonymously, then self-identified through the content of her reply – and thus

enter into a dialogue with Dorothy, opening up both about her own life and past

marriage and toward those of Dorothy’s concerns which cannot so easily be ascribed to

the maternal. Paradoxically, it is through Caroline’s virtual act of psychological

matricide, or at least intentional oversight, of her biological mother in her quest for her

great-grandmother that she is confronted and, subsequently, enabled to engage with her

mother, both as a mother and as a woman, and with the female and feminist identities

associated with these roles. It is only by temporarily laying off their familial identities

and by assuming new, virtual selves, that mother and daughter can communicate outside

of the generational paradigm, and that Caroline is encouraged to seek a connection with

the woman who shares her present, rather than looking for a foremother in the distant

past.

Virtual reality is also what defines the accounts of Caroline’s daughter, Dorothy
 61

‘Dora’ Barrett-Deel, whom we only encounter in a mediated fashion, through her profile

on a social networking site and through Caroline’s narrative. An undergraduate student

at Yale, Dora lists authors such as Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath and

Adrienne Rich (among others) under ‘Favourite Books’ (SHoW, 225), and also quotes

Anais Nin, the French diarist and erotica writer. At the same time, Dora’s ‘About Me’

section reads: ‘My great-great-grandmother starved herself for suffrage. Color me

Revolutionary’ (SHoW, 225). Together with Dora’s reading habits, this casual but

nevertheless public acknowledgement of her association with her suffragette relative

indicates that Dorothy Trevor Townsend’s rebellious spirit lives on in her great-great-

granddaughter; but, with her reading of Woolf and Plath, so does the undercurrent of

mental instability which runs through the novel’s stories, generation after generation.

Dora Maar, after whom Dora has named herself, suffered a nervous breakdown after her

nearly ten-year affair with Picasso, and, according to Mary Ann Caws, ‘was taken to a

psychiatric hospital, where for three weeks she was subjected to a series of electric-

shock treatments, and was then moved to a private clinic at the intervention of the

psychiatrist Jacques Lacan’, who treated Maar for two years, after which she lived

largely as a recluse until her death in 1997.63

This continued thematisation of women’s mental health is connected to what are

perhaps the most prominent connections between the majority of women introduced in

Walbert’s novel: the implications – both practical and psychological – of the

achievement of equal access to education and to the professions. Evelyn, in the 1930s

and 40s, made a clear choice between career and family, while Caroline in the 1950s

and onward feels she has lost her sense of self by being ‘only’ a mother and at the same

time wondering, with the same guilt which also plagued her suffragette grandmother,

63
Mary Ann Caws, ‘A Tortured Goddess’, Guardian (7 October 2000), Accessed: 25 June 2011,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/oct/07/features.weekend. See also Caws, Dora Maar with and
without Picasso.
 62

‘Why couldn’t she just be that?’ (SHoW, 49). Her daughters Caroline and Liz have both

families and careers, although Caroline had to forfeit her position as VP of a company

when she separated from Dora’s father. Liz, a mother of three and in a relationship with

the children’s father, is able to return to her career as a potter for five hours a day

between seeing her eldest daughter off to school and a nanny picking up the younger

twins: ‘five hours before she needs to take the subway uptown: five whole hours. It is

nothing and everything. It could stretch out before her like an eternity if she has the

will, or it could evaporate in a single moment’ (SHoW, 180). At a talk Liz attends at her

daughter’s school on ‘Raising a Calm Child in the Age of Anxiety: Or, How to Let Go

and Lighten Up’ (SHoW, 177), the room is filled with a ‘throng of mothers [and] the

few stay-at-home dads or those fathers whose schedules allowed them to be flexible’

(SHoW, 184). Clearly, the ability to have it all – family and career – comes at a high

cost, with the ability ‘to let go and lighten up’ still only accessible to few and only with

professional training at that.

The impact of war recurs once again not only because Liz lives in post 9/11 New

York, where at schools ‘emergency contact cards have been filed in triplicate’ and ‘each

child has an individual first-aid kit and a protective mask’ (SHoW, 185) but also because

it becomes a metaphor for a mother’s relationship to her child’s education. The school

is, Liz tells us, ‘one of those places where mothers are kept on their toes and organized

into various committees for advance and retreat, their children’s education understood

as a battlefield that must be properly assaulted’ (SHoW, 177). A mother’s purpose, then,

are her children and the wars of the domestic sphere, whose existence and safety are

threatened and, ironically, also supposedly protected by the global battles of the male

domain which, as in previous decades, relegate feminist concerns. If, as Dorothy Trevor

Townsend puts it before her death in 1914, ‘war is a man-made institution’ (SHoW,

132) then this is certainly felt, despite all advancements, in the generations which follow
 63

her fight for women’s suffrage.

But the history Walbert writes is neither one of commonality nor individualism,

sameness or difference. Rather, the tracing of matrilineage enables both the author as

well as her characters to explore a subtle collective history as much as the developments

and changes which characterise that history. The answer to Caroline’s question ‘And

what of history? [...] Lineage?’ (SHoW, 41), is not ‘Stop gnawing the bone, ladies.

History is behind us, or at least it’s over’ (SHoW, 179). History and lineage are what

inevitably defines these women, and their matrilineal narratives, their mothers’ pasts,

are what they actively utilise and revise – be it through direct identification or

disidentification – in order to create and negotiate their identities in the present. Female

genealogy, in Walbert’s hands, is by no means unproblematic, yet were are prompted, in

Henry’s words, to ‘try to think through its signification rather than abandoning it at the

outset’.64 Female and feminist genealogies, then, are both fruitful and fraught, restrictive

as well as liberating, but they are inescapable, as Evelyn discovers in the closing lines of

the novel, in her dying memories of the mother whom she tried so hard to reject for

most of her life: ‘I climb into bed with her, into that place where she is and if I get

caught, if I am found here, I am sorry, I will tell them: There is nowhere else to be’

(SHoW, 237).

Not my mother’s daughter: Fingersmith’s matrilineal fictions

Unlike A Short History of Women, Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith does not only

problematise generational relationships between women but challenges and destabilises

their very existence through its web of complex and fragmented matrilineal narratives.

The novel centres on Susan Lilly and Maud Trinder, two girls who were swapped by

their mothers shortly after their births and who have consequently grown up as Susan

64
Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister, p.11.
 64

Trinder and Maud Lilly, ignorant, for most of the narrative, of who their real mothers

are. Sue, the illegitimate daughter of the gentlewoman Marianne Lilly, grows up with

the baby farmer Mrs Sucksby in Lant Street, London. Once old enough to write, Mrs

Sucksby’s biological daughter Maud, relegated to an asylum during her early years,

experiences the fate that Sue was spared through the swap: a life as the secretary of

Christopher Lilly (Marianne’s brother) at the secluded country house Briar. On Sue’s

eighteenth birthday, the girls will supposedly told the truths about their mothers and are

each to receive half of Marianne’s fortune, but Mrs Sucksby intends to sacrifice Sue for

her biological daughter and acquire both girls’ inheritances. With the help of the villain

Richard Rivers, she makes Sue believe that she is to assist Rivers in tricking Maud into

marrying him by playing Maud’s new lady’s maid. Supposedly, after the marriage

ceremony, Maud will be declared mad and confined to a mental institution, leaving

Rivers and Sue with her fortune. However, it is Sue who is actually disposed of at the

asylum, while Maud, who has been promised a share of her fortune and a life free from

her uncle, is brought to Lant Street against her will and there comes to know the truth

about her own mother as well as Sue’s, and about Mrs Sucksby’s plan.

While ‘mothers in Victorian fiction are distinguished by their absence’,65 in

numerous novels of the period and particularly in the sensation genre, deviant and/or

mad mothers, despite their frequent absence, commonly have a threatening and

dangerous presence in their daughters’ lives, who by heredity carry at least the potential

for or tendency toward their mothers’ behaviours or illnesses.66 Through its changeling

plot, Fingersmith disrupts both this pathologised genealogy between mother and

daughter and the idea of hereditary female identity more generally since the swap of Sue

65
Sally Shuttleworth, ‘Demonic Mothers: Ideologies of Bourgeois Motherhood in the Mid-Victorian
Era’, Re-writing the Victorians: Theory, History and the Politics of Gender, ed. by Linda M. Shires
(London: Routledge, 1992), pp.31-51 (p.44).
66
See, for example: Bertha Mason in Charlote Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1848), Becky Sharp in William
Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848), Esther Summerson in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (1853)
and Lady Audley in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862).
 65

and Maud results also in an exchange of their maternal narratives. Each girl grows up

believing the other’s actual or fabricated maternal prehistory to be her own, hence

believing in what I will call a matrilineal fiction. In London’s criminal underworld,

Sue’s matrilineal fiction of her murderous mother, purportedly a thief and murderess

executed for her crimes, is told with pride rather than shame or fear:

‘What a thief!’ Mrs Sucksby would say. ‘So bold! And handsome?’
‘Was she, Mrs Sucksby? Was she fair?’
‘Fairer than you; but sharp, like you, about the face; and thin as paper. We put her
upstairs. No-one knew she was here, save me and Mr. Ibbs – for she was wanted,
she said, by the police of four divisions, and if they had got her, she’d swing.’67

Mrs Sucksby also claims that she has witnessed Sue’s mother’s death on the gallows

from the window of the room in which Sue was born, a fiction spatially linking the

girl’s birth with her mother’s death and vice versa. Sue’s own admiration of this

maternal narrative is evident:

I supposed it was a pity my mother had ended up hanged; but since she was
hanged, I was glad it was for something game, like murdering a miser over his
plate […] some girls I knew had mothers who were drunkards, or mothers who
were mad: mothers they hated and could never rub along with. I should rather a
dead mother, over one like that! (FS, 12)

Not only does Sue thus prefer her to be dead rather than mad – an irony considering that

her real mother is the madwoman of Maud’s matrilineal fiction – but she is also

thankful that her mother was hanged for a ‘proper’ crime.

As she threatens the Lant Street bully John Vroom with shears and the words ‘bad

blood carries. Bad blood comes out’ (FS, 80), it becomes clear that Sue believes she has

inherited her mother’s criminal potential. Indeed, she fosters this idea of a hereditary

maternal identity throughout the novel. Later, when Sue realises she has fallen in love

with Maud, the person she intends to betray, she considers the possible consequences of

a return home without the promised money: ‘They would laugh in my face! I had a

certain standing. I was the daughter of a murderess. I had expectations. Fine feelings

67
Sarah Waters, Fingersmith (London: Virago, 2002), p.11. Hereafter this text is referred to as FS
after quotations in the text.
 66

weren’t in them. How could they be?’ (FS, 135). Sue’s identity as her mother’s daughter

evidently causes her and others to anticipate that her character must be similar, or even

identical, to that of the supposed murderess, an assumption which causes Sue to be

surprised at her ability to have ‘fine feelings’, feelings which do not exist in her

maternal fiction.

Equally, her belief in sharing her mother’s pedigree and her ambition to live up to

her mother’s criminal career provide her with confidence when she assists Maud in her

escape from Briar in order for Maud to marry Rivers: ‘All my nervousness had left me,

and I was suddenly calm. I thought of my mother, and all the dark and sleeping houses

she must have stolen her way through, before they caught her. The bad blood rose in

me, just like wine’ (FS, 151). When Sue returns to London after her escape from the

madhouse, she does so ignorant of the fact that Maud has also been betrayed and is

convinced that it is Maud, not Mrs Sucksby, who tricked her into the asylum and who

has now taken her place at Lant Street, an assumption which makes her exclaim: ‘Oh

I’ll kill her, tonight!’ (FS, 476). Based on the fact that during their time together Sue has

(un)consciously adopted and imitated aspects of Maud’s identity (later allowing Rivers

to pass Sue off as a ‘lady’ to the doctors and install her in the asylum under Maud’s

name), Lucie Armitt argues that now ‘Sue also mirrors Maud’s previously articulated

desire for murder’ – albeit redirected from a male to a presumed female victimiser.68

However, considering Sue’s belief in the matrilineal fiction which renders her mother a

murderess, this desire also represents her final re-enactment of what she believes is her

inherited maternal identity.

In Maud and her maternal fiction we find very similar concepts of inheritance and

identity, but rather than feeling admiration, Maud, like Walbert’s Evelyn, disidentifies

68
Lucie Armitt, ‘Dark Departures: Contemporary Women’s Writing after the Gothic’, Postfeminist
Gothic, ed. by Benjamin A. Brabon and Stéphanie Genz (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp.16-
29 (p.26).
 67

with the woman she believes was her mother. Having spent the first years of her life in

the asylum in which Marianne Lilly died, Maud is convinced it was here that Marianne

gave birth to her as well as dying. Significantly, this idea again links the daughter’s

birth to her mother’s death, as in Sue’s matrilineal fiction and as in Walbert’s

introductory story to A Short History of Women when we meet Evelyn at Dorothy’s

deathbed. As soon as Maud is able to read and write, Christopher Lilly installs his

‘niece’ as his secretary at Briar, where he raises her to copy and catalogue his collection

of pornographic texts. Commenting on the locket with her mother’s picture, he remarks

that ‘wear[ing] her mother’s likeness […] will remind her of her mother’s fate, and may

serve to keep her from sharing it’ (FS, 181) and makes Maud believe she has inherited a

potential for her mother’s madness. Like Sue, Maud thus feels she has become heiress

to the identity of the woman she thinks gave birth to her, an idea that particularly

manifests itself in her mind in the course of one her uncle’s peculiar punishments:

Then he has my knife taken away, and I must eat with my fingers. The dishes he
prefers being all bloody meats [...] my kid-skin gloves grow crimson – as if
reverting to the substance they were made from [....] I am served it [wine] in a
crystal glass engraved with an M. The ring of silver that holds my napkin is
marked a tarnished black with the same initial. They are to keep me mindful, not
of my name, but of that of my mother; which was Marianne. (FS, 196)

Here, Maud perceives that by drinking wine from the glass marked with her mother’s

initials, she, like her gloves through the contact with bloody meat, ‘revert[s] to the

substance’ she was made from – her mother’s blood and what she believes to be her

mother’s history. Although her maternal fiction of madness is a potentially harmful

inheritance, she fosters the idea of sharing her mother’s blood in a similar fashion to

Sue. When Maud forces herself to carry out Gentleman’s plan and consequently betrays

Sue despite her feelings for her, she suspects that her ability to do so must be a sign of

‘madness, my mother’s malady, [which is] perhaps beginning its slow ascent in me’

(FS, 270). This continually present fear evokes a hatred for her mother which becomes

so strong that Maud wishes she could kill the already dead Marianne Lilly, a desire she
 68

fulfils by imagining ‘it was my birth that killed my mother. I am as to blame for her

death as if I had stabbed her with my own hand’ (FS, 122). Reinforcing the link

between her own birth and Marianne’s death, Maud has developed an excessively

bloody fiction accompanying this idea of being her mother’s murderess:

I imagine a table slick with blood. The blood is my mother’s. There is too much of
it. There is so much of it, I think it runs, like ink [...] There is only, still, that
falling blood – drip drop! Drip, drop! – the beat telling off the first few minutes
of my life, the last of hers. (FS, 179-180)

Evidently, Maud fosters both the idea of ‘having her mother’s blood on her hands’ as

well as inside herself.69

This murderous fantasy also draws attention to the fact that Maud’s identity as her

mother’s daughter is inescapably linked to her existence as Mr. Lilly’s secretary: she

describes her mother’s blood as ‘run[ning] like ink’, the liquid with which her uncle’s

hands and tongue are ‘stained all over’ (FS, 75) and which, of course, is the fluid in

which his pornographic literature and his index of it are written. Her association of

maternal blood with ink consequently suggests that, with her belief in her inheritance of

her mother’s blood, she has also inherited her uncle’s oppression, that is, she is not only

heiress to a matrilineal fiction, but a fiction written by men. This connection, then, hints

at an indivisible and ironic link between matrilineal inheritance and patriarchal

oppression, namely that the latter is continued by constituting an ineradicable

component of female heredity. Rivers therefore tells Maud that ‘your history as your

mother’s daughter, your uncle’s niece [is] in short all that marks you as yourself’ (FS,

227), and when Maud discovers that she is neither Marianne Lilly’s daughter, nor

Christopher Lilly’s niece, she has to realise that her ‘life was not lived [...] it was a

fiction’ (FS, 337). This fiction of an inherited maternal identity and of inherited

patriarchal oppression, then, was not only created by her uncle but, rather, by Marianne

Lilly and Mrs Sucksby, while it was ultimately fostered and performed by Maud herself.

69
Armitt, ‘Dark Departures’, p.27, my emphasis.
 69

Fingersmith thus not only ‘concerns itself with living with a maternal prehistory’,70 but,

more specifically, with re-enacting it.

However, both girls not only cultivate their own fictional, matrilineal identities,

but also each other’s. Rivers is practiced in the creation and alteration of fictions,

because he ‘spent a year putting French books into English [...] putting them slightly

different each time, and pinning different titles on them, and so making one old story

pass as twenty brand-new ones’ (FS, 21) – an act similar to the means by which he

creates new identities for the female protagonists. He presents Maud to the illiterate Sue

not as a girl who copies and reads pornographic texts, but as ‘an innocent, a natural

[who] has been kept from the world’ and who is ‘of sense, understanding and

knowledge [...] perfectly shy’ (FS, 30 and 24). As he rightly predicts, Sue soon believes

this false narrative of Maud because ‘[s]he will be like everyone, putting on the things

she sees the constructions she expects to find’ (FS, 227). Accordingly, at their first

meeting Sue is convinced that Maud ‘was an infant, she was a chick, she was a pigeon

that knew nothing’ (FS, 66), unaware as she is that she herself is the intended ‘pigeon’

who will be betrayed. Maud similarly is told that Sue is nothing more but ‘a sort of thief

– not over-scrupulous, not too clever in her ways’ (FS, 226), an image which is clearly

proven false by Sue’s skilful escape from the madhouse and return to London. Still,

Maud likewise believes Gentleman’s construction of Sue’s character and is confident

that the girl only sees her ‘white flesh [...] but not the quick, corrupted blood beneath’

(FS, 251). The young women’s encounter with each other is, then, obscured by the

narratives constructed by Rivers and those which they believe of each other. Both meet

as fictions of themselves, fictions presented to them by Rivers, but which are, first and

foremost, engineered by a female force, Mrs Sucksby.

This female complicity in oppression and exploitation – in the form of Maud’s

70
Armitt, ‘Dark Departures’, p.17, my emphasis.
 70

and Sue’s intended betrayal of each other and, most of all, Mrs Sucksby’s initiation of

the criminal plot – is simultaneously a product and a generator of the maternal fictions

which complicate the female protagonists’ sense of identity. This is evident if we

consider Fingersmith’s gender economics through its complex network of criminal

transactions and through its relation to the problematic connection established between

female identity and hereditary matrilineal narratives. Feminist critics, philosophers and

anthropologists of previous decades have agreed that in patriarchal societies women

usually serve as commodities within transactions between men (be it through marriage,

prostitution, or other cultural customs); consequently, in such a structure, they are

unable to act as autonomous transaction partners themselves.71 In this case, for a

woman, the act of stealing may represent a criminal offence that enables her to acquire a

certain degree of agency by disrupting the masculine system of exchange, and it is the

attempt of such as disruption which we repeatedly encounter in Fingersmith.

Sue’s maternal fiction of a thieving and murdering mother is also a maternal

fiction of female agency, a detail crucial to Sue’s participation in what she believes to

be Rivers’ plan, since the criminal plot seems to offer her exactly such agency. Striving

to live up to her mother’s supposed criminal talents and unaware that she herself will be

betrayed, Sue believes that she will be a partner in a transaction with Rivers in which

Maud and her fortune are the currency. Clearly, Mrs Sucksby has constructed Sue’s

maternal fiction carefully from the night of the infant swap onwards: when Sue is

initially in doubt about whether to play her part in the plan proposed, Mrs Sucksby is

able to persuade her easily by promising that Sue’s mother ‘would have done it, and not

given it a thought. And I know what she would feel in her heart – what dread, but also

what pride, and the pride part winning – to see you doing it now’ (FS, 47). For Sue,

71
See: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), and Gayle Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the
Political Economy of Sex’, Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. by Rayna R. Reiter (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp.157-210.
 71

participation in the treacherous plan is thus a chance to continue her dead mother’s

criminal career and to perform the identity she believes to have inherited from her, an

identity premised on criminal female agency.

If we reconsider Maud’s situation at Briar in such terms, it becomes evident that

in her case theft promises not imitation of but escape from a matrilineal identity defined

by madness and her uncle’s oppression. Rivers tells Maud that the plot he presented to

Sue is only a pretence to assist the betrayal of Sue herself and, therefore, Maud believes

‘[s]he will persuade me, first, into marriage with him, then into a madhouse. But there

she will take my place’ (FS, 227). As in Sue’s case, it is the belief in her maternal

fiction that drives Maud into Mrs Sucksby’s criminal plot. Rivers reminds her that,

since it is her maternal prehistory which renders her Lilly’s commodity, Sue’s

confinement in a madhouse under the name Maud Lilly ‘will pluck from your shoulders

the weight of your life, as a servant would lift free your cloak and you shall make your

naked, invisible way to any part of the world you choose – to any new life – and there

re-clothe yourself to suit your fancy’ (FS, 227). For Maud, the attraction of Gentleman’s

plan therefore lies in the opportunity to rid herself of what she has come to know as her

maternal history and the patriarchal oppression inherited with it, an opportunity which

she describes as ‘the liberty – the rare and sinister liberty – he [Rivers] has come to

Briar to offer. For payment he wants my trust, my promise, my future silence, and one

half of my fortune’ (FS, 227). Sue will therefore not, as she believes, profit from a

collaborative deceit of Maud, but, instead, it is she who is to be exchanged for Maud’s

liberty, that is, for her escape from her own name, her matrilineal identity, and her

uncle’s tyranny – or so Maud believes.

Yet, in the novel’s final twist, the gains both girls believe to make from each

other’s exploitation is rendered meaningless by the revelation that Mrs Sucksby is the

ultimate beneficiary and, indeed, the mastermind of the plot in which they are both mere
 72

chess pieces. Ultimately, her undertaking is the result of an exclusively female

transaction between herself and Marianne Lilly in which both their daughters are to

receive equal financial compensation on their eighteenth birthdays. However, Mrs

Sucksby betrays the dead woman and raises Sue solely with the intention to utilise her

as a currency to be exchanged for Maud and Sue’s own share of Marianne’s fortune.

Since at the madhouse Sue is assumed to be Maud Lilly, Gentleman’s wife, he is the

legal recipient of the other half of the money, which is his reward for bringing Maud

back to Mrs. Sucksby. Hence, through their beliefs in their matrilineal fictions, both

young women become female commodities of Mrs Sucksby.

What can be observed in Sue’s and Maud’s agreements with Rivers, as well as in

Mrs Sucksby’s pacts with him and Marianne, is that the agency offered and the method

with which it is acquired reinforce rather than challenge patriarchal gender economics.

Each woman is willing to utilise the other as an exchangeable good for her own profit,

that is, they are willing to reinforce the status of women as commodities in masculine

transactions by imitating the masculine role of the transaction partner who trades in

women, hence not altering the status or nature of the commodity. Consequently, the role

of the transaction partner remains a masculine one, independent of sex. The only aspect

altered in comparison to the male transactions of Mr. Lilly is the commodity’s value.

Clearly, for Mrs Sucksby, Sue’s value lies in her exchangeability for both Maud and

Maud’s money. Maud, however, possesses not only a relative monetary value, in

respect of her share of the fortune of which Mrs Sucksby will claim ownership; she is

also the object of Mrs Sucksby’s maternal love, giving her a value within herself,

though never wholly apart from her role as a sort of ‘possession’ of her mother, just as

earlier on she functioned as her presumed uncle’s ‘property’. The acquisition of female

agency thus replicates and reinforces the masculine system of commodification,

exchange, and exploitation of women. While Fingersmith is, then, indeed a novel which
 73

explores the ‘possession and betrayal between women’, it does not portray this

relationship as ‘fraught with its own power relations’ but as fraught with those of

patriarchal gender economics.72

Nevertheless, Marianne Lilly’s and Mrs Sucksby’s initial agreement does

represent a challenge to these economics and to patrilineal inheritance, since their

contract is drawn up ‘in defiance of [… Marianne’s] father and brother’ (FS, 532),

guaranteeing that Marianne’s fortune is to be passed on to her daughter rather than to

her daughter’s male guardian or husband. In her betrayal of Marianne, Mrs Sucksby

utilises the marriage laws of mid-nineteenth-century British society which, as Elaine

Showalter points out, rendered women ‘legally powerless and economically marginal’.73

Mrs Sucksby’s manipulation of this system enables her to use Rivers’ marriage to Maud

to rid herself of Sue, securing – with Rivers – Marianne’s full fortune rather than merely

Maud’s half of it. Hence, Mrs Sucksby defies a patrilineal system of inheritance on the

one hand, but also Marianne’s will on the other, proving that none of the agencies

sought by Sue, Maud, or Mrs Sucksby through the adoption of a masculine role within

an established patriarchal system can offer more than a sinister liberty.

What solution, if any, does Fingersmith propose, then, for its female protagonists,

whose lives and sense of identity are undeniably distorted and determined by their

matrilineal narratives, by fictions they believe are their pasts? For Maud, rejection and

escape from her identity as Marianne’s daughter does not have the positively liberating

effect for which she had initially hoped. To the contrary, the loss of her maternal

prehistory is, if at all, bound to be a problematic success, considering that her

matrilineal fiction and the male oppression attached to it are all that comprises her

identity. Hence the loss of the maternal fiction appears to Maud as ‘gaugeless, fearful,

72
Cora Kaplan, Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticisms (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2007), p.111 and p.112.
73
Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady (London: Virago Press, 1987), p.73.
 74

inevitable as death’ (FS, 230). This dying process, so to speak, is initiated when, in line

with Sucksby’s plan, she gradually starts to transfer her own identity onto Sue by

transforming the London thief’s looks into those of a lady – those of herself. From this

point on, Maud perceives herself as ‘a ghost’ (FS, 288), as the visible disembodied soul

of a dead person, because the substitute ‘new life’ Rivers promised she could ‘re-clothe’

(FS, 227) herself in is not yet available to her. Maud experiences this loss of her identity

as Mr. Lilly’s niece and Marianne Lilly’s daughter not as a self-liberation, but instead as

a process which renders her literally self-less. If Mr. Lilly has made her like a book and

if, as she says, she ‘suppose[s] all printed words to be true ones’ (FS, 186), then her

eventual destruction of her uncle’s personified books at the end of the novel becomes,

symbolically, another part of her erasure of her old identity, something that initially

poses difficulties, but nevertheless results in relief: ‘Still it is hard – terribly hard, I

almost cannot do it – to put the metal for the first time to the neat and naked paper. I am

almost afraid the book will shriek, and so discover me. But it does not shriek. Rather, it

sighs, as if in longing for its own laceration’ (FS, 290).

Similar to the destruction of Mr. Lilly’s texts, Rivers’ and Mrs Sucksby’s deaths

are necessary if both Sue and Maud are to define themselves outside of their matrilineal

identities. By murdering Rivers, Maud kills the person who has created the fictional

identities with which Sue and Maud first met one another. By remaining silent when

Mrs Sucksby claims to have committed his murder and is subsequently hanged for it,

Sue (although at this point still ignorant of the fact that Mrs Sucksby has betrayed her)

and Maud (who committed the actual murder) kill the woman responsible for the

creation of their matrilineal fictions and their betrayal. In Maud’s case, her fiction of

being her mother’s murderess becomes true, but, more generally, it eliminates the

authors of Sue’s and Maud’s matrilineal identities, who have to die if the young women

are to define themselves outside the artificial prehistories constructed for them.
 75

Finally, Sue and Maud both have to become aware that the maternal prehistories

they believed to have inherited are untrue. Once Maud has discovered that she is not

Marianne Lilly’s but Mrs Sucksby’s daughter and Sue has discovered that her mother

‘was not a murderess, she was a lady’ (FS, 533), this process of realisation is followed

by acceptance. In order to ‘become properly defined as women’,74 both Sue and Maud

must recognise that their lives and hitherto performed identities were someone else’s

inventions. They also have to acknowledge that these fabricated maternal fictions have

shaped them to the point of becoming part of their current, and perhaps permanent,

identities. As Maud eventually explains on Sue’s return to Briar, neither Mr. Lilly’s

death nor her destruction of his books changes the fact that, as a product of him and her

artificial matrilineal fiction, she continues to exist: ‘‘Don’t pity me,’ she said, ‘because

of him. He’s dead. But I am still what he made me. I shall always be that. Half of the

books are spoiled, or sold. But I am here’’ (FS, 546). Clearly, she accepts that the

fiction remains a substantial aspect of who she is now or might become in the future, an

aspect which she is unable to erase with the adoption of someone else’s identity or the

destruction of the texts that dominated her life. It is only this realisation that allows Sue

and Maud to renew their relationship, though never perhaps wholly outside the shadow

of Rivers’, Mrs Sucksby’s and Christopher Lilly’s fictions.

Nevertheless, Briar itself remains representative of a dark past, with ‘the dusk […]

gathered in the shadows already, waiting to creep and rise’ (FS, 537). Fingersmith’s

distorted and fragmented matrilineal fictions function, then, as a critical comment on the

applicability and appropriateness of the ‘matrophor’ itself. Sue is not the daughter of a

murderess and Maud is not the offspring of a madwoman; yet both have performed and

fostered identities determined by these matrilineal fictions. Consequently, any

generational links established through their belief in the inheritance of their mothers’

74
Armitt, ‘Dark Departures’, p.28.
 76

blood are entirely artificial and illusory. The mothers about whom they fantasise do not

exist, and neither do their similarities to their ‘daughters’. While utilising the familial

feminist metaphor of matrilinealism, Fingersmith simultaneously undermines its very

concept and the cross-generational continuity between feminist waves thereby implied:

for the novel’s daughters, any affiliation to their mothers is not biologically given, but

psychologically constructed.75

This destabilisation is further substantiated in Maud’s and Sue’s handling of their

matrilineal fictions, as well as in the novel’s plot development. Both girls are unable to

define themselves as individuals outside the (l)imitations of their matrilineal fictions,

until Mrs Sucksby – a mother figure of sorts to both of them – is dead. However,

rejection and death are not effective solutions. Mrs Sucksby’s (and, for that matter,

Rivers’) death is symbolically necessary to terminate Sue’s and Maud’s fictional

identities; yet even as they are rendered parts of their pasts, their matrilineal fictions

become enduring components of their future identities, though no longer representing

them entirely. While Fingersmith does not provide a definite answer, it certainly offers

a suggestion in the form of its ending and Maud’s ambiguous occupation as a female

pornographer. Despite Mrs Sucksby’s criminal intentions, which defy not only

Marianne’s brother and father but also Marianne herself, both Sue and Maud eventually

profit from the agreement their mothers signed. Implicitly, apart from Maud’s wage as a

writer, they ultimately live on what their mothers, in this case materially, enabled them

to inherit.

In Fingersmith, matrilinealism highlights neo-Victorian fiction’s and third-wave

feminism’s central concern with constructive ways of dealing with what has come

75
This destabilisation of matrilinealism in the novel also functions as an emphasis of the lack of
lesbian history and of lesbian feminist foremothers. For detailed discussions of this see: Rachel Carroll,
‘Rethinking Generational History: Queer Histories of Sexuality in Neo-Victorian Feminist Fiction’,
Studies in the Literary Imagination, 39:2 (Fall 2006), pp.135-147; and Paulina Palmer, ‘“She began to
show me the words she had written, one by one”: Lesbian Reading and Writing Practices in the Fiction of
Sarah Waters’, Women: A Cultural Review, 9:1 (Spring 2008), pp.69-86.
 77

before (be it events, identities, or generations) and of reflecting on how these shape the

present without either dismissing or simply imitating previous movements or refusing to

acknowledge one’s own indebtedness to their achievements. Any continuity between

feminist generations or historical periods, then, is a fictional one, characterised – like

Waters’ matrilineal fictions – by fragmentation as much as unity, by disavowal as much

as obligation.

Conclusion

Both Fingersmith’s sensationalist plot and A Short History of Women’s collection of

stories rely on matrilinealism and the exploration of the relationship between different

generations of women and feminists. However, they also question, and in Waters’ case

destabilise, the genealogical conception of these relationships through their non-

chronological and fragmented narrative structures as well as through their emphasis of

their heroines’ paralysing disidentifications with their mothers. Daughters’

psychological matricides and the fears of identification these acts represent resemble the

ambiguous motifs for our contemporary fascination with the Victorians in fiction.

Fingersmith and A Short History of Women are not so much concerned with the origins

of the protagonists’ mothers as they seek to explore the impact of matrilineal histories

on the daughters. Through Waters’ focus on Maud’s and Sue’s imitations of their

mothers’ identities and their eventual acceptance of their matrilineal fictions as parts of

themselves, and through Walbert’s investigations of each mother’s impact upon later

female generations of their family, these novels highlight the ways in which we actively

create our present through our past, both in the case of contemporary, third-wave

feminism and its constant negotiation of its relationship to feminism’s second wave, and

in terms of neo-Victorian fiction’s compulsive need to (dis)identify with the Victorians.

At the same time, however, Waters and Walbert highlight that our ‘present [also] shapes
 78

the interpretation of the past’,76 as is evident in Maud’s and Sue’s imaginative additions

to the fictions they have been told and in Evelyn’s, Caroline’s and Dora’s different

interpretations of their matrilineal histories.

What neo-Victorian fiction’s continuing utilisation of matrilinealism suggests is

that no identity – be it literary, national, cultural or personal – can properly define itself

except in comparison to what it perceives to be its past, and without (re-)negotiating,

fictionally or otherwise, its relationship with that history. Matrilinealism, then, offers

neo-Victorian fiction a way into a feminist past and a model for the exploration of

feminist issues in that past as a fruitful of further interrogating the present. Yet, while

Walbert’s and Waters’s texts critically appraise the very means through which neo-

Victorianism and third-wave feminism conceptualise their histories, they also indicate

the inevitability of the genealogical concepts which dominate the writing of these

histories. Although highly sceptical of the matrilineal metaphor and its historiographic

implications, neither novel provides viable alternatives, indicating that feminism in

particular is perhaps inescapably stuck in its own genealogical conceptualisation of

itself, rendering it all the more important that its proponents remain acutely aware of the

problematics and limitations the continuation of this concept poses.

76
Dana Shiller, ‘The Redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel’, Studies in the Novel, 29:4
(1997), pp.538-560 (p.544).
 79

CHAPTER TWO
Hystoriographic metafiction: women, madness, therapy and power

In line with their destabilisation of matrilineal genealogies, Walbert’s and Waters’

narratives of female madness also challenge the Victorian notion of women’s mental

illness as a hereditary affliction by highlighting, instead, the processes and cultural

anxieties through which their characters are labelled as mentally ill. This chapter

considers the recurring figure of the madwoman in neo-Victorian fiction and establishes

the significance of authors’ return to this infamous character of nineteenth-century

fiction and medicine. In returning to ‘the period when the predominance of women

among the institutionalized insane first becomes a statistically verifiable phenomenon’,1

Sebastian Faulks’ Human Traces (2005) and Megan Chance’s An Inconvenient Wife

(2004) participate in the writing of what Elaine Showalter has termed ‘hystories’, that is,

the histories of hysteria, while their novels are themselves conditioned by the

contemporary contexts and the feminist issues they set out to critically explore. These

works are, I suggest, hystoriographic metafictions, a combination of the genre Linda

Hutcheon has termed historiographic metafiction and of Showalter’s hystories. They,

like the work of the ‘New Hysterians’,2 demonstrate how ‘rewriting the history of

hysteria becomes a way of achieving an understanding of, and perspective on, ourselves

and our social world’,3 that is, within the scope of this chapter, how neo-Victorian

fiction provides a means of critically investigating contemporary issues surrounding

women’s mental health and third-wave feminist therapy theory.

1
Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830-1980
(London: Virago, 1987), p.52.
2
Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (London: Picador, 1997),
p.7.
3
Mark S. Micale, Approaching Hysteria (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p.182.
 80

Feminism and mental health: hystories and theories

Studies such as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), Michel Foucault’s The

History of Sexuality (1978), Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady (1985) and Lisa

Appignanesi’s Mad, Bad and Sad (2008) have explored the close relationship between a

society’s gender ideals and its definitions of mental health. As Appignanesi explains,

‘not conforming to a norm risks the label of deviance or of madness’, and although

mental health theories and practices as well as gender norms shifted throughout the

nineteenth century, the widespread idea that ‘duty was sacred, and for women [...] lay in

marriage and the purity of motherhood’ persisted.4 Consequently, women who diverged

from or neglected these duties by seeking satisfaction from activities outside the family

became objects of a male medical gaze which judged their behaviour not only as deviant

but also as unnatural and a symptom of illness. The most common medical labels

classifying female deviation from normative femininity changed from monomania to

neurasthenia and, eventually, to hysteria, as a result of the rapidly developing and

splintering field of mental health, which was variably contested by neurologists,

alienists, pathologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts as the century progressed.5

As both Showalter and Appignanesi have highlighted, the connection between

Victorian mental health theories and gender ideals became perhaps most obvious

towards the turn of the century, when feminists began to rebel collectively against the

restrictive roles assigned to their sex and when ‘often enough a nervous woman was also

a “new woman”’.6 At this point, it ‘[became] clear that emancipation, feminism and

neurasthenia, or its sometimes twin sister, hysteria, took shape in the same nervous

soil’.7 Accordingly, in her discussion of the transition from ‘psychiatric Darwinism’ to

4
Lisa Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the
Present (London: Virago, 2008), p.7 and p.104.
5
For discussions of these various medical approaches, see: Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad; and
Showalter, The Female Malady.
6
Apignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad, p.102.
7
Ibid.
 81

‘psychiatric modernism’,8 Showalter calls attention to how during the 1912 Holloway

Gaol protests suffragettes were treated by the government as hysterics were treated by

doctors, a reaction signifying that feminism and hysteria had become synonyms in the

course of the fin-de-siècle.9 Victorian and Edwardian medical theories were thus

informed by contemporary gender ideals and, in turn, they reinforced and sought to

provide scientific evidence for what was widely perceived as the biological attributes of,

rather than constructed roles for, the two sexes. Victorian writers often used their works

to express and explore contemporary medical theories surrounding madness and gender:

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1848), Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1860), Mary

Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The

Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892) are only a few of nineteenth-century fiction’s most famous

representations of the figure of the madwoman which ‘put the many concerns Victorians

had about insanity into dramatic perspective’ and variously explored the supposed links

between women’s mental health and their racial identity, social class, sexuality and

female heredity.10 Both literary as well as scientific narratives, then, are indicative of the

theories and ideologies which shaped the definitions and treatments of mental health and

illness during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

For feminists of the 1960s and 70s medical and literary representations of the

figure of the Victorian madwoman have, consequently, been particularly crucial, if also

divisive. Questions of agency and power became central to their readings and critiques

of these narratives. Are the ‘insane’ women of Freud’s case histories and of Victorian

novelists’ imaginations victims of patriarchy driven into madness by the confining

gender ideals to which they were unable to live up? Are they, as several French

feminists have famously argued, rebels and martyrs who in the name of feminism

8
Showalter, The Female Malady, p.17. In her study Showalter distinguishes between psychiatric
Victorianism (1830-1870), psychiatric Darwinism (1870-1920) and psychiatric modernism (1920-1980).
9
Ibid., pp.162-164.
10
Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad, p.87.
 82

express their protest against normative femininity in the form of hysteria?11 Or should

we consider such protests as futile because madness ‘as an alternative to patriarchy

ultimately traps the woman in silence’,12 therefore reinscribing the dominant cultural

condition it seeks to challenge while also ‘duplicating the essentialist thinking that

identifies women with irrationality in the first place?’13 The crucial question underlying

all of these readings is whether we decide to consider madness as a way of life and

expression that women are able to choose freely and consciously, or as an involuntary

affliction that befalls them against their will.

While interpretations of literary and medical illustrations of the female insane

were, and still are, diverse, second-wave approaches to ideas regarding the reformation

of women’s roles in mental health practice and theory have been equally numerous and

manifold. As a result of first-wave feminist efforts, women were no longer excluded

from the medical profession and were, consequently, able to put theory into practice

when it came to therapeutic concepts and methods. Feminist therapists of the 1960s and

70s agreed that women faced particular problems in society and culture and that

‘traditional psychology and therapy ignored this’.14 In their influential work

Psychotherapy for Women (1977), Dianne K. Carter and Edna I. Rawlings summarise

the issues surrounding power, agency, sex and gender which most feminists perceived as

the flaws of traditional therapy:

The values, structure, and goals of sexist therapy are destructive to women [...]
Clients in therapy move closer to the values of their therapists. Sexist therapists
accept the traditional/ cultural definitions of women as essential to an adequate
sexual identity, the sine qua non of mental health. However, we feel the traditional
role of women in our culture is demeaning, powerless and negatively valued.

11
See, for example: Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. by Betsy
Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
12
Marta Caminero-Santangelo, The Madwoman Can’t Speak: Or Why Insanity Is Not Subversive
(London: Cornell University Press, 1998), p.4.
13
Ibid., p.2.
14
Susan Contratto and Jessica Rossier, ‘Early Trends in Feminist Therapy and Practice’, The
Foundation and Future of Feminist Therapy, ed. by Marcia Hill and Mary B. Ballou (London: Routledge,
2005), pp.7-26 (p.8).
 83

Internalization of this role leads to low self-esteem and self-hatred. If sexist values
are learned from a therapist, a woman client will be discouraged from expressing
assertion, independence and power.15

However, feminists differed in their views on what exactly a non-sexist alternative to

these traditional theories and treatments should comprise. Writers such as Nancy

Chodorow and Jean Baker Miller, for example, saw potential for feminist revision in

psychoanalytic theory,16 while Hannah Lerman and Juliet Mitchell,17 amongst others,

argued that such appropriations would be inevitably flawed because ‘the core [was]

essentially rotten’ and a fundamentally new theory was needed.18

The diverse body of work on feminist therapy resulting from these divisions and

alliances is now, in the context of third-wave feminism, becoming vital to the ongoing

development of feminist theory and practice in psychotherapy. Works such as Liz Bondi

and Erica Burman’s special issue of Feminist Review on Women and Mental Health

(2001), Marcia Hill and Mary Ballou’s The Foundation and Future of Feminist Therapy

(2005) and Ellyn Kaschak’s The Next Generation: Third Wave Feminist Psychotherapy

(2001) highlight the blind spots of and suggest improvements for modern feminist

therapy after the second wave. Like third-wave feminism more generally, the

contributors to these works argue that at the very basis of the development of feminist

therapy must be a mutual understanding, respect and openness between second-wave

feminist therapists and the new generation of feminist practitioners now entering and

contributing to the field. This theory of collaboration between generations is put into

practice in the collections themselves, which include pieces by established feminist

therapists and doctoral students respectively as well as essays which are the results of

15
Edna I. Rawlings and Dianne K. Carter, Psychotherapy for Women: Treatment toward Equality
(Springfield: Charles C. Thomas Publisher Ltd., 1977), p.49.
16
See: Nancy Chodorow, Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1989) and The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1978) as well as Jean Baker Miller, Psychoanalysis and Women:
Contributions to New Theory and Therapy (New York: Brunner/ Mazel Publishers, 1973).
17
See: Hannah Lerman, A Mote in Freud’s Eye (New York: Springer Publishing, 1986) and Juliet
Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974).
18
Contratto and Rossier, ‘Eary Trends’, p.10.
 84

fruitful collaboration between members of two or more generations. A successful and

productive relationship between second and third-wave therapists can only be possible,

Ellyn Kaschak argues in the introduction to her collection, if young feminists cease to

consider the feminism of previous decades ‘as if it is incapable of development, as if

frozen in time in its infancy’,19 while, in turn, second-wave feminists must acknowledge

that

the tasks before young feminists are different because of all that we accomplished
and did not accomplish and because it is a different world from the one in which
we fought for freedom and equality. Yet they need the connection with the
previous generation and with each other as much as we do.20

A crucial aspect of this different world is the influence of postmodern theory on almost

every academic discipline, including psychology and psychotherapy. ‘The [...] context

into which we were born, raised and trained’, Cindy M. Bruns and Colleen Trimble

point out, is one ‘in which the postmodern movement has challenged notions of reality

and truth at fundamental levels’.21 One effective aspect of feminist therapy which arises

from this influence is the practitioner’s creation of a space in which ‘members of society

with the least access to traditional means of power [can] claim their personal experience

as the basis of truth and knowledge’,22 since multiple truths and histories are considered

not only as valid but indeed essential. This also extends, on a larger scale, to feminist

theory, as third-wave feminist therapists ‘all share the position that there is no single

reality, no one “right” feminist theory or epistemological position about women’.23

Consequently, radical, liberal, global and women-of-colour feminisms, among others, all

19
Ellyn Kaschak, ‘The Next Generation: Third Wave Feminist Psychotherapy’, The Next
Generation: Third Wave Feminist Psychotherapy, ed. by Ellyn Kaschak (Binghampton: Haworth Press,
2001), pp.1-4 (p.2).
20
Ibid., p.3.
21
Cindy M. Bruns and Colleen Trimble, ‘Rising Tide: Taking Our Place as Young Feminist
Psychologists’, The Next Generation: Third Wave Feminist Psychotherapy (New York: Routledge, 2001),
pp.19-36 (p.20).
22
Laura S. Brown, Laurie E. Riepe and Rochelle L. Coffey, ‘Beyond Color and Culture: Feminist
Contributions to Paradigms of Human Difference’, The Foundation and Future of Feminist Therapy, ed.
by Marcia Hill and Mary B. Ballou (London: Routledge, 2005), pp.63-92 (p.77).
23
Natalie Porter, ‘Location, Location, Location: Contributions of Contemporary Feminist Theorists
to Therapy Theory and Practice’, The Foundation and Future of Feminist Therapy, ed. by Marcia Hill and
Mary B. Ballou (London: Routledge, 2005), pp.143-160 (p.145).
 85

have a rightful place in and influence upon third-wave therapy theory. As Carolyn K.

West argues, within the realm of feminist theory, multiplicity accommodates and

enables development and transformation. Feminism, to her, is

a landscape holding many ideas and many truths. Its questions allow ambiguity,
entertain difference, invite reflection, and encourage investigation into new
perspectives without being reductionist, without needing to dismiss, edge out, or
shout down. This allowing, [...] this ability to stay open in the face of ambiguity,
provides the space for a transformative process that is akin to the very nature of
development itself.24

Inextricably linked to these notions of ambiguity and difference are third-wave therapy’s

concerns with diversity, particularly the putting into practice of theories on women’s

diversity. In the 1980s, Brown, Riepe and Coffey note, ‘feminist therapy theorists began

to abandon a unidimensional model of women that ignored women’s diversity and

complexity, focusing instead on the intersections between gender and other components

of identity and social location’.25

However, we are also reminded of third-wave feminism’s willingness to self-

critique, as the same authors observe with caution that feminists’ undertakings to

understand diversity amongst women are far from complete. While issues of colour and

race as well as of sexual orientation and age have been and are still being explored

widely, both in feminist theory in general and in feminist therapy, aspects such as

disability remain underexplored. In the field of feminist disability studies, Adrienne

Asch, for example, has raised awareness that ‘it is a convention of albeit social

construction to define all women with disabilities as members of the same group’, a

generalisation which should be replaced by a practice in which we ‘think in specifics

about this particular person, this particular disability, and its particular meaning in the

24
Carolyn K. West, ‘The Map of Relational-Cultural Theory’, The Foundation and Future of
Feminist Therapy, ed. by Marcia Hill and Mary B. Ballou (London: Routledge, 2005), pp.93-110 (p.95).
25
Brown, Riepe and Coffey, ‘Beyond Color and Culture’, p.64. There are some examples of theorists
concerning themselves with diversity amongst women already in the 1970s, but they are few and almost
exclusively concerned with issues of social class.
 86

current relational field’.26 Therapists such as Brown have argued that, frequently, ‘the

assumption is made that paying attention to issues of racial diversity will cover matters

related to class as well, as though the two variables were isomorphic’.27 Such sweeping

examinations of social class, she continues, ‘perpetuates dominant cultural stereotypes

equating middle-class status with white people and poverty with people of color’.28

While awareness of gender and sexism has been raised in the past decades, third-wave

therapist practitioners and theorists now call attention to the areas of women’s diversity

which remain underexplored, or even silent. Feminist therapists, Brown, Riepe and

Coffey suggest, must break these silences and, as difficult and complex as these areas

may be, acknowledge the problems they present and ‘create a space for uncomfortable

difference, perhaps unresolvable differences, between one woman and another’.29

An uncomfortable difference resulting from women’s diversity and impacting

especially on the feminist therapist-patient and mentor-student relationship is that of

power. Here, the perhaps most significant issue of second-wave feminisms was its

frequent failure to acknowledge inequalities in power amongst women in favour of an

appearance of commonality. As Bruns and Trimble observe, ‘while winning significant

battles supporting the rights of women and adding women’s voices to the psychological

discourse, i.e. gaining power, feminists simultaneously denied power differentials

existed, at least between women’.30 Since therefore neither the concepts of

egalitarianism (the denial of and discomfort with the use of power) or hierarchical power

(the use of power over others, as utilised by patriarchy) can be applicable or useful in a

diversity-conscious feminist practice, many third-wave therapists and theorists have

explored and argued for the potentials of relational power, or relational-cultural theory.

26
Brown, Riepe and Coffey, ‘Beyond Color and Culture’, p.64.
27
Laura S. Brown, Subversive Dialogues: Theory in Feminist Therapy (New York: Basic, 1994)
cited in Brown, Riepe and Coffey, ‘Beyond Color and Culture’, p.79.
28
Brown, Subversive Dialogues, cited in Brown, Riepe and Coffey, ‘Beyond Color and Culture’,
p.79.
29
Brown, Riepe and Coffey, ‘Beyond Color and Culture’, p.85.
30
Bruns and Trimble, ‘Rising Tide’, p.28.
 87

As in third-wave theories concerning the relationship between feminist generations, we

find mutuality at the centre of these approaches:

Relational power is the dynamic interplay between two active processes in which
the ability to be influenced is an active openness to, and inclusion of, another in
our world of meaning and concern. This openness, in turn, contains the potential to
influence the one to whom we have opened ourselves, who by their own active
openness and inclusion may once again influence us.31

The seemingly passive act of being influenced is thus turned into a conscious, active

and, most importantly, mutually beneficial practice which allows each participant to

gain the best out of others.32 Especially for young feminists and their therapist mentors

this praxis promises the productive collaboration between generations so desperately

encouraged in recent feminist writing, allowing for a utilisation rather than a silencing of

power differentials and providing ‘a means of subverting patriarchy without relying on

the master’s tools’.33 As West makes clear, awareness, here, leads to action: ‘It is not the

denial of power differences, but the recognition of them, the mindful attempt to

minimize differentials, and to, within the context of relationship, be empowered and to

empower another that creates the change inherent in growth and development’.34

Despite these developments in feminist therapy and feminist therapy theory, Mary

Ballou acknowledges that even in its third-wave feminist therapy is still facing

problems. Who, for example, decides how health and illness are defined outside of

physical medical practice, in areas where numbers cannot reflect ‘normality’ or

wellbeing? Even though norm groups supposedly give indications of what can be

considered average or normal, they are, Ballou points out, constructed by researchers,

meaning that ‘those dominant in the social structure have developed the tests based on

31
Bruns and Trimble, ‘Rising Tide’, p.30.
32
Unfortunately, what seems problematic is the absence of practicality in the works discussing this
promising new approach to therapy and power and to human relations in general. How can such theories
be implemented or be advocated outside the academy, for example? Although theories on relational
power are inspirational, how exactly is one to practice them? What actions equal these theories? While
such questions represent a significant gap in current feminist scholarship, it is not within the realm of this
thesis to explore them.
33
Bruns and Trimble, ‘Rising Tide’, p.35.
34
West, ‘The Map of Relational-Cultural Theory’, p.103.
 88

their views of normality, and their trained representatives continue to interpret these

tests on the bases of dominant socio-cultural normative standards’.35 Nevertheless, it is

exactly this awareness, indication and analysis of problems which also adds to the

impact and, hopefully, effectiveness of third-wave feminist therapy.

Feminist literary theories surrounding madness and the issues its gendered

representations evoke for women have been translated into neo-Victorian fiction since

the 1960s. In Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Jean Rhys famously revisits Brontë’s Bertha

Mason by providing readers with a fictional account of the supposed madwoman’s life

before her marriage to and incarceration by Rochester. In doing so, Rhys addresses the

interconnected issues of gender, race, colonisation and hereditary female insanity and

lends the original madwoman in the attic the voice she was denied in Jane Eyre. Rhys

demonstrates that for Antoinette (Bertha) the slip into madness is neither a conscious

choice nor an empowering act, but that, instead, it signifies her surrender: as she tells us,

‘words are no use, I know that now’.36 With this remark and by ‘giving up words’, as

Marta Caminero-Santangelo observes, ‘[Antoinette] gives up the battlefield to the

Rochester figure’s representations, which will come to stand as universal’.37 Madness, in

Wide Sargasso Sea, becomes therefore ‘not a challenge to constraining representations

but a complete capitulation to them’,38 a loss rather than an achievement of agency and

power. Over three decades after the publication of Rhys’ novel, the madwoman remains

as compelling a subject to authors of neo-Victorian fiction as she once was for their

Victorian counterparts. While texts such as Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the

White (2002) and Michael Cox’s The Meaning of Night (2006) revisit, like Rhys, the

famous madwoman in the attic, works such as A.N. Wilson’s A Jealous Ghost (2005)

35
Mary Ballou, ‘Threats and Challenges to Feminist Theory’, The Foundation and Future of
Feminist Therapy, ed. by Marcia Hill and Mary B. Ballou (London: Routledge, 2005), pp.201-210
(p.204).
36
Rhys, Jean. [1966] Wide Sargasso Sea (London: Penguin Books, 1968), p.135.
37
Caminero-Santangelo, The Madwoman Can’t Speak, p.17.
38
Ibid., p.16.
 89

and Justine Picardie’s Daphne (2008) have created the contemporary figure of the

fanatic Victorianist – the hysteric scholar – for whom reality is replaced with and reason

lost in their subject of study.39 The novels which are of particular interest for the purpose

of this chapter, however, are those which revisit female insanity in explicitly medical

settings by focusing on the doctor-patient relationships created in therapy and the

politics of power evoked in that context.

Through an analysis of Human Traces and An Inconvenient Wife, this chapter

demonstrates that not only feminist literary theories on the madwoman but also issues

concerning feminist therapy are reflected and explored in these neo-Victorian novels.

While the texts are concerned with Victorian concepts of madness and the power

differentials between male doctors and female patients in fin-de-siècle therapist praxis,

the very fact that they concern themselves with these issues is indicative of the themes’

continuing significance in a twenty-first century and third-wave feminist context.

Faulks’ and Chance’s novels can, therefore, be considered as fictional equivalents to the

work of the New Hysterians. Because of the inextricable link between gender and

medicine, the nineteenth century has proved a fruitful ground for this group of scholars

to demonstrate that records such as case histories and patient classifications – both

historical and contemporary – can be considered as narratives which reveal as much, if

not more, about the cultural values and anxieties of the societies in which they were

conceived as about the patients, symptoms and conditions they set out to describe. The

New Hysterians acknowledge hysteria as a set of multiple phenomena which are

historically, culturally and politically conditioned and significant. Both their subjects as

well as their methods, then, ‘express the age as much as the disorders they analyse’.40

What becomes clear from Showalter’s investigations as well as from works such as

39
Wilson’s protagonist is a doctoral student whose obsession with Henry James’ The Turn of the
Screw (1898) eventually leads to her inability to distinguish between the events of her own life and those
of the story. One of Picardie’s characters is a specialist on Branwell Brontë and fixated on the hopeless
task of finding more significance in Branwell’s writings than they have previously been granted.
40
Showalter, Hystories, p.8.
 90

Mark Micale’s Approaching Hysteria (1994) is that hysteria and, I argue, mental health

theory and practice in general, can be of cultural and political significance on several

levels in historical and contemporary contexts. Symptoms, disorders, treatments,

representations and scholarship on any or all of the former are expressed in narratives,

each of which also carries a meta-narrative about the contexts in and processes through

which it is conceived.

Medical – and especially psychiatric and psychotherapeutic – practices and

theories therefore produce narratives which are always, if to varying extents, culturally

constructed and thus bear a close resemblance to fiction. It was, ironically, Sigmund

Freud – the man who turned so many of his female patients’ biographies into notorious

psychoanalytic fictions to match and hence confirm his own theories – who noted this

connection in his Studies on Hysteria (1895) and, with some concern, admitted that his

case histories lacked the scientific form of psychiatric reports and could well ‘read like

short stories’.41 Steven Marcus persuasively argues that ‘Freud’s case histories are a new

form of literature; they are creative narratives that include their own analysis and

interpretation’.42 If, as Marcus suggests here, psychoanalytic case histories can be read

as fictions, then we cannot help but ask whether fiction, in turn, can read like a case

history of the society and culture that produces and consumes it. Consequently, this

chapter analyses the gendered politics and power relations of the patient-doctor

relationships central to Faulks’ Human Traces and Chance’s An Inconvenient Wife in

order to explore the ways in which these novels engage with and consider historical

subjects through contemporary feminist theories surrounding women’s mental health.

41
Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer, [1895] Studies on Hysteria, ed. and trans. by James and Alix
Strachey (London: Penguin Books, 1974), p.231.
42
Steven Marcus, ‘Freud and Dora: Story, History, Case History’, In Dora’s Case: Freud – Hysteria
– Feminism, ed. by Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane, 2nd edn (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1990), pp.56-91 (p.90).
 91

Rewriting and overwriting the Victorian madwoman: Human Traces

Set for the most part in the fin de siècle, Faulks’ Human Traces is concerned with

misreadings of the female body and its symptoms and, through this, explores the power

relations and manipulative narratives of the discipline which was, then, yet to become

known as psychoanalysis. The novel’s narrative follows the lives of Englishman Thomas

Midwinter and the French Jacques Rebière. Both medical students, the young men

discover their shared passion for the science of the mind when their ways cross at the

age of twenty around 1880. Each of them is, initially, interested in the different theories

and practices prevalent in the other’s country, but their intellectual paths soon divide as

their careers progress. As Thomas explains, he and Jacques ‘are in the same room, but

[...] looking out of different windows’, since his ‘guiding light’ is Darwin and Jacques,

like Freud himself during the mid-1880s, is influenced by Charcot.43 Throughout the

plot, Thomas emerges as the contemporary voice of medicine as his theories are

modelled on philosophical, humanistic and anthropological studies of more recent

decades.44 However, it is Jacques – the novel’s Freud – on whom I want to focus first

and foremost. His desire to study the human mind is motivated by his determination to

cure his older brother Olivier from a mental illness he developed in late adolescence.

Olivier, who is forced by his father to live in chains in the stable, is important to the

young doctor mainly because their mother, who died giving birth to Jacques, is

metaphorically locked up with his brother, since Olivier’s memories are Jacques’ only

access to information about her. Jealous of his brother’s recollections – however

fragmented and incomplete – Jacques becomes obsessed with the search for a cure for

43
Sebastian Faulks, Human Traces (London: Vintage, 2006), p.413. Hereafter this text is referred to
as HT after quotations in the text.
44
In his notes and acknowledgments Faulks cites Julian Jaynes’ The Origins of Consciousness in the
Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1977), David Horribin’s The Madness of
Adam and Eve: How Schizophrenia Shaped Humanity (London: Bantam, 2001) and the works of
Professor T.J. Crow as the major influences for the theories Thomas develops and presents in the later
parts of the novel.
 92

Olivier’s mental disorder and, considering this desire for his absent mother, it is not

surprising that towards the fin de siècle he is increasingly drawn to the then emerging

discipline of psychoanalysis.

In their Austrian countryside sanatorium he and Thomas have opened together,

Jacques takes on the case of Fräulein Katharina von A, also known as Kitty. In the first

paragraphs of his report, he records that she is ‘a young woman, aged twenty-five years,

[who] had been complaining for some time of severe lower abdominal pain,

accompanied by infrequent vomiting’ (HT, 379) and ‘in addition [...] reported chronic

joint pain in the shoulders, elbows and fingers’ (HT, 380). This is where Jacques’

scientific observations end. Instead of starting his treatment with a physical examination

to either determine the physical cause of Kitty’s pains or to eliminate any potential

physical reasons for her illness, Jacques immediately begins to probe his patient’s social

background and life story to establish grounds for a psychoanalytic analysis of her

problems. From the outset, he is convinced that Kitty is ‘a young woman of outstanding

character’ (HT, 379) as well as ‘of considerable education and self-possession’ (HT,

380), but he also quickly forms the opinion that all these traits merely mask the hysteria

which must be lingering underneath: ‘the initial impression that this evidently thoughtful

young woman gave to the world concealed an extremely troubled interior life’ (HT,

382). Despite his observation that Kitty ‘seemed bemused by her symptoms’ (HT, 381),

he attributes her ability to bear her suffering to ‘what Charcot called the belle

indifference of the hysteric’ (HT, 382), that is, the patient’s lack of concern regarding the

causes and consequences of her symptoms.

An adaptation and amalgamation of the cases of Freud’s Ida Bauer (Dora) and

Emma Eckstein, as well as of Josef Breuer’s Bertha Pappenheim (Anna O.),45 Jacques’

fictions regarding the connection between Kitty’s physical pains and her life and

45
For detailed descriptions and analyses of these cases see: Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester’s
Freud’s Women (London: Phoenix, 2005).
 93

sexuality grow increasingly improbable as his treatment of her continues. Like Freud’s

Ida, Kitty has had homosexual fantasies and encounters as an adolescent; like both Ida

and Bertha, she has experienced brief losses of her ability to speak; and similar to the

case of Emma – in which Freud persisted there were psychological reasons for a

bleeding which had, in fact, been caused by a half-meter gauze which was left in

Emma’s nasal cavity after a surgery – Jacques insists in the psychological causes of

Kitty’s afflictions, which are later revealed to originate from ovarian cysts and

rheumatic fever. Like Freud, then, Jacques misreads the narrative of Kitty’s bodily

symptoms. His determination to find traumatic sexual encounters as the causes of her

somatic troubles leads him to several astonishing interpretations of her relationships

with friends, parents and lovers. Once his patient has told him about her affectionate

relationship with her father, her fear of small animals, her homosexual desires and

experiences as an adolescent, her subsequent habit of masturbating and her anger at her

dying father’s replacement lawyer entering her bedroom without knocking, Jacques

believes that this information provides him with ‘a fairly clear picture of the trauma that

had precipitated her hysteria’ (HT, 390). Not only that, but he is certain that this picture

‘must by now also be taking shape in the mind of anyone to whom the outline of the

case has been related’ (HT, 390). Hence mistaking his approach and interpretation of the

case as common sense, he finds that

beyond doubt [...] a traumatic incident had been deliberately suppressed by her
conscious mind because she found the implications of it intolerable [and] this sum
of psychological excitation, being denied proper release, had converted itself
easily through the pathways of somatic innervations into the distressing symptoms.
(HT, 391)

Yet, Jacques insists he is an objective observer, much like his idol Charcot, who despite

his sensational stage performances famously explained: ‘I am absolutely only the

photographer; I register what I see’.46

46
Martin Charcot cited in Showalter, The Female Malady, p.151.
 94

In his version of Kitty’s life story, Jacques claims that her abdominal problems,

which first occurred when she heard of her father’s death, are not a reaction to the loss

of a man she had been close to, but are supposedly a sign of her desire for her father’s

lawyer, Herr P, whom she has always disliked.47 Kitty’s anger at Herr P’s abrupt

entrance on an occasion before her father’s death is, consequently, also easily

explainable: not only was it actually Herr P – rather than his replacement – who entered

the room that day but he also, contrary to Kitty’s memory and narrative, caught her

masturbating. The aphonia Kitty reports to have experienced twice in her life is

therefore, too, magically accounted for, since it is apparent to Jacques that at the time

Kitty was caught masturbating, she was also fantasising about performing an act of

fellatio on Herr P, which later physically manifested itself in the loss of her ability to

speak. Finally, and possibly both most amusingly and disturbingly for the modern

reader, Kitty’s fear of small animals apparently stems from the nickname ‘little weasel’

(HT, 393), which she was given by Frau E, the woman with whom she had her first

sexual encounter. To Jacques, the significance of this is that

in Katharina’s unconscious, the act of masturbating had become associated with

the idea of small animals in their holes or burrows; doubtless Frau E-’s successful
manipulation had involved the appearance of the clitoris from within its protective
hood, like a timid animal that subsequently withdrew. (HT, 393)

In this parody of Freudian analysis, sexual fantasy, vivid imagination and professional

ambition merge, here, into one. Jacques plans to present and receive praise for his case

history at a symposium in Vienna, an event at which a predominantly male audience

would ponder collectively and scientifically over women’s ‘timid’ and animal-like

genitals during lesbian intercourse.

Once Jacques has finished his ‘psychophysical resolution’ (HT, 420) of Kitty’s

case, the last step towards a cure, so he believes, is for her to accept his fiction as her

47
This is not dissimilar to the way in which Freud, in the case of Ida Bauer, argued that Ida’s desire
for and relationship with Frau K was actually a displaced desire for Frau K’s husband, Herr K.
 95

own narrative, one he insists reflects the true traumatic events responsible for her

physical illness. However, to his surprise, Kitty is unwilling to believe his invention of

events which never happened and he notes: ‘Fräulein Katharina [...] would not concede

that the incident I had interpolated into her story was necessarily true [and] she was not

in a position to recognise it as something she had actually experienced: I believed it

would have taken hypnosis to achieve that’ (HT, 397-398, my emphasis). Jacques’

unconscious intention with regard to Kitty is, therefore, the same as Freud’s was with

Ida, that is, ‘to penetrate the sexual mysteries of [… her] hysterical symptoms and to

dictate their meanings to her’.48

Despite these clear representations, Faulks lacks confidence in his readers (and in

Kitty) to recognise the at best suspicious nature of the medical narrative Jacques has

constructed. It is Thomas, who, having been asked by Jacques to give his opinion on the

case history, instantly realises that Kitty is by no means a hysteric, but instead suffers

from rheumatic fever and, as the hospital surgeon finds, has two cysts in one of her

ovaries. With Thomas thus having heroically rescued Kitty from the potentially fatal

misdiagnosis of his partner, Faulks feels the need to explain to us, step by step, the flaws

of Jacques’ analysis in a painfully unsubtle way, namely by presenting us with Thomas’

written evaluation of the case. For Thomas, with whom the modern reader is clearly

supposed to identify, the problem with Jacques’ practice of psychoanalysis is his lack of

consideration for physical symptoms and causes of illness, his misreading of them as a

narrative which suits the needs of his theories and interpretations rather than serving an

effective diagnosis and treatment of the patient. As Thomas aptly puts it, for Jacques

even Kitty’s ‘apparent sanity is a symptom of her insanity’ (HT, 429), and, therefore,

‘she is trapped either way’ (HT, 429). In fact, the only consistent rule underlying

Jacques’ analysis of Kitty’s life, sexuality and dreams is, as Thomas cynically observes,

48
Showalter, The Female Malady, p.159.
 96

that ‘everything is the opposite of what it seems – unless it is not, when it may be itself

again. Anything can represent anything else – or its opposite!’ (HT, 433).

For Thomas, a firm believer in the potential of emotional care, it is not the act of

talking as a therapeutic method which is at fault, but the fact that Jacques abuses his

patient’s narrative to construct his own story. Jacques’ aim is, consequently, not to cure

his patient by whatever means, but to find what he wants to find, that is, to alter Kitty’s

narrative with his rigid, still underdeveloped theory rather than shaping his theory with

consideration of her narrative. Mirroring the way in which ‘some of the openness to

women’s words and feelings displayed in Studies on Hysteria had become codified in

the interests of Freud’s emerging psychoanalytic system’,49 Jacques’ supposedly

scientific case history, then, is more representative of the male doctor’s than the female

patient’s fears and desires. Appignanesi argues that today, ‘depending on the interpreter

or historian’, Freud is either is ‘the heroic conquistador of the secrets of the unconscious,

the great innovator whose talking cure definitively altered the treatment of madness, or

the manipulative fraudster who launched a movement out of a mixture of fabrication and

speculation’.50 Considering his representation of Jacques, it seems that for Faulks he is

certainly the latter. Despite this critique of psychoanalysis as a male overwriting of

women’s narratives and Thomas’ more promising therapeutic strategy ‘of love and care’

(HT, 658), from a feminist point of view Human Traces evokes a sense of

disappointment. The cases of Ida Bauer, Emma Eckstein and Bertha Pappenheim have

all acquired feminist significance in their own right: Ida’s story has become an admired

expression of female homosexuality, her decision to walk out on Freud and quit his

treatment has been championed by feminists of various camps, providing, as Emma’s

case does, ‘a paradigm case for catching patriarchy with its pants down’.51 Similarly,

49
Showalter, The Female Malady, p.158.
50
Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad, p.194.
51
Appignanesi and Forrester, Freud’s Women, p.146.
 97

Bertha’s hallucinations and her frequent loss of the ability to speak her native tongue

have been considered as feminist rejections of the patriarchal order.52 However,

although Faulks utilises these cases in his construction of Kitty, the novel lacks a

gendered critique of psychoanalysis and its power relations, as its interrogations of

mental health practices remain strictly scientific ones.

Accordingly, the story’s female characters are of little consequence. Sonia

(Thomas’s sister and Jacques’ wife) as well as Kitty are generally portrayed as relatively

witty and intelligent, but they always remain within the realm of the famous angel of the

house and act as their husbands’ complements, not their equals. Unlike Ida with Freud,

Kitty does not walk out on Jacques, but, instead, has to be rescued from his misdiagnosis

by Thomas. Even though she does not fall in love with her psychoanalyst, like Bertha

did with Joseph Breuer, she does eventually marry her heroic rescuer Thomas and,

ironically, does not become the first female analyst as Emma Eckstein did, or a feminist

activist like Bertha, but is, instead, content with co-managing the sanatorium’s accounts.

Indeed, Thomas admits it is Jacques’ case history, his friend’s sexual fiction of

Kitty’s life, which made him fall in love with her in the first instance and her intellectual

capacities are only of interest to him for his own benefit. His feelings towards her were,

he claims, intensified ‘when she showed such interest in his work’ and when he

recognised that ‘only Katharina had been able to connect the different parts of him’ (HT,

444). Sonia, Kitty’s sister-in-law, is repeatedly noted to be perfectly content and fulfilled

by her role as mother and (betrayed) wife. Motherhood, to her, resembles complete

fulfilment, so much so that she believes all mothers’ complaints regarding the

difficulties of raising and looking after their children are no true complaints at all, but

simply strategies of disguising their so perfect and infinite happiness as mothers. As

mothers, Sonia assumes, all women share the same experience:

52
Dianne Hunter, ‘Hysteria, Psychoanalysis, and Feminism: The Case of Anna O.’, Feminist Studies,
9:3 (1983), pp.465-488 (p.474).
 98

She talked for hours with these young mothers about their children and their
husbands and their lives [...] and they were not women she thought might
otherwise have been her friends, but the intensity of what they shared was such
that it dwarfed all differences. It was such a common human experience, thought
Sonia – by definition, perhaps, the commonest of all; yet to each of them, she
could see, it was a private rapture so intoxicating that they were forced sometimes
to play at being blasé, to complain about the work, the sleepless nights, the loss of
time alone, when she could see that all they really felt was incredulity that
something so mechanically natural was in truth so sublime. (HT, 487)

This unconditional maternal surrender and the supposedly inherent and natural pleasure

in it also define Sonia’s identity as a wife. She is convinced that loving one’s husband

means ‘to bend all your powers to their happiness. All of them. To be everything’ (HT,

777). To be everything extends even to feign ignorance regarding Jacques’ affair with a

young Russian woman, Roya, and leads Sonia to secretly console her husband by

sending him a letter she has made out to be from his mistress, with a fictional

explanation of why Roya left him. In both Sonia’s and Kitty’s case, then, being a woman

in the medical world means, after all, to be nothing but a part of one’s husband, to be, as

it were, Adam’s rib. Despite its critique of power relations in therapy, then, Human

Traces reinforces what feminists of the 1960s and 70s so desperately fought against,

namely the ‘psychological characteristics attributed to them by patriarchy [and]

naturalised and internalised as truth’, that is, the roles of men as ‘active producers’ and

of women as ‘passive reproducers and care-givers’.53

This is also the case for some of the other patients inn Faulks’ novel. In his

function as heroic rescuer, Thomas also becomes the god-like doctor, the creator of

women. During his first employment at an English asylum, Thomas secretly removes

and later employs two misdiagnosed and ill-treated working-class women, Daisy and

Marie. While the ambiguous power relations of psychoanalysis are critiqued, they are

reinstated all the more through Thomas’ relationships with these female characters. As

Daisy tells him toward the end of the narrative:

53
Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad, p.368.
 99

You gave us a life. Me and Mary. It was like being born again into a better
world. Look at us now. We both do our best work at the hospital, I’m a married
lady with a nice husband and a house and a fine boy [...] Don’t you know how
we worshipped you? You were our god. You saved us [...] and me and Mary we
just wanted to go down on our knees and kiss the place you’d walked on. (HT,
771-772)

The modest and good doctor supposedly employed his power to empower others, but,

nevertheless, these working-class women now fall on their knees before him and labour

in his sanatorium to display their infinite and life-long gratitude – an ambiguous

liberation.

Eventually, it is Thomas’ own fate which puts the novel in an undoubtedly

contemporary context. It can be no coincidence that, at the age of sixty, he starts to

suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, a mental illness for which even today cause and cure

have not yet been identified. Addressing historical as well as contemporary therapy

theories and practices of mental health, Human Traces certainly critiques Victorian as

well as Edwardian approaches to women’s mental health. However, in its historical

critique and through its continuous and at times tedious representations of the minute

details of medical discourses on mental illness, its uncritical reproduction of the

gendered inequalities they create, and its underdeveloped and ambiguously empowered

female characters, Faulks’ contribution to hystoriographic metafiction illustrates as

much as it exemplifies the ways in which medical and literary practices – historical as

well as contemporary – can overwrite women’s bodies and the stories they tell. Human

Traces, then, employs the insights of second-wave psychotherapy theories on gendered

power relations, but fails to turn its critical eye upon itself and consider, as third-wave

theorists and practitioners do, the fraudulent power relations it reinforces in its critique

of the past.

An Inconvenient Wife: hypnosis, power and the ambiguities of liberation

While Faulks’ Jacques believes that hypnosis would have allowed him to overwrite
 100

Kitty’s history and memory with his own psychoanalytic fiction of her life, Megan

Chance’s An Inconvenient Wife explores this idea of the therapist’s potential power to

create a new person and takes it significantly further. Chance takes us away from Britain

and the Continent to mid-1880s New York. Here, Lucy Carelton, descendant of one of

the first settler families, suffers from headaches and breakdowns when in society. Lucy

married William for love, but William, a self-made man and newly-rich stockbroker,

appears to have used her as a means to gain access to the circles of society which would

otherwise have remained out of his reach. Desperate to have Lucy return to her duties in

society and marriage in an adequate fashion, William has taken her from doctor to

doctor and has had his good-willed wife endure any treatment imaginable. At the time

the novel begins, the only alternative left to avoid the young woman’s incarceration in a

private asylum promises to be Dr. Victor Seth, a Jewish neurologist from the Continent

who, like Faulks’ Jacques, is inspired by Charcot. Victor’s initially promising treatment

of Lucy through hypnosis, however, soon comes under scrutiny when William realises

that her new doctor attempts to free his wife from her ailments by suggesting that she

must break from the gendered restraints her social status and her husband have imposed

on her artistic aspirations and sexual desires. Victor’s intervention becomes more

questionable when he influences and even controls Lucy’s mind and behaviour through

hypnosis and when their doctor-patient relationship becomes a sexual one. Lucy

eventually kills her husband to free herself from him and to be with Victor, and she

escapes a sentence because of her gender, her station and her lawyer’s claim that, at the

time of the crime, she was temporarily insane.

Chance’s novel does not introduce us to the narrative’s madwoman through a

doctor’s report on her mental condition. Instead, we are presented with Lucy’s own

voice, accompanied by extracts from her therapist’s journal. Like Faulks’ novel, An

Inconvenient Wife initially concerns itself with the misdiagnosis of the female
 101

protagonist. When we read Victor’s first notes about Lucy it becomes apparent that, as

with Jacques Rebière, professional ambition influences his approach to and treatment of

patients, as does, in Victor’s case, their sex and social status. Dismissively, he predicts

that like all other ladies Lucy will very soon

be gone from my office completely, restored to her usual uncomplaining, parasitic

existence. Though her husband desires discretion, they will both laud my
accomplishments and recommend me to another bored invalid. These are the
times I begin to despise the turn my practice has taken. Though I am adequately
rewarded financially, these women only provide fodder for my critics and keep
me from pursuing real knowledge.54

Replicating the prejudice he endures due to his Jewish working-class background,

Victor ironically judges Lucy and her peers as parasitic due to their class and sex

despite the fact that it is he who, like a parasite, lives off their ailments. In his further

entries we learn that he considers his women patients as easily treatable because of their

‘suggestibility’ (IW, 71), allowing him to hypnotise them and then plant suggestions in

their minds which will subsequently influence their behaviour or alter their thinking in

critical – or hysterical – moments. He goes on to claim that he will be ‘profoundly

grateful’ when Lucy has no more need of his services, although ‘there will simply be

another to take her place. Another invalid, another bored society matron’ (IW, 71). This

condescending disinterest is directly linked to his professional ambitions because these

everyday cases cannot add to his profile as a researcher and practitioner and, thus,

deserve only contempt. Of importance can only be what helps him gain his fellow

physicians’ respect and ‘such a thing cannot be found in treating upper-class

neurasthenics’ (IW, 71).

Victor’s ultimate aim is to prove that hypnosis is a valid and effective form of

therapy, that ‘the mind itself can cure, that the unconscious can be trained to direct the

will’ (IW, 71). Inspired by Charcot, he is particularly taken not by his idol’s treatment of

54
Megan Chance, An Inconvenient Wife (New York: Warner Books, 2004), p.54. Hereafter this text
is referred to as IW after quotations in the text.
 102

hysterics, but by his creation of them. He passionately criticises his colleagues for not

believing

that at Salpêtrière, Charcot himself is creating hysterics through suggestion! They

are afraid to believe such a thing is even possible! And if they do not believe that
such a thing is possible in those who suffer from true madness, how then will they
come to believe my own experiments, performed as they are on those who suffer
from self-indulgent invalidism? They will not – that is the only answer. Yet I
cannot help but persist in believing that someday I will find a way to convince
them all. (IW, 71)

The judgement which is explicitly made here is that occurrences of madness in women

of the upper classes are usually self-inflicted and therefore easier to cure than ‘true

madness’, meaning it is less prestigious to cure them, whatever his method. Lucy only

becomes of higher interest and value to him when he realises that his usual treatments

do not achieve the expected results and that she appears to present an usual case.

Victor’s methods consist in part of electrotherapy, which he uses repeatedly to bring

Lucy to a climax, causing a sexual relief which she is denied in her passionless marriage

and which is intended to balance her mental condition. He notes that ‘faradization has

brought her to climax quickly, and she achieved a trance through touch-induced

stimulus – which leads me to believe that Mrs. C. has normal female passions that have

been severely discouraged, perhaps by her husband, perhaps by others in her life’ (IW,

86-87).

However, although Lucy responds positively and as expected to this treatment,

Victor’s first attempts to influence her unconscious are less successful and heighten his

interest in her. When she is under hypnosis, he suggests to her the image of a forest, a

relaxing scene which is supposed to form part of her memory and which her

unconscious will recall whenever a hysteric episode looms. Other women respond well

to such suggestions and are content when the artificially created image enters their

conscious minds. Lucy, however, notices that there is something unnatural about this

scene and notes that ‘there was a falseness about it […] as if it were a set staged for me
 103

alone, a memory told me that I had grasped hold of and made my own, though it was

not mine’ (IW, 77). It is this resistance which, in contrast to Faulks’ Jacques, leads

Victor to establish that his initial diagnosis and prediction were significantly flawed: ‘I

have always believed that hysteria lies in egoism and wilfulness’, he reflects, ‘but [...] I

had the opportunity to observe the etiology that underlies Mrs. C’s fits, and I begin to

question my own hypothesis’ (IW, 102).

Lucy’s unconscious is as resistant to fin-de-siècle gender norms as to the artificial

memory he attempted to place in her mind during hypnosis. As becomes clear in her

following therapy sessions as well as in her first-person narrative, Lucy’s spells of

headaches and her emotional outbreaks are the result of her struggle with the gender

norms imposed on her. Hysteria expresses the clash between her desire and her inability

to be the wife she is supposed to be, but it is neither a conscious nor an effective act of

expression or rebellion since it leads not to empowerment but to a mind-numbing

laudanum addiction and the prospect of incarceration in an asylum, a threat which her

husband issues subtly though repeatedly throughout the novel.

While Lucy is convinced that she wants to be the flawless angel in the house and

tries her hardest to be ‘an obedient wife’ (IW, 115), Victor challenges this assumption.

‘But you aren’t, are you?’, he prompts her and continues,

You’ve taken refuge in hysterical fits for years, and therefore achieved just what
you wanted: some wretched imitation of autonomy. You’ve done everything you
possibly could to fight the constraints of your life while still clinging to the
semblance of it. In what way do you believe you’re an obedient wife? (IW, 115).

Step by step he discovers that Lucy’s life has been an ongoing and enforced repression

of artistic and sexual passion, defined largely – as in the case of Maud in Waters’

Fingersmith – by her identity as her mother’s daughter. When Lucy was still a girl, she

watched her mother being driven to suicide by the same restrictions Lucy now

experiences in her own life as a wife; she even comes to envy her mother, to some

extent, for the freedom she gained through death. Anxious that his wife’s mother’s
 104

discontent with the traditional feminine role and, thus, the tendency to suicide, could be

hereditary, Lucy’s father forbade his daughter any activities which might cause

supposedly unhealthy excitement in her, most notably poetry and drawing. While under

hypnosis in one of her therapy sessions with Victor, Lucy recalls the crucial encounter

with her father and the words which would lead her into her current passionless life:

‘“It’s best you learn how to be a wife.” He said I should have children and devote

myself to them. Not painting. Not poetry. “You’ll only be unhappy,” he said. “Believe

me. I know”’ (IW, 106-107). After her marriage to William, her father ironically

cautions her that the pursuit of her wifely duties, her natural role, is the best cure for –

rather than the cause of – her nervous spells. ‘Be a wife to your husband’, he advises,

‘[and] if you make his world a comfortable one, that’ll go a long way toward calming

your nerves’ (IW, 58). Lucy’s identity as her (supposedly mad) mother’s daughter

determines her existence as her father’s child, and in her marriage she can escape

neither since her father tells William of Lucy’s mother’s suicide and advises him never

to allow her to touch either paintbrush or book. This instruction closely resembles Dr. S.

W. Mitchell’s prescriptions to Charlotte Perkins Gilman after he had first treated her

with the (in)famous rest cure, advising her, Perkins Gilman writes in her autobiography,

to ‘have but two hours’ intellectual life a day. And never touch pen, brush or pencil as

long as you live’.55 Significantly, Lucy is threatened with Mitchell’s rest cure by her

husband in the novel’s closing stages, and her perception of William’s arm as ‘an iron

bar beneath my fingers’ (IW, 26), that is, as the embodiment of her confinement within

normative femininity and of the threat of physical incarceration at male hands, functions

as an early pointer toward the fate of Perkins Gilman’s heroine in ‘The Yellow

Wallpaper’ (1892).

Having realised that Lucy, contrary to her own claims, has no ‘true’ or ‘natural’

55
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, [1935] The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p.96.
 105

desire to pursue the Victorian feminine ideal and ‘feel[s] no need to commit to what is

considered to be woman’s sole purpose’ (IW, 105), Victor’s subsequent insights into the

contrast between his patient’s unconscious desires and the role she has been assigned

appear promising at first:

To see such emotion in this woman was fascinating. It explained much that has
puzzled me. Her hysteria no doubt comes from her unconscious confusion – to
long for something and be denied that longing with no hope of ever achieving it. I
began to believe that despite the inclinations of her sex, perhaps she truly does not
want children, that such a circumstance might drive her to deeper levels of
despair. I also understood why her unconscious mind did not grasp my suggestion
urging calm. To be at peace is not what she wants. To be like other women is not
her desire, as much as she protests that it is. It is clear that she does not want to be
well in this world her father and husband have made for her, a world as a wife and
mother, without the passion that exists within her, a passion that has no outlet but
hysteria. (IW, 108)

Yet, it soon transpires that the potential options arising from these findings are

disturbing ones, overshadowed as they are by a dangerous power imbalance between the

male therapist and his female patient. Victor is aware of his opportunity to make Lucy

content with her traditional feminine role by oppressing – through suggestion – what he

now knows to be her true needs, or he can attempt to encourage her artistic and sexual

passions and complicate her life as an upper-class woman much further because, as

friend Millie tells Lucy, ‘your behaviour was acceptable [only] as long as it was simply

a fit now and then, or headaches’ (IW, 152). Obsessed with the potential Lucy may hold

for his research, and for his career, but also aware of the unethical implications of his

ideas, Victor consequently remarks in his journal that it is

fascinating, but impossible that such an opportunity for research exists in this
woman. This woman who is everything I’ve dismissed so contemptuously
before now. I know I cannot pursue this. It is irresponsible if my suspicions are
correct, the passion she tries so hard to hide and control would ruin her were it
brought to light. She would no longer be able to exist within her world, and I
have no faith she could exist out of it. Yet what could it harm to learn more?
(IW, 109)

Having come to the conclusion that ‘any suggestion I make that more firmly urges her

adaptation to this world may not be successful’ (IW, 108), Victor decides, without
 106

Lucy’s or William’s knowledge, to conduct an experiment which will determine

whether his suggestions to his patient’s unconscious can make her act against her better

judgement, that is, against the social norms ruling her day-to-day life. Reminiscent of

the significance of Maud’s gloved hands in Waters’ Fingersmith, Victor makes the

suggestion to Lucy, under hypnosis, that she take off her gloves while dancing with her

husband at their next public outing, despite his awareness that such an action would

contradict everything she ‘has known, learned, or understood about her life’ (IW, 127).

At the same time, he also reminds Lucy of and encourages her sexual desires. In their

subsequent session she confesses, ‘I took off my gloves [...] I couldn’t bear the feel of

them another moment’ (IW, 124). William, unsurprisingly, deems Lucy’s behaviour at

the dance and, later, her sexual advances towards him as wholly inappropriate for a

woman of her social status and thus warns Victor not to ‘turn his wife into a whore’

(IW, 170) or ‘one of those New Women’ (IW, 119),56 neither of which, he ensures

Victor, will be accepted by him or their social circle.

Crucial, Victor now realises he can not only make Lucy a New Woman, but, in

fact, any new woman. As he points out to her,

‘You’ve led an entire life ruled by a will not your own [...] Your father’s will,
your husband’s will. What if you could be the woman you were meant to be?
What if you could escape from this’ – he gestured futilely about the carriage –
‘this dull acquiescence?’ (IW, 111-112)

From this recognition and from the events that follow, a series of fundamental issues

ensue regarding the ambiguities of power, identity and liberation. Arguably, Victor is in

a position to help Lucy find and acknowledge something we may call her ‘true’ self, yet

paradoxically any intervention would be an act of manipulation, rendering Lucy the

56
As Sally Ledger explains, the term ‘New Woman’ first came into existence in 1894 and New
Woman writers such as Sarah Grant and Mona Caird propagated, through their fictions, different visions
of what exactly defined this New Woman. However, ‘those women who persisted in the belief that
married women should be enabled to lead a full and independent life as man’s equal were the New
Women most vilified in the periodical press during the last two decades of the nineteenth century’. See:
Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1997), pp.10-11.
 107

subject of not exclusively her own but also of his will, a thought which is mute if we

accept identity as a fluid combination of performance and construction rather than a

fixed entity. If Victor did plant suggestions which comply with Lucy’s desire to paint

and to be free of social constrictions, she could supposedly be a new woman, but not of

her own making. Victor’s options also centre around the question of where we draw the

line between a patient’s unconscious will and a therapist’s construction and potential

encouragement or further suppression of that will. After all, if the gender conventions

Lucy attempts to obey are alike to the artificial suggestions Victor makes to her

unconscious, then so is the idea of a free will, or indeed the suggestion of liberation.

Victor is aware of and tormented by some of these questions and by the choices he now

has, as well as their implications:

My theory had proved correct. When presented with the opportunity, her
unconscious mind can overpower her will. This is a stunning discovery, and it
made me wonder what power her unconscious could have if it were given free
rein. Could I lead it, through hypnosis, to completely overtake her reason? Could I
change her will? To be given what I so ardently wish for – to have in my hands a
subject who can help me win the respect of my colleagues, one who can help me
prove the power of the unconscious mind [...] To remake her in the way I wish is
to destroy the life she claims to want so desperately, I know this, and yet what
shall I do? Make her into another useless parasite? Shall I let scientific knowledge
pass because of the wishes of one woman who cannot hope to understand the
secrets she possesses? (IW, 127-128)

There is a certain ambiguity and tension surrounding Victor’s feelings towards Lucy

and his potential to be either her oppressor or liberator. He closes the above diary entry

with the words, ‘I would be less a scientist [...] if I conceded to her wishes [to be a

traditional wife and mother]. She is only a woman’ (IW, 127-128), another sure

indication that Lucy’s value for to him lies exclusively in her potential as an object of

scientific observation.

While her identity as a human individual is of little consequence here, Victor

nevertheless appears to have certain positive intentions towards Lucy when, at least

initially, his aim is to ‘create in her the need to be free’ (IW, 158) in the hope that she
 108

will then be able to choose whether to disregard or comply with social convention in

order to meet this need for freedom in her own way. Similarly, Victor wonders if he

should utilise Lucy’s romantic feelings for him for what he considers her benefit by

showing her ‘what true satisfaction can be, to lead her ever further into the sublimity of

the experience that her upbringing has kept from her’ (IW, 158). Unlike Lucy’s

perception of William as literally incarcerating her with arms like bars, she remarks of

Victor how he ‘wrapped his long fingers delicately around the thick cup as if afraid he

might crush it’ (IW, 49), representing, to her, not a threat, but care and security.

However much his good intentions may at first outweigh his scientific curiosity

and professional ambition, Victor is soon led astray by the power hypnosis offers him

over his patient and the professional recognition Lucy may bring. He thus continues

where Faulks’ Jacques (involuntarily) left off. Once he has ensured that he can

manipulate Lucy’s behaviour, Victor begins to refer to her as ‘Eve C.’ in his journal

entries, leaving no doubt that from now on the role of therapist equals that of a god, a

creator, while the female patient becomes his creation, reminding us, this time, of

Thomas’ ambiguous role as liberator in Human Traces. Despite his own cravings for

recognition and his evocation of himself as a creator of life, Victor does not see the

irony which his evident in his comparison of science and religion: ‘Most gods have

flaws’, he claims, ‘Even your God [...] He demands sacrifices to His ego. Like any

common man. Science has no ego. It’s rational and logical’ (IW, 178).

Equally, when promising Lucy freedom from the confines of her class and sex, he

does not recognise that it is now he who, in his attempt to liberate her, dictates and

restricts her existence through his determination to ‘make [his] influence stronger than

any of the other influences in her life, including those of her husband and social

ostracism’ (IW, 129). Implicitly, his objective is to demonstrate that a doctor’s abilities

can equal those of a god, since ‘our will can be molded, […] a “soul” can be created. I
 109

am creating a new woman – and succeeding beyond my greatest expectations’ (IW,

157). What particularly excites him about being able to make a new woman out of Lucy

is ‘to be able to mold her passion, to watch her come alive’ (IW, 158), to re-enact, on a

psychological rather than biological level, the creation of his fictional namesake, Victor

Frankenstein. As the narrative progresses, we read less of Victor’s journal and are

provided, instead, more and more with Lucy’s perspective. Consequently, it becomes

difficult to distinguish or judge which thoughts may or may not have been planted in her

mind in the form of Victor’s suggestions. Although the voice of the madwoman is not

strictly speaking silenced, we know it is potentially distorted and not entirely her own.

As a result of his new, selfish intentions, Victor begins to disregard the

implications his interventions have on Lucy’s every-day life and, ultimately, he loses

control. He admits that ‘there forms a great attachment between patient and doctor, as is

inevitable when one divulges one’s greatest secrets’ (IW, 158) and purposely begins to

abuse the feelings Lucy has developed for him (or which he as suggested to her) as her

treatment continues. When he encourages her to start drawing again secretly, she finds

in it the only means of self-expression available to her. However, Victor soon also

motivates her to show William the sketches, each of which demonstrates her ‘longing

[...] for freedom. For passion’ (IW, 160). But, unsurprisingly, rather than understanding

these longings, William burns his wife’s pictures and, realising that Lucy took up

painting at Victor’s suggestion, tells her that he will end her treatment. Lucy reacts to

this shock by seeking out Victor at his home in the slums of the city, where, against his

better judgment, he sleeps with her. Sexuality becomes the second defining

characteristic of Lucy’s release from social confinement. After her first experience of an

orgasm during intercourse she describes how she ‘could not move for the intensity of

[her] release’ (IW, 195) and perceives that Victor has ‘freed’ (IW, 195) her. Although

Victor claims that sleeping with Lucy is a therapeutic strategy, he also admits that, at
 110

this stage of her treatment, it was a mistake. What is even more unsettling perhaps is

that sleeping with female patients seems common therapeutic practice not only for him

but also for his colleagues: ‘I was never so careless before; in the past I have

approached this level of treatment with the utmost care, as have all of the physicians

I’ve known’ (IW, 208). Victor tries to remind himself that he must not ‘allow [his] own

passions to gain sway’ (IW, 209), but it is clear that his falling in love with Eve (rather

than Lucy) is inevitable. She is his own creation, a woman who through his

intervention, in his opinion, ‘is becoming a truly marvellous creature’ (IW, 240). When

Lucy confesses her love to him, Victor regains control of himself once more and warns

her that ‘love only complicates things. It can only imprison you. You said you loved

William when you married him, didn’t you?’ (IW, 214).

Once he has negotiated the continuation of Lucy’s treatment with William, Victor

finally becomes, like William, her incarcerator. With triumph he reports that

Eve has not only agreed [to continue her treatment], she has given me carte
blanche. Today I planted the suggestion that she would want above all things to
see me, in spite of any persuasion by her husband or anyone else against me. I
have also reinforced my insistence on secrecy and instructed that she continue her
life as it is until I determine she is ready to make decisions about her future. (IW,
216)

It is from here on that Victor, like William, confines Lucy. During his stay with Lucy at

the Carleton’s Newport house, he continues his affair with her and claims, ‘You are not

William’s but mine. I created you’ (IW, 261). Here, the potential for liberation and care

Lucy previously saw in Victor fades as she describes how ‘he held me close, so tightly I

could barely breathe’ (IW, 261) and slowly but surely becomes suspicious of his

influence on her. Any hope for liberty, however, is literally taken away from her when

William, on his return, surprises the two during a public display of affection on the

beach. Once back at the house and in her room, Lucy shows how dependent she has

become on Victor and how little of a free will he has given her: ‘Desperate for my

instruction, I wanted to ask him what he wanted of me, what my role should be, but
 111

William made sure that such a meeting was impossible. I had no hope of rescue. I was

paralyzed by the weight of my future’ (IW, 265). Like a religious fanatic, then, Lucy’s

existence has become dependent on her god, on Victor. Despite his initial intentions and

his promising insights into Lucy’s situation, his professional ambition and carelessness

result in Lucy’s incarceration by William first in her room, then – under the influence of

laudanum – in an asylum. Victor tries to convince himself that the loss of Lucy as a

patient does not matter, since he has collected enough evidence to present his case to his

colleagues, but, nevertheless, struggles to feel indifference towards her:

I tell myself it is for the best: I have done the research required for my paper; I
have no doubt that when I present it to the Neurology Association this fall, it will
receive the accolades it deserves. [...] She remains my creature. And yet perhaps I
did not completely see. Experiments flourish best in a controlled environment,
and Eve’s environment is not within my hands. I must ask myself why I continued
to work with her when I had succeeded in doing what I set out to do. I have felt
desperate at the thought of losing her, and my rational mind says this should not
be so. [...] The results are gathered. I cannot think of her. I must not think of her. I
must not want her. (IW, 269)

While Victor seems to have sacrificed his patient for his career, Lucy suffers

humiliating treatments and punishments at the asylum, where she is also led back into a

severe laudanum addiction.

The attending doctors are helpless in her case and soon invite a specialist to

observe her and advise them with regards to her treatment – the specialist is, a little

predictably, Victor. Lucy learns from him that she is due to be cured and released by

October, which is when she is expected by William to host the first ball at their new

house on Fifth Avenue. Shocked by what he has done to Lucy, Victor now uses his

power to empower her. He forbids the asylum’s superintendent to treat Lucy with

laudanum, and his patient slowly regains full consciousness and clarity of thought. At

his next visit, Victor confesses that he loves her, but, no longer under his influence,

Lucy is cautious and cynical, asking ‘What other fame can I provide for you?’ (IW,

306). Having overcome her addiction with his help, Lucy is now able to assess her
 112

situation critically and assert her own will:

I understood for the first time the power I had over him. My mind was my own
again, and I realized that we were equally matched, that he had not lied to me. [...]
I was his obsession, as he had once been mine. It was exhilarating. It inflamed me,
because I understood how to take what I wanted; I knew how to be free. ‘Very
well’, I said to him, and he smiled in satisfaction. He leaned to kiss me again, and
when he was near my lips, I whispered, ‘But this time, Victor, I get what I want.’
(IW, 307)

Lucy is conscious that she cannot rely on anyone but herself to construct her own

identity and her own life and, consequently, we now read no more case histories about

her.

Once released from the asylum, Lucy makes her entrance at the ball at Fifth

Avenue only to shoot William, a scene which she finishes with the words, ‘All I felt

was free’ (IW, 319). Following the murder, Lucy begins to construct and perform her

own identity with the help of the media and her lawyer. She decides that it should not be

her father’s renowned family lawyer who should be called to her defence, but William

Howe, a man known for his theatrical behaviour in court, ‘a man who’d bought life

from nearly certain death sentences with his rhetoric and his crocodile tears’ (IW, 328).

Early on in the novel, at a dinner party, Lucy realises how easily manipulated public

perception is in her circles: that evening, ‘the conversation was sparking; everyone kept

saying so [...] how could an evening be boring when all kept remarking that it was not?’

(IW, 9). By hiring William Howe and taking her fate in her own hands, she utilises this

knowledge in her favour. Howe ensures that only journalists in favour of Lucy

interview and write about her, portraying the murderess as an innocent, abused woman

who was driven to temporary insanity by her husband. Similarly, Lucy is aware that the

judge is a friend of her father, making this the first instance in which she able to truly

profit from her identity as his daughter. The only thing we hear from Victor in this

process is his statement during the trial regarding Lucy’s mental condition and his

judgment that temporary insanity would have been possible at the time she murdered
 113

William. Lucy’s high social station thus enables her to control the media’s construction

of herself.

Eventually, the jury’s verdict is ‘not guilty by reason of temporary insanity’ (IW,

400) and, although her father attempts to regain his control over her by wanting commit

her into the care of the well-known Dr. Weir Mitchell and his rest cure, she decides to

take the first ship across to the Continent, accompanied by Victor. As it turns out, Lucy

now also consciously plays with Victor’s belief in his power over her and the narrative

closes with the following lines:

‘I told you it would work, Lucy, didn’t I? What a remarkable creature you are.’
‘Yes’, I murmured back. ‘We are so clever.’ ‘I love you, Lucy’, he said. ‘Just
think of how we will be together’, and I smiled. He was so confident. He still
thought he could control me, and I wanted him enough to let him believe it. For
now. Yes, we would be together for now. Until the day I cut the thread that bound
us. (IW, 404)

Victor continues to call her a ‘creature’ and gives the impression that all this was part of

his plan. The question therefore remains whether Lucy’s last actions – the murder of her

husband, her cunning decisions regarding the trial – were indeed hers, or whether they

were carried out by her at Victor’s suggestion. Similarly, there is no way of telling

whether Lucy has genuinely turned the tables on the power relations between herself

and Victor, or if Victor selflessly suggested to her that these schemes were her idea and

that she will one day leave him because he knows this to be the only way for her to

liberate herself, as far as possible, from his influence.

Chance’s novel therefore leaves its heroine ambiguously empowered. The

traditional male-female doctor-patient relationship appears to have been overturned, or

at least disrupted, yet the narrative’s ending leaves no doubt as to the ambiguity and

complexity of the newly created power relations between its protagonists. No matter

how optimistic or pessimistic we choose to read the novel’s final pages, there is no

doubt that Inconvenient Wife not only critically explores the gendered power structures

at work in Victorian definitions and treatments of mental illness but that it also gestures
 114

toward the potentials and problematic of the therapist’s duty to empower their patient to

empower herself, independent from the shape which this self-empowerment may

eventually take. Resembling contemporary attitudes toward sex/uality and toward the

Victorians, Victor pathologises sexual repression and the absence of sexual satisfaction

in women. Yet, the novel’s ambiguous ending blurs this popular neo-Victorian

juxtaposition of the sexually repressed hysteric and the sexually liberated and therefore

mentally healthy woman by challenging the very notion of psychological and physical

liberation.

Conclusion

Like the critical studies of Showalter and Appignanesi, Faulks’ Human Traces and

Chance’s An Inconvenient Wife are concerned with the exposure and criticism of

nineteenth-century male practitioners’ misreadings of their female patients’ symptoms

and their abuse of the powerful position in which they found themselves as doctors.

These texts seek to demonstrate the ways in which women and their stories – physical

and oral – could be interpreted and rewritten by doctors and therapists as medical

narratives and theories which complemented and conformed to dominant discourses and/

or contributed more to doctors’ professional ambitions and standings than to their

patients’ improvement. In these texts, practitioners and the dominant cultures they

represent are therefore authors rather than scientists and their reports fictions rather than

scientific observations, indicating the practitioners’ rather than the patients’ anxieties:

their narratives becomes, as Appignanesi puts it, ‘expressions of the culture’s malaise,

symptoms and disorders [which mirror] time’s order – its worries, limits border

problems, fears’.57 Ursula Link-Heer has argued that studies concerned with the ways in

which ‘women are constituted historically and discursively’ tend to treat the history of

57
Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad, p.5.
 115

hysteria either as ‘a patriarchal defamation and violation of real women who in truth

were not hysterics, or one that uncovered supposedly genuine feminine characteristics

behind the label “hysteria” and identified with them’.58 While Faulks’ Human Traces

certainly counts toward the former category, Chance’s Inconvenient Wife goes beyond

the dichotomy Link-Heer observes.

Hystoriographic metafiction does not simply criticise gendered medical discourses

of the past, but, to varying extents, illustrates and explores the ways in which gendered

issues are still central to the theory and practice of mental health. As studies such as

Elizabeth A. Klonoff and Hope Landrine’s Preventing Misdiagnosis in Women (1997)

and Denise Russell’s Women, Gender and Madness (1995) have shown, despite modern

scientific advances, there are still illnesses and disorders which, if not diagnosed and

treated properly, can lead to ‘a woman’s being confined to a mental hospital for her

entire life or even result in her untimely death’.59 Although hystoriographic metafiction

does not explicitly represent third-wave feminist therapy theory, it critically engages

with the issues and concepts which lie at the heart of third-wave work in the field, most

notably the ambiguity and fluidity of power relations and of identity. If traditional

psychotherapies, as Appignanesi puts it, ‘attempt an understanding of the self that

marries past with present’,60 then hystoriographic metafiction which critically

investigates women’s mental health in the present by revisiting the past certainly has the

potential, like third-wave feminist therapy, to help us interrogate the discourses and

issues which continue to define women’s current positions as patients in the mental

health professions.

58
Ursula Link-Heer, ‘“Male Hysteria”: A Discourse Analysis’, Cultural Critique, 15 (1990), pp.191-
220 (p.192).
59
Elizabeth A. Klonoff and Hope Landrine, Preventing Misdiagnosis of Women: A Guide to Physical
Disorders That Have Psychiatric Symptoms (London: Sage Publications, 1997), p.xix.
60
Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad, p.481.
 116

CHAPTER THREE
Sexual f(r)ictions: women, sex and pornography

While Faulks and Chance investigate the narrativisation and pathologisation of

women’s bodies by revisiting the gendered power relations inherent in Victorian

histories of female madness, other authors of neo-Victorian fiction have opted to

explore representations of women’s sexualities not within the context of medicine but

within the realm of pornography. Its infamous existence in the nineteenth century is

peripherally acknowledged in a number of neo-Victorian novels,1 but to date two texts

in particular have engaged with the topic in significant depth: Belinda Starling’s The

Journal of Dora Damage (2007) and Waters’ Fingersmith, whose matrilineal narratives

I explored in Chapter One. In these novels pornography occupies a central place as

Starling and Waters utilise their mid-Victorian settings to trace pornography back to its

roots, to the time when the term first entered the English vocabulary in its contemporary

definition,2 referring to ‘printed or visual material’ which contains ‘the explicit

description or exhibition of sexual subjects or activity […] in a manner intended to

stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic feelings’,3 and when the production and

distribution of such material first became an industry.

Both authors are concerned, to varying extents, with the inherent and intersecting

1
In Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (London: Canongate, 2002), for example,
William Rackham studies Exploits of a Seasonal Traveller, or, Around the World in Eighty Maidenheads
instead of the particulars of his father’s perfume business. Deanna Raybourn’s Silent in the Grave
(London: Mira Books, 2008) treats the subject with equal brevity, but conveys a little more detail
regarding the diversity of nineteenth-century pornographic material when heroine Lady Julia Grey finds
an album in her house’s servant quarters which does not only contain photos of women in ‘a provocative
state of undress [...] staring at the camera with a saucy expression’ but also pictures which ‘were
thoroughly obscene, not because they were sexual, but because they were violent’ (p.272).
2
Walter Kendrick, The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture (Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1987), p.57; Lisa Z. Sigel, Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in
England, 1815–1914 (London: Rutgers University Press, 2002), p.3.
3
‘pornography, n.’, Oxford English Dictionary Online (June 2011), Accessed: 31 July 2011,
http://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/148012. This general definition of the term acts as the
starting point for the discussions in this chapter, although several competing and more specific
understandings of what constitutes pornography exist, particularly among different feminist factions.
These varying definitions will be addressed in the introduction to this chapter’s historical and
contemporary contexts as well as in relation to the novels discussed.
 117

constructions of gender, class and race relations which defined pornography in the

nineteenth century and which, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, have remained

intrinsic both to its depictions of sex/uality and to feminist debates surrounding the

politics of those depictions. Tracing the history of pornography from the mid-nineteenth

century and charting, in particular, the discourses and developments which have defined

critical approaches to the topic since the mid-twentieth century, this chapter explores the

ways in which The Journal of Dora Damage and Fingersmith utilise their Victorian

settings in order investigate pornography as a contemporary feminist issue and illustrate

women’s increasingly complex relationships to it. However, Starling’s and Waters’

representations of their heroines’ sexual experiences and of their encounters with

sexually explicit material also raise questions regarding their own novels’

sexsationalism and concerning the extent to which their narratives function as

contributions and/or challenges to the neo-Victorian sexsation and our readerly

consumption of it.

Pornography in Britain: definitions, contexts, debates

Despite the Oxford English Dictionary’s succinct explanation of the term, definitions of

what constitutes pornographic material have always been ambivalent and subject to

interpretation. The libraries of notable nineteenth-century collectors such as George

Cannon (1789–1854) and, in subsequent decades, Henry Spencer Ashbee (1834–1900)

consisted of literature, drawings and photographs and ranged from copies and

translations of illustrated ancient texts such as The Kama Sutra to publications like

Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron (ca. 1353) and more contemporary texts, such as

The Lustful Turk (1828), which catered to a variety of sexual preferences, including

homosexuality, bestiality and flagellation.4 As Lisa Z. Sigel notes, definitions of what is

4
Ian Gibson, The Erotomaniac: The Secret Life of Henry Spencer Ashbee (London: Faber and
 118

considered as pornographic are seldom stable, and ‘pornography varies as a culture and

the symbolic meanings in that culture evolve’; some materials collected as obscene in

the nineteenth century ‘may seem unpornographic, unerotic, or downright decent, while

others may appear unerotic and downright disgusting’ to twenty-first century

beholders.5 Both the contents of pornography and the application of its label are thus

dependent on historically and culturally-specific contexts.

From the mid-nineteenth century in particular, pornography became defined, by

law, according to not only its content but also, and more significantly, the identities of

its viewers and readers. When John Campbell, Lord Chief Justice 1850–1859, first

introduced the bill which would eventually become England’s first obscenity statute, the

Obscene Publications Act 1857, it became clear almost immediately that what exactly

constituted pornography was near impossible to define according to a work’s content

alone. In response to Campbell’s first demand for the legal suppression of the

‘poisonous’ trade,6 the Lord Chancellor highlighted that ‘the line which separated

poisons from medicines was extremely difficult to define’.7 The proposed bill met

further opposition within Parliament on similar grounds, the general fear being that

works of ‘genuine’ artistic and literary merit may fall prey to the new regulations and

could be destroyed. Indeed, Lord Wensleydale suggested that ‘there was not a library in

which books could not be found containing passages which a strict-dealing magistrate

might consider to bring them within the operation of this Bill’.8 Wynford, a defender of

the Act, admitted to the lack of precision in its definition of the term ‘obscene’, but

contended that ‘works [of merit …] were preserved, not on account of the exceptional

Faber, 2001), pp.43-44; Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in
Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (London: Transaction Publishers, 2009), pp.40-41.
5
Sigel, Governing Pleasures, p.4.
6
UK Parliament, ‘Sale of Poisons and Poisonous Publications: Question’, Hansard Parliamentary
Debates, Vol.145 (11 May 1857), Accessed: 22 July 2011, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/
1857/may /11/sale-of-poisons-and-poisonous.
7
Ibid.
8
UK Parliament, ‘Sale of Obscene Books, &c., Prevention Bill: Second Reading’, Hansard
Parliamentary Debates, Vol.146 (25 June 1857), Accessed: 22 July 2011, http://hansard.millbank
systems.com/lords/1857/jun/ 25/second-reading.
 119

passages which were objectionable, but for the noble and elevating sentiments which

they inculcated’.9 The act certainly engendered debates regarding the difficulty of

differentiating art from pornography, but, aware that strict distinctions were almost

impossible to draw and would potentially endanger the freedom of the press and the

liberty of the subject, Campbell and his contemporaries did little to further define the

boundaries between the two, and similar problems would continue to accompany the

legislation and critical discussion of pornography throughout the twentieth century.

Yet, while obscene content may have been difficult to define, the identity of its

audience proved invaluable in pornography’s distinction from work of merit. Although

illiteracy and low earnings excluded the working classes from the consumption of the

more expensive publications, Sigel contends that it was nevertheless a ‘cross-class

phenomenon’, albeit one which generally ‘favoured the well-to-do’.10 Passed in 1857,

his Obscene Publications Act enabled police to search premises for and destroy

pornographic materials which were intended for display and sale.11 The law did

therefore little to interfere with the activities of men of the upper classes and gentry who

commissioned, wrote and/or privately acquired the works in question (a task which

would indeed have been difficult to achieve considering the numerous eccentric

synonyms under which such works were published). Indeed, ‘indecent books of a high

price’ were not Campbell’s chief concern as they were only affordable to the affluent, a

factor which functioned as ‘a sort of check’ and meant that their circulation was

inevitably confined to the upper echelons of society, in whose hands pornography was

deemed a valid object of interest and study. However, to the untutored (that is, to

women, youths and the working classes) they were ‘poison more deadly than prussic

9
UK Parliament, ‘Sale of Obscene Books’.
10
Sigel, Governing Pleasures, p.26.
11
Kendrick, The Secret Museum, p.116; M.J.D. Roberts, ‘Morals, Art, and the Law: The Passing of
the Obscene Publications Act, 1857’, Victorian Studies, 28:4 (Summer 1985), pp.609-629 (p.610).
 120

acid, strichnine, or arsenic’;12 the realisation that pornographic material was obtainable

by – and in some instances even purposely made affordable for – the lower classes filled

Campbell with ‘horror and alarm’,13 and thus it was the uncontrolled distribution of

cheap ‘periodical papers of the most licentious and disgusting description [which] were

[…] sold to any person who asked for them’ that the act sought to suppress.14 This focus

on readership rather than content was further formalised when, in 1868, Campbell’s

successor, Alexander Cockburn, established a definition of ‘obscenity’ which his

predecessor had failed to provide. In what became known as the Hicklin rule, it was

determined that whether a publication was obscene was dependent on its ability to

corrupt those whose minds were prone to such corruption, or, as Cockburn put it, ‘those

whose minds are open to immoral influences’.15

It was not only the boundaries between art and pornography which were

challenged and blurred by Victorian pornography and implicitly (if insufficiently and

shakily) drawn by the Obscene Publications Act and its underlying class politics.

Upper-class collectors such as Ashbee were considered – and certainly thought of

themselves – as impervious to their libraries’ corrupting potentials. In the introduction

to his famous bibliography of pornographic texts, Index Librorum Prohibitorum (1877),

Ashbee compares himself to ‘a truthful and honest historian’ and likens his approach to

the ‘frequently licentious’ material he catalogues and reproduces to a physician’s

examination of ‘the naked body of a woman extended on the dissecting table’.16 His

supposedly scientific view of pornography meant not only that ‘the passions are not

excited’ by his work but also that, to the contrary, it ‘will inspire so hearty a disgust […]

12
UK Parliament, ‘Sale of Poisons’.
13
Ibid.
14
Ibid.
15
Regina v. Hicklin (1868), cited in Colin Manchester, ‘Lord Campbell’s Act: England’s First
Obscenity Statute’, The Journal of Legal History, 9:2 (1988), pp.223-241 (p.240); Jonathon Green and
Nicholas J. Karolides, ‘Hicklin Rule’, The Encyclopedia of Censorship (New York: Facts on File, 2005)
p.232.
16
Henry Spencer Ashbee, [1877] Bibliography of Forbidden Books (New York: Cosimo Classics,
2007), p.xix and p.xx.
 121

that the reader will be satisfied to have nothing further to do with [the texts

discussed]’.17 Having provided detailed descriptions of the contents of around 150

pornographic publications in his index,18 it seems at the very least doubtful that Ashbee

wrote those words without being conscious of (and perhaps even intending) their irony,

considering in particular the numerous pages he devotes to ‘the revolting crime of

corpse profanation’.19 Here he includes an account of an allegedly real-life case

involving exactly the medical scenario to which, in his introduction, he likened his work

– that of the physician examining the body of a dead woman. Ashbee claims that this

narrative was communicated to him by a former medical student, who reported that

the body of a well favoured girl of about 15 years was brought to St.
Bartholomew’s hospital for dissection. Although no marks of violence were
apparent, the students were of opinion [sic] that she had not met her end by fair
means. One of them introduced his finger into the vagina, and, finding the
hymen to be intact, declared that she was a maid. Upon this the porter who was
employed to carry the dead bodies in and out, also put his finger up, and
exclaiming: ‘that he had never had a maidenhead, but that he would take one
now, by G—’, proceeded to violate the corpse then and there, in the presence of
the students assembled.20

Unsurprisingly, Ashbee issues no comment on this passage which so paradoxically

reinforces and exposes the class and gender politics at the heart of Victorian

conceptions of pornography by juxtaposing the medical student’s and the working-class

porter’s penetration of the dead (and therefore passive) female body, the former’s

‘professional’ action leading only to a factual observation (that the victim had not been

raped prior to her death) and the latter’s ‘vulgar’ imitation of it resulting in

uncontrollable sexual urges which supposedly justified fears of ‘working-class sexual

and social indiscipline’.21 The female body, in either case, remains subject to male use,

be it sexual, scientific or both. Yet, while the scene reiterates and underpins the class

politics through which Ashbee categorises his own perusal of pornography as analytical,
17
Ashbee, Bibliography of Forbidden Books, p.xx.
18
Gibson, The Erotomaniac, p.39.
19
Ashbee, Bibliography of Forbidden Books, p.412.
20
Ibid., p.415.
21
Roberts, ‘Morals, Art, and the Law’, p.613.
 122

scientific and immune to moral corruption, the account complements and becomes itself

part of the list of pornographic narratives from which the bibliographer quotes. Here,

not only the female corpse but also the medical gaze, and with it Ashbee’s own, become

sexualised and demonstrate their pornographic potential.

This merge of science and obscenity found some of its most prominent and

disturbing expressions in the works authored and commissioned by members of the

London Anthropological Society, founded by Richard Burton (1821–1890) in 1863, and

its inner circle, the so-called Cannibal Club.22 Characteristic of the group’s publications

was a ‘fascination with biological and cultural differences in sexuality’.23 Their works

ranged from Burton’s translation of Arabian Nights (1888) and pseudo-scientific papers

on the sexual customs and physiologies of the natives of the British colonies to fictional

narratives reflecting their personal preferences for both homo and heterosexual

intercourse, sadomasochism and flagellation, to name but a few. Despite the diversity of

their materials, one guiding principal of the Cannibal Club’s pornography was the

notion of inherent sexual and racial difference, and their publications ‘created a distance

between the male and the female and between the British and the foreign, arguing for an

intrinsic, natural sexual difference between peoples’.24 Both imperial and patriarchal,

the pornography of Burton and his fellow Cannibals, not unlike Ashbee’s

representations of the texts in his index, ‘further stabilized the social order that benefited

them in innumerable ways’,25 that is, it reinforced white male superiority by fusing

science, sex/uality and pornography.

Evidently, then, pornography – from its creation, publication and distribution to

its legislation – was a predominantly male arena; yet, there are some notable

22
Sigel, Governing Pleasures, p.50.
23
Ibid., p.53.
24
Ibid., p.52.
25
Ibid.
 123

exceptions.26 After George Cannon’s death in 1854, his wife continued his publishing

business until the mid-1860s, and Andrew Wither’s shop on Hollywell Street, Victorian

London’s most infamous area for the sale of pornography, was run by his widow and

son from the late-1860s onwards. Sigel notes that many publishers and sellers who were

repeatedly prosecuted and imprisoned under the Obscene Publications Act relied

entirely on their families to continue the writing and distribution of the materials on

which their livelihood depended.27 Although there is only little evidence to suggest that

women were more actively engaged in the pornography trade as authors and readers,

Sharon Marcus highlights that the content of women’s magazines was frequently

appropriated and republished as pornography, not least because both shared an interest

in corporal punishment.28 Thus the descriptions of and instructions for girls’ physical

punishment in the correspondence sections constituted an area in which ‘pornography,

usually considered a masculine affair, intersect[ed] with fashion magazines targeted at

women’.29 In such instances, Marcus concludes, women in Victorian England were able

to access sexually arousing material via journals which were directly aimed at them and

which, consequently, ‘blurred distinctions not only between pornography and the

women’s press but also between male and female readers’.30 Additionally, areas such as

Hollywell Street, where shops often displayed pornographic publications openly, were

frequented by both men and women; and while the excessive use of pseudonyms in the

sale and purchase of pornography renders it almost impossible to determine exactly who

its consumers were, women certainly had access to them, not only as direct buyers but

26
Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2007), p.141.
27
Ashbee, Index of Forbidden Books, p.114; Marcus, Between Women, p.141; Iain McCalman,
‘Unrespectable Radicalism: Infidels and Pornography in Early Nineteenth-Century London’, Past and
Present, 104 (August 1984), pp.74-110 (p.109); Sigel, Governing Pleasures, p.21.
28
Marcus, Between Women, p.140.
29
Ibid, p.140.
30
Ibid.
 124

also potentially via the purchases of their husbands.31

Although pornography was produced for and consumed by a predominantly

(although clearly not exclusively) male market, women’s roles in nineteenth-century

pornographic narratives, although not always straightforwardly reductive and

oppressive, remained at best ambiguous. Works which feature violence against women

and which objectify the female body solely as a means of satisfying male desires were

by no means uncommon, but neither were texts which subjected men to the same kinds

of fates, be it at the hand of males or females. In The Lustful Turk, the Dey’s women are

repeatedly subjected to rape as a means of forcefully opening their eyes to pleasures of

which, supposedly, they would otherwise have remained ignorant. But representations

of domination and subordination depended by no means on sex alone and neither were

they fixed statically to either gender. Ellen Bayuk Rosenman suggests, for example, that

My Secret Life (1888-1895), an anonymously published fictional memoir, challenges as

well as reaffirms traditional gender and class hierarchies as its protagonist, Walter,

desires to identify with the sexual experiences of women and homosexuals and

consequently transgresses normative codes of masculine sexuality,32 but at the same

time is only able to fulfil these desires through his ‘economic power [… as a] bourgeois

gentleman’.33 No matter how disruptive his sexual desires and experiences are, they are

chosen at will, predicated upon gendered and class-dependent privilege and, therefore,

always an implicit expression of the superiority he retains.34 While the production and

consumption of pornography may have well been male-dominated, the sexual politics of

its contents can neither be collectively described as objectifying and oppressive nor as

outright liberating for women and other disenfranchised groups.

31
Marcus, Between Women, p.141.
32
Ellen Bayuk Rosenman, Unauthorized Pleasures: Accounts of Victorian Erotic Experience
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), p.176 and p.191.
33
Rosenman, Unauthorised Pleasures, p.194.
34
Rosenman identifies equally ambiguous politics in G.W.M. Reynold’s Mysteries of London
(1844), a text which ‘stretches normative categories’ (p.87) at the same time as it ‘upholds prevailing
sexual values’ (p.116). See: Rosenman, Unauthorised Pleasures, pp.87-123.
 125

By the early twentieth century, a firmly established consumer culture and the

expansion of photography had further complicated these politics by diversifying the

pornography market. While until the 1890s the written word dominated the trade, the fin

de siècle witnessed the rise and, soon, dominance of the sexually explicit image.35 As

Sigel observes, in the 1880s in particular the circulation of pornography became

increasingly confined to the upper echelons of society because of its high prices and,

consequently, ‘the disenfranchised functioned as models for the desires of the wealthy,

but these people could rarely see, let alone reinterpret, the goods – based upon them –

that circulated in the marketplace’.36 A decade later, however, these objects became

more than just ‘the canvases for such projections’ when mass market pornography

enabled them to be also consumers,37 and although pornographic content was, as in

previous decades, heavily dependent on traditional ideas of class, gender and race, ‘the

expanded dissemination of these ideas transformed their meanings by radically

resituating them in society’.38 Sigel suggests that the effects of this expansion were

twofold: one the one hand, ‘consumerism often channelled sexually subversive

tendencies into socially conservative arrangements’ and, thus, the wider distribution of

mass-market pornography helped spread and reinforce the dominant notions of social

relations and sex/uality commonly portrayed in these materials; on the other hand,

through the exposure of these representations to the scrutiny of those who had

previously been only their subject matter, the ambiguities, contradictions and

subjectivities of these constructions were equally exposed.39

As the circulation of pornography increased, the policing of its new audiences

became stricter, although no amendments were made to the 1857 act during the first half

35
Sigel, Governing Pleasures, p.119.
36
Ibid, p.118.
37
Ibid., p.120.
38
Ibid.,
39
Ibid., p.117 and p.154.
 126

of the twentieth century.40 In the realm of pornographic literature, the pseudo-scientific

approaches promoted by Ashbee and the Cannibal Club had been in decline since the

1880s,41 and instead ‘descriptive narratives that superficially followed the rough form of

the novel flourished’.42 These developments reignited debates on how to protect

literature of artistic merit from ‘low art’ such as pornography. These discussions

resulted, eventually, in the 1959 Obscene Publications Act, which covered the

publication of print as well as sound and film material.43 As Jonathon Green and

Nicholas J. Karolides note, ‘while the 1857 act sought to control pornography, its

successor was intended to protect art’,44 and therefore it replaced the Hicklin rule with a

new test for obscenity which specified that obscene passages must be considered within

the context of the entirety of the work in which they appear rather than in isolation from

it. Overall, then, an item could still be considered as possessing ‘literary’ or ‘artistic’

value even if it did contain pornographic passages. The wave of scholarship which set

out to investigate Victorian sex/uality in the 1960s was equally preoccupied with

attempts to reinstate clear boundaries between art and pornography. In his conclusion to

The Other Victorians, Steven Marcus insists that pornography ‘stands in adverse to

literature’ because literature ‘possesses […] a multitude of intentions, but pornography

possesses only one [that is, to sexually arouse]’;45 furthermore, whereas language is a

valuable and meaningful tool in literature, for pornography it is a ‘bothersome

40
In subsequent decades steps towards regulating the pornography trade on a global scale began to
be taken in the forms of the International Agreement for the Suppression of the Circulation of Obscene
Publications (1910), the International Convention for the Suppression of the Circulation of and Traffic in
Obscene Publications (1923) and the Protocol to the Agreement for the Suppression of the Circulation of
Obscene Publications (1949). See: United Nations, ‘Chapter VIII: Obscene Publications’, United Nations
Treaty Collection, Accessed: 2 May 2011, http://treaties.un.org/pages/CTCTreaties.aspx?id=8&subid
=A&lang=en.
41
Sigel, Governing Pleasures, p.93.
42
Ibid.
43
Jonathon Green and Nicholas J. Karolides ‘Obscene Publications Act (1959)’, The Encyclopedia
of Censorship, pp.404-405 (p.404). According to Green and Karolides, in this new act, a person who
publishes pornography referred to someone ‘who distributes, circulates, sells, hires out, gives or lends
[…], or who offers […] for sale or for hire’ an obscene article and also covers ‘playing records, exhibiting
films and showing artworks that are meant to be viewed by the public’.
44
Ibid.
45
Marcus, The Other Victorians, p.279 and p.278.
 127

necessity’.46 At the same time as law and critics attempted to establish defined

boundaries between pornography and literature they also acknowledged the

uncomfortable similarities and proximity between the two which, for them, rendered

these distinctions necessary.

With the emergence of feminism’s second wave in the 1960s and the 1970s,

pornography became a feminist issue and debates shifted away from its (lack of) artistic

merit toward its role in women’s oppression and liberation. Feminists’ focus on

women’s sexual liberation and on the social, cultural, legal and economic structures and

practices which oppressed women meant that pornography and it subject matter could

be regarded as a means of acknowledging, exhibiting and stimulating female sexual

pleasure as much as it could be interpreted as a contribution to and reinforcement of the

oppressive structures and practices feminists sought to challenge. These debates were

influenced in particular by the ever increasing availability of pornography and its

production through new mediums: by the time feminist discussion reached their height

in the 1980s and early 1990s, the new popularity of home videos meant that

pornographic films were mass produced and circulated,47 including hard-core films

depicting rape and other violent acts towards women. The gradual diversification of

pornographic material – from literature to photographs to film – had thus added a new

dimension to pornography’s representation of women and sex, that is, photographs and

films required sexual acts to be carried out in reality rather than creating textual images

of them. Women (and men) had become physically implicated in the making of

pornography rather than being merely its imaginary objects.

Within the feminist arguments which dominated the 1980s and early 1990s,

distinctions between textual and photographic or filmic pornography were frequently

46
Marcus, The Other Victorians, p.278. See also: Ronald Pearsall, [1969] The Worm in the Bud: The
World of Victorian Sexuality (New London: Sutton Publishing, 2003), p.373.
47
Jane Juffer, At Home with Pornography: Women, Sex, and Everyday Life (New York: New York
University Press, 1998), p.43.
 128

ignored in favour of more abstract debates surrounding pornography’s relationships to

reality and representation. For feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catharine

MacKinnon, pornography did not represent but created women’s inferior position in

gendered power structures: ‘pornography’, MacKinnon argued, ‘makes the world a

pornographic place’ and both directly causes and functions itself as physical as well as

psychological violence against women,48 be it in the form of words or images.49 In this

conception of pornography, as John Stoltenberg suggests,

male-supremacist sexuality is important to pornography, and pornography is

important to male supremacy. Pornography institutionalizes the sexuality that
both embodies and enacts male supremacy. Pornography says about that
sexuality, ‘Here’s how’. Here’s how to act out male supremacy in sex. Here’s
how the action should go. Here are the acts that impose power over and against
another body.50

Pornography, here, functions as an essential tool of women’s oppression because it

normalises and advocates male superiority and dominance in a mass market, furnishing

men in particular with the means to act out and maintain that superiority.

Judith Butler, on the other hand, argued that pornography is a form of creative

expression and representation of ‘the social reality of gender positions’ and, hence, it

does not ‘constitute that reality [and] indeed it is [its] failure to constitute it that gives

the pornographic image the phantasmatic power it has’.51 Similarly, Lynne Segal

criticised that feminists’ condemnations and demands for the censorship of pornography

denied women sexual agency as consumers. Specifically the passionate prose of

Dworkin and MacKinnon, Segal suggested, reinstates rather than challenges ‘old

patriarchal “truths” centred on the polarizing of male and female sexuality’,52 while also

48
Catharine A. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourse on Life and Law (London: Harvard
University Press, 1987), p.68.
49
Catherine A. MacKinnon, Only Words (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp.3-4.
50
John Stoltenberg, ‘Pornography, Homophobia and Male Supremacy’, Pornography: Women,
Violence and Civil Liberties, ed. by Catherine Itzin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp.145-165
(p.150).
51
Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997), p.68.
52
Lynne Segal, ‘Only the Literal: The Contradictions of Anti-Pornography Feminism’, More Dirty
Looks: Gender, Pornography and Power, ed. by Pamela Church Gibson (London: BFI Publishing, 2004),
pp.59-70 (p.61).
 129

ignoring that pornography is a form of representation which attempts to re-create and

interpret structures that are already in place. As Sigel observes in a recent essay on her

own position as a pornography researcher, feminist discourses such as MacKinnon’s

‘[work] very much like pornography […], manipulating and isolating my readerly body,

drowning out my story […] with hers’, a story which allows for only two female subject

positions, ‘the woman in the text or the one who throws stones at the woman in the

texts’.53 The censorship of pornography would thus achieve a similar replication and

reinforcement of the power relations and oppressive structures which feminists sought

to overturn:

If we [women] want to keep any creative space open for ourselves as sexual
agents (rather than encouraging fantasies of female victimization) the very last
thing we want to do is remorselessly censor certain words and images: trying to
fix their meanings independently from seeking to understand their
representations and social context, or complex psychic investments.54

According to Segal, censoring pornography would deny women a space of potential

sexual empowerment and expression while also isolating it from the frameworks in

which it exists and through which it is created.

Similar cases were made by feminists whose have frequently become lost in

simplified, antithetical accounts of ‘anti-pornography’ and ‘anti-censorship’ arguments.

Indeed, Susan Gubar provided a critical view on these seemingly opposing theories in a

1986 essay in which she draws attention to other voices which diversified feminist

responses to pornography, including the works of Susanne Kappeler and Angela Carter.

Kappeler commented in her book of the same year that if pornography ‘eroticizes

domination and submission and […] is one of the key sites in which these values are

mediated and normalized in contemporary culture’,55 then these processes are certainly

53
Lisa Z. Sigel, ‘Autobiography of a Flea’, Jane Sexes It up: True Confessions of Feminist Desire,
ed. by Merri Johnson (London: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002), pp.241-257 (p.253 and p.257).
54
Segal, ‘Only the Literal’, p.69.
55
Robert Jensen, ‘Introduction: Pornographic Dodges and Distortions’, Pornography: The
Production and Consumption of Inequality, ed. by Gail Dines, Robert Jensen and Ann Russo (London:
Routledge, 1998), pp.1-8 (p.2).
 130

not limited to the medium of pornography, but are – and have been for a centuries – also

prevalent in art and literature. In her view, ‘the pornographer only reproduces, on a less

elevated level and with a less exclusive circulation, what the artist does in the esoteric

fields of high culture; and he derives from it more profit in return for reduced

prestige’.56 Pornography must, therefore, be considered as one part of a larger culture

rather than as the one aspect of it which single-handedly renders that culture oppressive

to women. Carter, controversial and, as so often, ahead of her time, had published The

Sadeian Woman in 1979 and argued that even male-authored and violent pornography

such as the works of the Marquis de Sade can be considered to work in women’s favour

and that, in fact, women could appropriate pornography as a means of sexual

empowerment. ‘Pornographers’, she argues,

are the enemies of women only because our contemporary ideology of

pornography does not encompass the possibility of change, as if we were the
slaves of history and not its makers, as if sexual relations were not necessarily
and expression of social relations, as if sex itself were an external fact, one as
immutable as the weather, creating human practice but never part of it.57

For Carter, a plain rejection of pornography suggests an inability to move from object to

subject, an unwillingness to rewrite and subvert patriarchal history, and, ultimately,

defeat, a notion which Butler would reiterate nearly twenty years later when she insisted

that ‘one is not simply fixed by the name that one is called’.58 As Rebecca Munford has

highlighted, in later decades this diversity of voices was frequently replaced by an

image in which ‘radical anti-pornography campaigners such as Dworkin, MacKinnon

and [Robin] Morgan stand in for all second-wave feminist activity’ within the realm of

pornography.59

56
Susanne Kappeler, The Pornography of Representation (Oxford: Polity Press, 1986), p.103 and
p.102.
57
Carter, The Sadeian Woman, p.3.
58
Butler, Excitable Speech, p.2.
59
Rebecca Munford, ‘BUST-ing the Third Wave: Barbies, Blowjobs and Girlie Feminism’,
Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualization of Western Culture, ed. by Feona Attwood (London: I.B. Tauris,
2009), pp.183-197 (p.187).
 131

At the turn of the new millennium, third-wave feminists picked up where, two

decades earlier, Carter had left off, advocating that women could utilise and participate

in the pornography trade to gain both empowerment and sexual pleasure. Throughout

the 1990s and the 2000s, pornography expanded once again through a new medium, this

time the internet, while outside of the home and the virtual world it was (and still is)

also becoming increasingly influential and visible in mainstream consumer culture. As

with the rise of pornographic images in the 1890s, the implications of these

developments have been at least twofold from a feminist perspective: on the one hand,

the mainstreaming of pornography continues to normalise the notion that women are

sexual objects who, like any other market products, can be perpetually consumed at

will; on the other hand, the pornography industry is now not only ‘as eager to address

women as desiring consumers as it once was to package them merely as objects of

consumption’ but it has also witnessed a significant rise in the number of women

producing pornography.60 As Juline A. Koken notes, ‘several women-owned and

operated porn companies […] have arisen in recent years, as women creating porn with

an explicitly woman-centred, feminist perspective gain a foothold in the larger adult

industry’.61 Within this new marketplace, women’s positions explode and blur the

supposedly mutually exclusive roles of victim, accomplice and emancipated sexual

agent which various feminist factions had established for them.

Accepting and embracing the contradictions which various combinations of these

roles may create, third-wave feminism does not condemn women’s consumption of

pornography. Rather it is considered a legitimate aspect of female sexual pleasure,

independent from the preferences for which the material caters. Instead of attempting to

classify what constitutes ‘good’ or ‘bad’ pornography, ‘third-wave feminists reject the
60
Segal, ‘Only the Literal’, p.60.
61
Juline A. Koken, ‘The Meaning of the “Whore”: How Feminist Theories on Prostitution Shape
Research on Female Sex Workers’, Sex Work Matters: Exploring Money, Power, and Intimacy in the Sex
Industry, ed. by Melissa Hope Ditmore, Antonia Levy and Alys Willman (London: Zed Books, 2010),
pp.28-64 (p.63).
 132

constraints of political correctness on representations of desire’.62 If, for example,

feminists deem heterosexual masochistic practices as politically incorrect because of

their reliance on male domination, there is inevitably the implication of a prescriptive

attitude towards sexuality which relies on the highly questionable assumption that

‘somewhere there might be ‘an “authentic” female imagination, free of all the influence

of male domination’ and that ‘we can clearly separate [those desires and fantasies]

which are authentically feminine from those which are masculine, or the effect of social

subordination’.63 Consequently, third-wave feminists oppose this notion of ‘sexual

correctness’ and the concept that certain sexual practices are (not) compatible with

feminism.

If pornography and the acts it features are thus legitimate stimuli for female

sexual pleasure, then the production of pornography can be as much a feminist act as its

consumption. Much like Carter, third-wave feminists argue that pornography can be

appropriated by women, both on page and on screen. As Melanie Waters puts it:

By describing sexual experiences and fantasies in their own words, but in an

established pornographic rhetoric, it might be argued that the authors of
[pornographic] works successfully utilise the tools by which anti-pornography
feminists claimed women were oppressed in order to subvert the gendered
power.64

Within the magazine and film industry these trends have been equally evident, with

lesbian-focused publications such as On Our Backs ‘expanding the range of body types

represented in mainstream pornography by featuring women with short hair, piercings,

tattoos, nonsurgically enhanced breasts, and a range of ethnicities’, and video

productions by women such as Shar Rednour and Jackie Strano, whose films ‘[endorse]

62
‘pornography, feminist’, The Women’s Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third-Wave
Feminism, Vol.1, ed. by Leslie L. Heywood (London: Greenwood Press, 2006), pp.248-250 (p.248).
63
Jean Grimshaw, ‘Ethics, Fantasy and Self-Transformation’, Ethics, 35 (1993), pp.145-158 (p.157).
64
Melanie Waters, ‘Sexing it Up?: Women, Pornography and Third-Wave Feminism’, Third Wave
Feminism: A Critical Exploration, ed. by Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie and Rebecca Munford (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp.250-65 (p.261).
 133

butch/femme gender play’ and satirize the objectifying male gaze.65 Heterosexual

feminist pornography equally attempts to ‘break free of traditional sexual imagery that

fetishizes male ejaculation and puts women in the subordinated role’ by focusing,

instead, on gender role reversals and on experimentation ‘with the fluidity of power in

sexual intercourse’.66 In the mainstream pornography market, Jenna Jameson set up her

own pornography business (Club Jenna) after having worked in the sex industry since

the age of 18.67 Instead of attempting to suppress pornography, third-wave feminists

suggest that women can subvert and utilise the industry and the medium for their own

benefit, in a sexual as well as an economic sense.

Although frequently accused of demonstrating ‘an uncritical relation to dominant

commercially produced sexual representations’ through their participation in the

normalisation of pornography in mainstream culture,68 at the same time as the third

wave embraces pornography as a space for female sexual expression and empowerment

its proponents also retain a critical view of the structures of the industry as well as of the

consumer culture of which it is a part. By considering and by providing a space for the

voices of women involved in the industry, many third-wave essay collections do offer

analyses of the exploitative practices and politics of pornography, but at the same time

they (and the authors themselves) refuse to cast women into the one-dimensional role of

the victim. Instead, these texts emphasise how within an exploitative framework

women, too, have the potential to become the exploiter and profit from consumer

demands. Many anti-pornography feminists accuse pro-pornography or anti-censorship

feminists (with whose arguments the third-wave largely aligns itself) of considering

women’s involvement in pornography exclusively as a

65
‘pornography, feminist’, The Women’s Movement Today, pp.248-249.
66
Ibid., p.249.
67
See: Jenna Jameson with Neil Strauss, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale
(New York: Harper Collins, 2004).
68
Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (London:
Sage, 2009), p.17 and p.18.
 134

voluntary activity, representative of the woman’s (or man’s) own freely chosen
sexual identity and desire, [ignoring] the economic conditions of the sexual
exchange, the social and economic power of the producers and consumers, and
the poverty, economic exploitation, and sexual abuse that may underlie the lives
of those involved in the sex industry.69

Yet, this simplification ignores the fact that the third wave acknowledges and

investigates both the exploitative and liberating potentials of pornography, including its

associations with sex trafficking and prostitution (which are the subject of Chapter

Four).

Third-wave feminists, then, ‘lean toward a more complex analysis’ of

pornography, ‘attending to the very real concerns raised by antiporn feminists while

arguing that one can both advocate against censorship and formulate serious challenges,

critiques, and protests of the objectionable and discriminatory’ aspects of

pornography’.70 Consequently, third-wave writings on the issue very much share the

aims and concerns of recent scholars such as Brian McNair, Feona Attwood and

Clarissa Smith, who seek to critically explore – rather than reject from the outset – the

mainstreaming of sex in contemporary culture, including its manifestations and the

content and politics of pornography. As such, third wavers contribute to the challenge

Attwood sets in the introduction to Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualisation of Western

Culture (2009): ‘How’, she asks,

should we respond to forms of sexualisation which may be profoundly

contradictory in the way they mix up oppressive and emancipatory views of sex
and gender, and how do we develop a critical language for the analysis of
sexualisation without reverting to ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ positions on pornography?
Whatever stance we take, simply rejecting sexualisation is unlikely to take us
very far.71

Embracing popular culture as a fundamental aspect of women’s lives today, third-wave

69
Ann Russo, ‘Feminists Confront Pornography’s Subordinating Practices: Politics and Strategies
for Change’, Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality, ed. by Gail Dines, Robert
Jensen and Ann Russo (London: Routledge, 1998), pp.9-36 (p.17).
70
‘pornography, and feminism’, The Women’s Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third-Wave
Feminism, Vol.1, ed. by Leslie L. Heywood (London: Greenwood Press, 2006), pp.247-248 (p.247).
71
Feona Attwood, ‘Introduction: The Sexualization of Culture’, Mainstreaming Sex: The
Sexualization of Western Culture, ed. by Feona Attwood (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), pp.xiii-xxiv
(p.xvii).
 135

feminism addresses these issues by both embracing and interrogating the contradiction

which arise from women’s self-conscious and pleasurable participation in a consumer

culture which objectifies and dehumanises them, be it through pornography or

mainstream advertising.

It is this paradox of simultaneously critiquing and contributing to a sexualised

consumer culture which links third-wave theories to neo-Victorian fiction. Novels such

as Starling’s The Journal of Dora Damage and Waters’ Fingersmith return to the

Victorian past in order to trace the roots of pornography as a feminist issue and explore

and critique, to various extents, its liberatory and exploitative potentials. In doing so,

however, they illuminate not only women’s but also neo-Victorian fiction’s and third-

wave feminism’s ambiguous positions within the sexualised marketplace they

interrogate.

The Journal of Dora Damage: pornography’s feminist failures

In 1859, two years after the Obscene Publications Act had been passed, bookbinder wife

Dora Damage is forced to take on her husband’s bindery due to his first crippling and

eventually fatal rheumatism. In order to save her family from starvation, Dora is

tempted into profitable but dangerous business with Les Sauvages Nobles, a group of

bibliophile gentlemen, led by Sir Jocelyn Knightley, who publish and collect

pornographic and racist anthropological works of literature and photography. In the

course of the novel, Dora progressively receives material of a more and more violent

and racist nature and, attempting to refuse the continuation of her services, she is forced

to remain in business with the group as they threaten physical violence in the form of

subjecting Dora’s young epileptic daughter, Lucinda, to a clitoridectomy. Reading and

binding books of sexual practices previously unknown to her, Dora has to compromise

her middle-class respectability for her family’s survival, while also discovering, in the
 136

course of the novel, her own sexuality through her relationship with Din, an American

fugitive slave whom she employs in her workshop by instruction of Knightley’s wife

Sylvia and her Lady’s Society for the Assistance of Fugitives from Slavery.

As a woman of the middle classes, Dora has been raised by her governess mother

into the role of the ‘angel in the house’ (for which Dora lacks both talent and

enthusiasm) and, hence, into an identity of which sexuality is only an aspect in the sense

that it is absent. Consequently, at the beginning of her narrative, Dora is sexually

inexperienced, a factor which significantly shapes her first impressions of the

pornographic material she comes to bind for Knightley. Her marriage, like her

upbringing, does not encourage sexual acts beyond the purpose of reproduction and,

consequently, Dora and Peter have only had sex three times since their betrothal, once

on their wedding night and twice thereafter, each time preceded with Peter ‘barking

instructions at [her] to scrub [herself] all over with carbolic soap and baking soda’ (DD,

24). Having conceived a child and presumed that Dora’s expressions of pleasure during

sex must be signs of her being ‘a convulsive’ (DD, 24), Peter cannot not see a reason for

a fourth sexual encounter: ‘I remember’, Dora explains,

suggesting a third time [...] to which he [Peter] replied in wonder, ‘What do you
want to be going and doing that for?’ as if I had suggested we steal a hot-air
balloon and see if we could fly to the moon. It was a wrongful disposition for a
respectable wife and mother. I learnt to acquire an appropriate aversion. (DD, 24)

Due to this inexperience and because of the popular Victorian notion that female sexual

desire is, at least in the public eye, inexistent, Dora’s first encounter with sexually

explicit material is as shocking to her as it seems excessively dramatic to us. Initially

unable to determine the meanings of the illustrations in Boccaccio’s Decameron, but

then surprised and shaken.

Considering, then, that Dora is confronted with matters for which her ‘upbringing

and society had not prepared [her]’ (DD, 163), her contact with pornography inevitably

generates problematic perceptions of the extent to which these books represent or create
 137

reality or fantasy. Unlike Maud, who finds herself spatially confined to Briar, Dora is

incarcerated by her role as a middle-class wife. The material she reads has no direct

application or relevance in her life, and the worlds of Knightley’s texts consequently

make her ‘angry at [... her] ignorance’ and at the fact that the books, against her will,

‘led [her] into the dark caves of sin, and left [her] there in torment and confusion’ (DD,

164). However, the novelty of and the shock over the texts’ natures wears off quickly

and Dora soon finds that it ‘felt curiously normal [...] now to be doing this’ (DD, 185).

Now able to reflect on the books’ contents, she begins to interrogate her own world, her

marriage and herself according to their descriptions and comes to think, ‘What a

disappointment I must have been to my husband, for not being a docile and willing

conduit, a physiological sewer, to the pouring-forth of his mighty Jupiter Pluvius’ (DD,

186). Pornography, for Dora, initially occupies an ambiguous place in the creation and

representation of social reality and its gender relations. Dora believes that the texts and

illustrations she encounters in Knightley’s books are fantasies of personal fetishes, but

that especially those of a sadomasochistic nature are also ‘love unromanticised, [and]

for that reason, possibly more authentic’ than the demure stories of romance novels. The

works she binds for Les Sauvages Nobles show her, she feels, something for which she

‘had previously no visual representation in this world of convention and delicacy’,

something which ‘had often underpinned [her] whole existence as a woman’ (DD, 163).

These forbidden publications, then, represent as well as reinforce already existing

gender constructions and hierarchies, that is, they act as a means of maintaining

women’s subordinate status to men and function as prescriptive guides which distort

their female reader’s perception of herself into an image characterised by insufficiency.

That pornography, in Starling’s novel, has little to do with female sexual pleasure

becomes clear when Dora reads in the Decameron that every woman should be aware of

her best side during the sexual act, that is, from which perspective she is most attractive
 138

to behold for a man. Again acutely aware of her shortcomings in this respect, Dora

confesses, ‘I had never beheld these parts of my body in this way, unfamiliar as they

were to me as far-off parts of the globe. For the first time in my life, I started to wonder

about my best angle’ (DD, 161). She continues by explaining that one of the texts

‘mentioned in passing an extraordinary, magical place, called the Clit-oris. The author

was unspecific as to its exact co-ordinates, but it sounded as if it should be in Africa or

Xanadu, or Timbuc-Tu, so leysian were its qualities, especially for the female of the

species’ (DD, 161). The clitoris, here, is of minor importance as a means of achieving

female sexual pleasure and, as Dora’s comical interpretation makes clear, instead

functions merely as an exotic item of male pursuit for male enjoyment.

But for Dora, Knightley’s materials do not only result in a diminished sense of

self-confidence; their sexual prescriptions also, because of Dora’s lack of sexual

experience, prohibit rather than develop her discovery of her own sexuality and sexual

pleasure. Instead of naturally giving in to her passions, in her first sexual encounter with

Din Dora finds herself torn between what body desires and what her brain believes is

‘correct’ sexual behaviour: ‘The heat from my body seemed to drain towards that one

point; my head struggled to reclaim control, and in the conflict, my body lost. I was

feeling too much [...] Instead of feeling too much, I made the choice of feeling nothing’

(DD, 362). Convinced that sex must be performed as it is represented in Knightley’s

texts and not according to personal feeling, she attempts to recreate the illustrations she

has memorised, causing a scene which is as comical as it is pitiable:

‘Forsooth,’ I suddently remembered, relieved that the last year’s toil had not been
in vain. Then, ‘Verily sir, a mighty one.’ [...] I thrust myself forward and tilted the
crown of my head towards the floor, and arched my back dramatically, but it was
all wrong. [...] Our skulls clunked together and our temples throbbed. ‘A
tremulous shudder’ […] and two or three long sighs, followed by the critical,
dying ‘Oh, oh!’ That was it. I tried all those, in turn. Din pulled back, and for the
first time I could see nature’s grand master-piece, only his seemed to be wilting. I
had not read of that, only of pillars, and engines, and skewers. (DD, 362)

Dora soon realises that the ‘knowledge’ she has acquired from her client’s obscene texts
 139

is worth nothing when it comes to real-life experiences of passions and sex, leaving her

embarrassed by her behaviour and conscious that she had ‘read of too many fantasies to

feel anything than fictitious myself right now’ (DD, 362).

Thus unable to inspire female sexual pleasure and, instead, prohibiting women’s

discovery of their sexualities by alienating them from their own bodies, pornography,

for Dora, offers only mere illusions of female empowerment. Dora is at first flattered by

the special position she occupies as Knightley’s confidante, but it soon transpires that

her value to them does not lie in her professional skills. Rather, Les Sauvages Nobles’

attraction to Dora lies to a large extent in their desire to watch her read, if not in a literal

sense then certainly by way of displaying their perverse and obscene sexual preferences

and fetishes through the texts Dora binds for them, which, as a rule, she reads before

designing their bindings. From the moment of her employment by Knightley, it

becomes clear that Dora is an object of his – and the group’s – gaze. On their first

meeting, he examines and interprets her physiognomy in detail and, once decided to

make her his Mistress Bindress, remarks with satisfaction on the suitability of his new

acquisition with the words, ‘Mrs Damage, you are perfect for our requirements’ (DD,

107). The pleasure he takes in watching Dora watch also becomes apparent in this first

encounter, when, in the presence of bookseller Charles Diprose, he encourages her to

inspect closely the anatomical model of a female torso which he keeps in his study.

While Dora is ‘fascinated and repulsed’ (DD, 104) by what she sees, she in turn

becomes the object of observation when Knightley points out to Diprose, ‘See how she

looks so’ (DD, 104). Meanwhile, noting that ‘he was continuing to watch my struggle

with placing my gaze’, Dora realises their ongoing fascination with her reaction to the

anatomical model, watching her ‘as if [she] were some scientific curiosity’ (DD, 104).

Clearly, as a woman of the lower middle classes employed to bind and clothe

pornographic texts and pictures, Dora is a ‘scientific curiosity’ to these men on at least
 140

two accounts: her social status and her sex.

Later it becomes clear that to Les Sauvages Nobles Dora’s biggest attraction is

that she knows, through the materials she binds for them, their sexual preferences, their

fetishes and perversities. This play of the gazes becomes explicit when Dora is first

kidnapped and held hostage by them:

I caught a glimpse of a long, hazy room, a shining table, men in jewel-coloured

velvets, a flame lighting a cigar, a flash of gold. It felt tremendously improper for
me to witness this male occasion; it somehow felt more shameful than anything I
had seen in any book to date. But I could not avert my gaze, and the men within,
too, stared back out at me. (DD, 239)

Knowing of all their sexual fantasies and activities – ranging from sadomasochism to

bestiality and paedophilia – Dora is aware that ‘they were all here, I knew, for I had

read their diaries, their letters, their stories, and they knew it too as they watched me

watching them (DD, 240). Having realised that her ‘anger was delighting them’, Dora

recognises that she

was one step away from Mistress Venus with her birch rods, and I suddenly
realised that her disciplinary procedures were nothing more than an artificially
bestowed power, handed to her temporarily by the men who so yearned for
chastisement. Mistress Venus was just another job for just another brow-beaten
woman, just another task to fulfil, along with cleaning his slippers, filling his pipe,
and being the cushion for his rage. (DD, 220-221)

Consequently, any sexual power or liberty women imagine they possess through the

enactment of heterosexual sadomasochistic practices is merely subject to and created for

the satisfaction of male desires and hence of a degrading rather than an emancipatory

nature.72

Because of its frequently violent contents, pornography, in Starling’s novel, is not

72
That for Les Sauvages Nobles the pleasure lies not only in the contents of their publications but
also in the exposure of these materials to those who are either not their designated audience or who object
to obscene literature is further evident in the musings of Mr Prizzy, who claims that his distribution of
pornography is politically motivated and a ‘moral crusade’ (DD, 228). Prizzy takes great pleasure from
trials against sellers of obscene publications because ‘[by] rule of law, each obscene item has to be
categorised and described, and read out as the list of indictments in court. […] Oh, it cheers the heart of a
radical obsceniteur to hear such words spoken in a court of law by an upholder of the law’ (DD, 227).
Thus, independent of a case’s outcome, those who intend to fight obscene texts and pictures are,
ironically, forced verbally disseminate the contents they so fervently condemn and seek to suppress.
 141

only as psychological violence against women by distorting their sense of self and

estranging them from their own bodies and desires but it also functions as a form and

promotion of physical abuse. Reading The Lustful Turk (an authentic piece of Victorian

pornography), the pleasure which the Dey’s women eventually feel following acts of

extreme violation appears to Dora not as a dubious sanctioning of rape, but instead – as

the text intends it – as a pain to which men must subject women in order to introduce

them to the pleasures of sex. Objectification by and violation for the benefit of the male

gaze are taken to the extreme when Dora is destined to become not simply the content

but the very material of Knightley’s books. Drawing on Burton’s Cannibal Club,

Starling re-imagines an instance when, in 1863, Burton promised Frederick Hankey to

bring him a human skin from his next trip to Africa so his friend could have his de Sade

texts bound in it; but where Burton failed in his undertaking Knightley succeeds.73

Having been asked to bind a book in a mysterious material without being allowed to

open the text itself, Dora discovers that the binding material unknown to her is the skin

of a woman from the colonies whom Knightley ‘saved’ from being burned on her

husband’s grave. Soon any remaining illusions of her empowerment are crushed as the

symbolic and phallic coat of arms of Les Sauvage Nobles – ‘a weighty implement, like a

large bookbinder’s tool or stamp’ (DD, 109) which she first received with pride – is

now the template for a tattoo on her buttocks, the skin of which is meant to become the

cover of ‘Volume Two’ (408), rendering her Knightley’s ‘magnum opus’ (DD, 235) and

both a fictional and literal part of Knightley’s pornographic fantasies.

But Knightley’s pornography does not only endorse violence against and the

objectification of women; it also promotes racism. Dora discovers that it is the

protagonists’ ethnic and cultural backgrounds which distinguish Knightley’s books and

illustrations from others. Dora finds them filled with ‘caliphs, emperors, maharajahs,

73
Sigel, Governing Pleasures, p.50.
 142

and the Dey’ (DD, 157) and set in foreign lands, reflecting her client’s pseudo-scientific

obsession with the anthropology and ethnography of the British colonies and their

native inhabitants. Knightley claims to have political and moral motifs for his interest in

and commissioning of obscene materials, motifs in which science, sexuality and

pleasure intersect. He argues that the sexual liberation of the nation – for which

pornography is, apparently, essential – will result in an increase in its health: the

purpose of his ‘scientific study’ is, he explains to Dora, ‘the liberation of our oh-so-

corseted society from the restraints of decency and prudery as an urgent matter of health

and well-being’ and sexually explicit texts, be they ancient or contemporary, have the

power to ‘captivate and which liberate’, and are ‘what England needs. Our literature is

chaste and ailing because we as a society are chaste, and ailing’ (DD, 142-143).

Knightley’s primary interest, however, lies in attempts to prove scientifically the

inferior nature of the African people through an examination of their physiognomies,

hence the symbolic hat stand in the shape of a ‘waist-high Negro boy’ in the lobby of

his house (DD, 100-101) and the title Les Sauvages Nobles for his club of bibliophiles.

His motivation for his research becomes most explicit in the preface to a collection of

obscene – or, supposedly, scientific – photographs which Dora is expected to bind and

which includes shots such as ‘Young wife violated by Negro in revenge for cruelties by

master’ and ‘Stupration of mulatto daughters by father’ (DD, 204). The preface to this

catalogue – the content of which causes Dora to be sick – reads as follows and is

illustrative of the pseudo-scientific purpose of its obscene contents:

This volume is for neither the prurient and perfidious, nor the ignorant and
innocent. The artist of discernment, who professes the pursuit of truth, the
liberation from taboos, and the continued supremacy of Britannia, as the higher
motives behind his representations, will be best served by its contents. The nature
of such an endeavour compels the reproduction of extreme imagery, which is a
triumph of the technology of our age. (DD, 204)

Knightley’s wife, Sylvia, is a founding member of the Lady’s Society for the Assistance

of Fugitives from Slavery, whose attitudes and behaviours towards African-Americans

 143

do, in principal, not differ a great deal from her husband’s and are motivated by equally

hypocritical political motifs. As we learn from Din, the so-called assistance he receives

from the ladies of the society is in many ways a dubious one, as they appear to exploit

Din for re-enactments of their erotic fantasies of black men, which are largely based on

the ideas of excessive and animalistic sexuality Knightley seeks to prove. Indeed,

Collette Colligan notes that ‘there was a tendency among some nineteenth-century

English readers to view slave narratives as racy transatlantic products’. Consumed by

both men and women, and ‘focused on the sexual violence underlying the slave

system’,74 this ‘appropriation of slavery imagery was [...] part of a growing

underground obscene print culture that fed off cultural fantasies’ and, in the 1880s,

came to focus on obscene narratives which both ‘created and reflected fantasies about

the sexual excesses within slavery’.75

In the company of the women of the Lady’s Society Din becomes the protagonist

of their very own version of such a narrative, but also later falls prey to Dora’s – and

our readerly – sexsational gaze: ‘They take me into this room, ma’am, this red room in

her house,’ he tells Dora,

an’ they put the pelt of a tiger round me, an’ a spear in this hand an’ a shield in
that, an’ ask me to stand about like a Zulu warrior. ‘Ooh, a Zoo-loo, a Zoo-loo,’
they cry, an’ wave their arms [...] an’ they cry tears over me, an’ they say, ‘Oh,
Sylvia, how his skin shines!’ an’ ‘Oh, his teeth be so white an’ fright’nin!’ (DD,
210)

Such scenarios and his relationship with Dora, Din later explains, challenge Victorian

discourses of white and male supremacy even more than bestiality or paedophilia: ‘[It’s]

seen to be the wrong way round; the wrong balance of power. White over black, man

over woman, that’s the right way, ain’t it? Black man, white woman, though, stirs it all

up, causes bother’ (DD, 365). What is conveyed here is that pornography and the sexual
74
Colette Colligan, ‘Anti-Abolition Writes Obscenity: The English Vice, Transatlantic Slavery, and
England’s Obscene Print Culture’, International Exposure: Perspectives on Modern European
Pornography 1800–2000, ed. by Lisa Z. Sigel (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), pp.67-
99 (p.71).
75
Ibid., p.67 and p.73.
 144

fantasies it illustrates can both undermine dominant discourses on race, gender and

power and, at the same time, reinforce them as fundamental hierarchies by treating

those fantasies as forbidden, dangerous and exotic.

It is her encounter of more racist and violent materials and Din’s presence in her

workshop which eventually force Dora to reflect upon her attitude towards the texts she

binds. Initially, her naïve perception of Knightley’s works is facilitated by her

unquestioning acceptance of pornographic discourses. Having become familiar with the

language and contents of her client’s publications, Dora soon admits that because she

has become desensitised to their words, the texts themselves have, dangerously, lost

also all relationship with reality. At the point at which Dora makes her observation she

still has no sexual experience to which she can compare or relate the works she binds.

Assuming that the acts they depict are specific to the upper classes and, therefore, of

little relevance to her, she reflects:

I learned entire new languages: I accepted words such as gamahuching,

firkytoodling, bagpiping, lallygagging, or minetting as if they were my mother
tongue. My world became tinged with unreality; such literature placated with its
tone, written with such levity, good humour, civility and incoherence. It came to
be endearing, childish, and meaningless. In fact, I came to realise it was rather
like the whimsical poems filled with nonce words that I read to Lucinda at night,
only a bit wetter. (DD, 163)

To Dora, Knightley’s books were, at first, mere fantasies which have no impact on or

connection with her reality; therefore, any critical scrutiny of their contents becomes

unnecessary as they neither contribute to nor represent real sexual and social relations.

Having learned of Din’s treatment by the women, Dora eventually (although in

vain) attempts to end her work for Les Sauvages Nobles and what she perceives as her

complicity in both the violence against and women and the racism their works

perpetuate. As Dora admits, ‘the presence of the stranger was forcing me to accept the

transgressive nature of my business’ (DD, 176), making both her and the reader

question her position in the trade she has entered and reflect on whether the fact that she
 145

is not the author of such works really exempts her from any responsibility. There is no

question in Starling’s novel that its protagonist’s involvement in the production of

pornographic texts also makes her a passive supporter of the ideologies they advocate.

Eventually, it is only when Dora gives in to her feelings and gains sincerely

pleasurable sexual experiences, which are not stages but ‘as involuntary as fainting’

(DD, 362), that she is able to gain a different perspective on pornography and on herself

as a sexual being. Her experience of sex is unrelated to any text or illustration she has

studied in the past, as ‘it was not the chaste embraces of popular novels, nor was it the

tuneless organ-grinding of Diprose’s catalogue of work’ (DD, 362). Sex and sexuality

are, for Dora, not only personal but first and foremost inexpressible in word or picture.

The sex with Din, for her, defeats any label or description one could attach to it, and

hence Dora observes, ‘I do not have a name for what we did [...] we did it, wordlessly

and without name’ (DD, 362). Dora admits that her sexual encounters with Din have

taught her ‘more over those five days about the inner workings of our hearts and bodies

than [...] over a year of binding erotic texts; I learnt things on which the books could not

inform or instruct, written as they were solely to arose and shock’ (DD, 372). Their

purpose, Dora realises, is not to represent reality or universal truths, but to shock those

unfamiliar with these works and their contents or to pleasure those at whose sexual

preferences they are aimed. Pornography, then acquires a multiplicity of characteristics.

On the one hand it is presented to us as harmful for women and in part responsible for

their subordination; on the other hand, Dora illustrates in this last quotation that

pornography is a form of fiction, but its function to represent sexual pleasure remains a

fruitless endeavour, since true desire and passion cannot be transformed into and

represented by words, be they penned by men or by women.

Starling’s novel successfully overwrites the male gaze to which Dora is subjected

by Les Sauvages Nobles and their pornographic materials. The fraught power relations
 146

of Knightley’s desire to watch Dora watch are subverted in the latter’s relationship with

Din. During sex, Din literally shares his view of Dora with Dora, ‘look[ing] back into

[her] eyes as if he could transfer the image to [her] that way’ (DD, 373) and hence

destabilising the power relations associated with her identity as a white woman and

Din’s as a black man. Dora does not become a text on Knightley’s shelves, but authors

her own book, The Journal of Dora Damage. This, she explains on the first pages, is not

a text which prescribes a life, but one which a woman must fill herself:

[The] pages of the [...] book start off blank, and await inscription by the lending
of a life of free will according to personal inspiration and divine grace. And the
more one’s destiny is pursued, the more brilliance the book acquires, until the
binding far surpasses any hide, cloth or paper binding ever produced in the
finest ateliers of Paris and Geneva, and is finally worthy of joining the library of
human knowledge. (DD, 1-2)

In The Journal of Dora Damage women can overwrite the male gaze, but pornography

– in whichever shape or form – is not the vehicle through which such subversion can be

achieved. Rather, it remains a means of initiating and reinforcing a form of male sexual

pleasure which is dependent on and maintains women’s physical and psychological

subjugation in society.

Yet, while Starling draws attention to the troubled gender, class and race politics

of nineteenth-century society and pornography in particular, we are also forced to face

our contemporary readerly desire for such politically correct critiques,76 and, therefore,

indirectly, for the sensational (and mostly sexsational) illustrations of the acts and

practices under scrutiny. This becomes clear when Dora quizzes Din about his

experiences of abuse by the Lady’s Society. During his account, Dora interrupts him

repeatedly with impatient questions, while Din appears to play to her evident

anticipation of the sexual details of his story:

‘What else did they do?’ But he would not answer. He simply sat and smiled. So I
76
As Christian Gutleben points out in Nostalgic Postmodernism, the impulse to provide politically
correct critiques of nineteenth-century society and culture has become a neo-Victorian trope and fulfils
readerly expectations toward the genre. See: Christian Gutleben, Nostalgic Postmodernism: The Victorian
Tradition and the Contemporary British Novel (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), p.37.
 147

moved slightly closer to him. A question burnt my lips; I did not know if I dared
ask, until it spoke itself for me. ‘Do they touch you, Din?’ I said quietly. He
paused, and held my gaze, still grinning. ‘Oh, Lord’ do they touch me!’ He
whistled through his teeth. (DD, 210)

Women’s writing – in the form of Dora’s journal – thus poses both a challenge to

pornography’s sexual and textual politics as well as holding up a mirror to its readers’

consumption of the neo-Victorian sexsation at the same time as it caters to it by

providing us with the sexual experiences of its heroine and the eccentric sexual

practices of its villains.

Fingersmith: pornography’s feminist potentials

Where Starling’s The Journal of Dora Damage contextualises its representations of

pornography primarily within discourses of heterosexuality, race and class, Fingersmith

turns its attention to pornography by focusing chiefly on its engagement with and

impact on lesbian sexuality and its representations. As with Dora’s relationship to Les

Sauvages Nobles, Maud’s importance to her uncle is at least partly defined by her

function as a visitor attraction for his gentlemen guests from London, who, like Mr

Lilly, are collectors of pornography and enjoy hearing Maud read aloud the texts and

obscene matters she daily catalogues and indexes:

He is used to occasionally entertain gentlemen at Briar: now he has me stand for

them and read. I read from foreign texts, not understanding the matter I am made
to recite; and the gentlemen – like Mrs Stiles – watch me strangely. I grow used to
that. When I have finished, at my uncle’s instruction I curtsey. I curtsey well. The
gentlemen clap, then come to shake or stroke my hand. They tell me, often, how
rare I am. I believe myself a kind of prodigy, and pink under their gazes. (FS, 198)

As Rivers indicates to Maud, she is well-known and much-discussed ‘in the shady

bookshops and publishers’ houses of London and Paris’, where they talk of her ‘as of

some fabulous creature: the handsome girl at Briar, whom Lilly has trained, like a

chattering monkey, to recite voluptuous texts for gentlemen’ (FS, 224). Having been

raised and trained into this position by her uncle, Maud herself has been created, has
 148

been written – like Mr Lilly’s pornographic books – by, and as an entertainment for,

men. Indeed, her uncle makes Maud internalise early on during her time at Briar that he

considers her as nothing more than a part of his collection, when he tells his naturally

resistant young niece, ‘I have contently passed many tedious weeks in expectation of

poorer volumes than you!’ (FS, 194). While Maud becomes a sexualised object during

her readings to her uncle’s guests, Mr Lilly’s own interest in her is not of a sexual

nature but, rather, mirrors the collector’s fondness of the physical object.

Whereas Dora’s sexual inexperience is ascribed to her confinement within her role

of middle-class wife, Maud is raised in complete seclusion from the world outside of

Briar, where her uncle attempts to raise her as an innocent whose only knowledge

comes from his texts and whom he can thus train to be what he is, and what Ashbee

claimed to be, ‘the bibliographer [...] who assumed the scholarly apparatus of the

scientist to distance himself from the pornographic voyeur [...] [and] pursued

objectivity’ by ‘collecting, organising, categorising, and then labelling’ the sexual acts

represented in his library without being aroused by them.77 Not dissimilar to Dora’s

appeal to Les Sauvages Nobles, Maud’s attraction to Lilly’s visitors therefore lies in her

identity as a sexually unaware and virginal girl who – at least superficially – is

emotionally detached from and, hence, does not respond to the sexual material she reads

because the texts are written in languages she has been taught to read but not to

understand, both literally and metaphorically. If in French or Latin, Maud utters the

words without knowing their meaning, and even when written in English, the acts they

describe remain a foreign language to Maud, whose secluded life at Briar has so far

provided her with no experiences (physical or otherwise) which would allow her to

relate to the texts’ contents. It is exactly this detachment which Lilly attempts to foster

and maintain in his niece, to both his advantage and to that of his visitors. Considering

77
Sigel, Governing Pleasures, pp.60-61.
 149

himself ‘a curator of poisons’ (FS, 199) immune to the toxicity of his collection, he

aims to bestow this immunity upon Maud, so

that you might assist me [...] For you come here with naked fingers, while in the
ordinary world – the commonplace world, outside this chamber – the men who
handle vitriol and arsenic must do so with their flesh guarded. You are not like
them. This is your proper sphere. I have made it so. I have fed you poison, by
scruple and grain. Now comes the larger dose. (FS, 199)

For the Victorians, pornography was a valid object of scientific study in the hands of

educated upper-class men, but filthy, unrespectable entertainment if consumed by the

working classes,78 and hence Lilly, like Ashbee, ‘keeps it neat, keeps it ordered, on

guarded shelves’ and cautions Maud to ‘remember the rareness of our work. It will

seem queer, to the eyes and ears of the untutored. They will think you tainted, should

you tell. You understand me? I have touched your lip with poison, Maud’ (FS, 199). To

outsiders, then, her contact with these texts must inevitably indicate her physical as well

as her moral contamination as they perceive woman as incapable of Lilly’s male,

detached, scientific gaze.

Consequently, when Maud eventually manages, for a brief time, to escape into

this ordinary world, she is no longer an attraction but a dangerous embarrassment.

Desperately seeking refuge at Mr Hawtrey’s bookshop in Victorian London’s famously

ill-reputed booksellers row, Holywell Street, Maud finds that Hawtrey is unwilling to

help the girl he so admired within the secluded confines of Lilly’s country house,

reminding her that ‘this is not Briar [...] You were among gentlemen, there’ (FS, 380),

and delivering her to what he believes is the proper place for a ‘poisoned’ girl like Maud

outside the confines of her uncle’s country house: ‘a house for ladies [...] like you [...]

Poor ladies, widow ladies – wicked ladies’ (FS, 387), that is, a workhouse for

gentlewomen.

Maud’s ignorance and inexperience of the world outside Briar, then, also raise

78
Sigel, Governing Pleasures, p.4.
 150

fundamental questions regarding the nature of pornography. Due to her lack of

knowledge, Maud ‘suppose[s] all printed words to be true ones’ (FS, 186), that is, she

not only supposes them an accurate depiction of reality, but to her, they are what

constitutes reality. Having spent all her life reading about sexual acts of all shapes and

forms while being unable to discover her own bodily desires during her adolescence,

Maud believes she is not in any way roused by the subject matter of her uncle’s texts

because of her profound knowledge of their contents and, when prompted by

Gentleman, she asks, ‘aren’t those who know the matter best, moved least? I speak not

from experience of the world, of course, but from my reading merely’ (FS, 214). Her

faith in her uncle’s books goes so far that she even considers herself someone who ‘can

never be deceived, for instance, in the matter of a gentleman’s attentions’ (FS, 14). As

for Dora, for Maud pornography is initially not a form of expression which represents

and interprets reality, but, because she does not know anything else, a force which

creates reality, which, in MacKinnon’s words, ‘creates gender, creates woman and man

in the social form in which we know them’.79

However, at the age of thirteen, in an incident far less comical but no less

revelatory than the embarrassing sexual experience of Starling’s protagonist, Maud

painfully realises her ignorance and the false knowledge resulting from it when her

curiosity leads her to observe not only her maid Barbara’s but also her own body,

neither of which conform to the pictures and descriptions of her uncle’s books.

Watching Barbara take a bath, she observes:

Her legs - that I know from my uncle’s books should be smooth - are dark with
hair; the place between them - which I know should be neat, and fair - darkest of
all. That troubles me. Then at last, she catches me gazing. ‘What are you looking
at?’ she says. ‘Your cunt,’ I answer. ‘Why is it so black?’ She starts away from
me as if in horror [...] ‘Where did you learn such words?’ ‘From my uncle,’ I say.
‘Oh, you liar! Your uncle’s a gentleman.’ (FS, 200)

79
Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourse on Life and Law (London: Harvard
University Press, 1987), p.149.
 151

Having her mouth washed with soap as a punishment for using the language Mr Lilly’s

texts have taught her, Maud internalises the idea that her ‘lip must have poison in it,

after all’ and, witnessing her own genitalia becoming more similar to those of her maid

rather than to those in her uncle’s books, she, like Dora, finally comes to know her the

texts ‘to be filled with falsehoods’ and, consequently, to loathe herself ‘for having

supposed them truths’ (FS, 201). It is at this point that pornography destroys any sense

of innocence, pleasure or ‘natural’ feeling in the young girl, for whom adolescent

‘restlessness turns [...] to scorn’ (FS, 201): her uncle’s books fail to make her blush now

that she recognises them as fantasies rather than accurate depictions of reality and,

consequently, their falsehoods cause Maud to detach herself from their subject matter

once more and to treat them as hateful objects of study. Pornography, as in Starling’s

narrative, functions as psychological violence against women, resulting in either a

deprivation or a disturbed sense of emotion. This becomes particularly clear when Maud

starts punishing her maid Agnes for possessing an innocence which Maud herself has

lost, by exerting cruel acts of physical harm which also demonstrate her helplessness,

her inability to develop or express any healthy emotions within the quiet confines of

Briar:

She is fifteen, innocent as butter. She thinks my uncle kind. She thinks me kind, at
first. She reminds me of myself, as I once as. She reminds me of myself as I once
was and ought still to be, and will never be again. I hate her for it. When she is
clumsy, when she is slow, I hit her. That makes her clumsier. Then I hit her again.
That makes her weep. Her face behind her tears, keeps still its look of mine. I beat
her the harder, the more I fancy the resemblance. (FS, 203)

Maud’s punishment of Agnes functions, of course, also as a projected self-punishment

born from contempt and as the novel progresses, we find that it is partly Sue’s idea of

Maud as an innocent which makes her attractive for Maud, who is ‘too compelled by

her idea – her idea of me as a simple girl, abused by circumstance, prone to nightmare’

(FS, 251). When Maud first met her uncle at the madhouse in which she had grown up,

his decision to take her to Briar with him was made on the basis of her handwriting and
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her ability to read, hence her later realisation that her ‘fair characters are her undoing’

(FS, 182). To Maud, Sue’s illiteracy is therefore ‘a kind of fabulous insufficiency - like

the absence, in a martyr or a saint, of the capacity for pain’ (FS, 244) – an insufficiency

which, at least to some extent, saves her from becoming a part of the language and

system of patriarchy.

Again, it is with positive sexual experiences that the protagonists’ perception of

pornography changes. Maud’s relationship towards her uncle’s books is altered when

Sue comes to Briar in the guise of Maud’s new maid and both girls discover their

feelings for each and their lesbian sexualities. Having a feeling and an experience to

associate with the contents of the texts – a real-life referent so to speak – Maud

perceives Lilly’s collection as coming to life for her as she begins to discover her own

feelings and desires:

Even my uncle’s books are changed to me; and this is worse, this is worst of all. I
have supposed them dead. Now the words [...] start up, are filled with meaning. I
grow muddled, stammer [...] For the work tells of all the means a woman may
employ to pleasure another, when in want of a man. (FS, 280)

Yet, within this realm of evidently male-orientated pornography, Maud finds herself

trapped since she cannot help but relate her own feelings to and view them through

these texts which are written by and intended to arouse men, not women, and which are

central to her captivity in her uncle’s power. She continues,

And despite myself - and in spite of Richard’s dark, tormenting gaze - I feel the
stale words rouse me. I colour, and am ashamed. I am ashamed to think that what
I have supposed the secret book of my heart may be stamped, after all, with no
more miserable matter than this - have its place in my uncle’s collection. (FS,
280)

What clearly troubles Maud is that, now, her performative act of reading is linked to and

expresses her innermost passions and feelings, which become, consequently, mere

reflections of men’s fantasies and are made the objects of their gaze. When Maud and

Sue sleep with one another, Maud finds herself unable, at first, to break out of her

performance and imitation of the scenes she knows from pornographic fiction and thus
 153

encounters the same obstacle Dora faces in her first attempt at having sex with Din:

‘And at first, it is easy. After all, this is how it is done, in my uncle’s books: two girls,

one wise and one unknowing [...] I say my part, and she - with a little prompting - says

hers. The words sink back upon their pages’ (FS, 282). It is only through Sue’s

penetration and when Maud gives in to her own desire that she literally comes alive by

finding her own sexuality rather than performing what is prescribed by her uncle’s texts

and ‘everything [...] is changed. I think I was dead, before. Now she has touched the life

of me, the quick of me’ (FS, 283).

It is because of these discrepancies between sex and text, between individual

preference and cultural prescription, that pornography, as in The Journal of Dora

Damage¸ is represented throughout Fingersmith not only as emotional but also as

physical violence against women. Maud’s enforced training to become one of her

uncle’s ‘poisons’ involves severe physical punishments, even in her early childhood, all

of which are performed with tools used for or associated with the book trade. When, at

her arrival at Briar, Maud refuses to wear the gloves she has been given, Lilly presents

her with

one of those things that bookmen use - a line of metal beads, bound tight with silk
for keeping down springing pages. He makes a loop of it, seeming to weight it;
then he brings it smartly down upon my knuckles. Then, with Mrs Stiles’s
assistance, he takes my other hand and does the same to that. The beads sting like
a whip; but the silk keeps the flesh from breaking. (FS, 186-187)

Not long after this scene he threatens, ‘I shall whip your eyes until they bleed’ (FS, 189)

and as the consequence of a further childish disobedience, threatens Maud with ‘a slim

brass knife, blunt-edged, for cutting pages’ (FS, 194). Through Lilly, pornography

becomes a medium of patriarchy which ‘is physical injury and physical humiliation and

physical pain: to the women against whom it is used after it is made; to the women used

to make it’.80

80
Andrea Dworkin, ‘Against the Male Flood: Censorship, Pornography, and Equality’, Feminism
 154

However, unlike in Starling’s novel, it is also, in the first instance, the utilisation

of these masculine tools in which we can witness the novel’s attempt to overturn the

violence exercised by men through pornography. While ink, throughout the novel, is

associated with Mr Lilly and, hence, with patriarchal oppression, its negative

connotations begin to shift when Maud describes her desire for Sue by observing, ‘I am

not dry, like sand. I am wet. I am running, like water, like ink’ (FS, 282). On the night

of her flight from Briar, Maud steals into her uncle’s bedroom while he is sleeping to

take both his razor and the key to his library with the intention to cut up his precious

collection of texts. Her destruction of her uncle’s personified books becomes a step

towards her liberation from these texts and the oppression she associates with them,

even though this destruction of something so intrinsic to her identity proves difficult at

first, before resulting in relief: ‘Still it is hard - terribly hard, I almost cannot do it – to

put the metal for the first time to the neat and naked paper. I am almost afraid the book

will shriek [...] But it does not shriek. Rather, it sighs, as if in longing for its own

laceration’ (FS, 290).

When at the end of the novel and after Mr Lilly’s death Sue returns to Briar and

finds Maud writing her own pornographic fiction, Maud soon points out to her that the

‘smears of ink on her fingers’ (FS, 546) which symbolically scar her are not a cause for

pity, but a part of her. Neither Mr Lilly’s death nor Maud’s destruction of his books

changes the fact that she continues to exist as his product: ‘“Don’t pity me,” she said,

“because of him. He’s dead. But I am still what he made me. I shall always be that. Half

of the books are spoiled, or sold. But I am here’ (FS, 546). Clearly, Maud has

recognised that her uncle and his pornographic texts have, however negatively, shaped

her identity as a woman, an influence which is irreversible and forms a part of her. In

terms of the appropriation of the tools and texts which have previously oppressed her,

and Pornography, ed. by Drucilla Cornell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp.19-38 (p.27).
 155

Maud’s liberty remains a sinister and ambiguous one despite what Waters herself calls

the novel’s happy ending (Waters 2007, my emphasis). Indeed, Fingersmith’s open

ending is inherently ambiguous. On her return to Briar, Sue finds that Maud has started

to utilise the ‘education’ her uncle has given her and now writes and sells pornography

herself, texts which, she explains to Sue, are ‘filled with all the words for how I want

you’ (FS, 547). Arguably, Maud no longer occupies the passive space of the reader and

copier of already written narratives but, instead, has become the active creator of her

own stories by utilising her uncle’s tools and expressing her homosexual desires and

fantasies. Waters’ novel ends with a hint that Maud teaches Sue to read and write, as

Maud ‘put the lamp upon the floor, spread the paper flat; and began to show me the

words she had written, one by one’ (FS, 548), sharing her newly gained agency with the

so far illiterate Sue. Taking into account their difference in terms of social class, the

working-class Sue is removed here from her previous identity as someone whom

‘narratives [...], pornographic or otherwise, might be written about, but upon which she

herself is supposed to never blacken her tongue’.81 Sue would, then, be initiated into an

appropriated but at the same time still new tradition of pornography as a means of

expressing women’s sexualities.

Nevertheless, this ending, which Cora Kaplan finds ‘ironic, but in no way

punitive’,82 is much less liberating if we consider the previously established links

between literacy, exploitation and oppression. As already mentioned, it was Maud’s

ability to read and write which made her uncle take her to Briar and confine her there as

his secretary and, later, she wishes she ‘had scrawled and blotted the page’ (FS, 182).

When Rivers intends to fake the marks of a ruptured hymen on their wedding bed by

drawing blood from Maud’s arm, she threatens him with the words ‘touch it and die. I
81
Mark Llewellyn, ‘Breaking the Mould: Sarah Waters and the Politics of Genre’, Metafiction and
Metahistory in Contemporary Women’s Writing, ed. by Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp.195-210 (p.202).
82
Cora Kaplan, Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticisms (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2007), p.113.
 156

have poison in me’ (FS, 293), showing her acceptance of her uncle’s notion that he has

permanently poisoned her. It is inevitable to link Maud’s literacy with Lilly’s

exploitation and oppression and one cannot help but wonder whether Maud is poisoning

rather than liberating Sue by showing the pornographic work she has produced and,

through this, supposedly teaching her how to read and write. This implication brings

with it the idea that Maud now occupies her uncle’s space, literally - by living at Briar -

as well as symbolically, especially since he explains to Maud during her early time at

Briar that ‘Your hand shall be my hand’ (FS, 199). From this perspective, Maud merely

occupies and imitates a masculine role, adopting rather than challenging traditional

gender roles within an already established, oppressive and now exclusively female

context. Equally, her own act of writing is a questionable appropriation of ‘the sexual

and the literary imagination’:83 Maud admits her writing is only profitable when she

‘write[s] swiftly’ (FS, 547), justifying Kohlke’s suspicion that her texts represent ‘a

lesbian profiteering from male desires by simulating fantastic sex on paper, and

probably mainly heterosexual sex at that’.84

Overall, and in contrast to Starling, Waters clearly recognises and explores the

potential women’s appropriation of patriarchal concepts and tools such as pornography

can hold for the expression of female sexual identity, and despite Maud’s destruction of

some of her uncle’s books, it is adaptation, not destruction, which transforms

pornography into a representative space for her. As Waters recently explained in an

interview, Fingersmith ‘ultimately tries to at least gesture towards the possibility that

women could write their own porn themselves’,85 a potentially positive act, as Melanie

Waters argues:

By describing sexual experiences and fantasies in their own words, but in an

established pornographic rhetoric, it might be argued that the authors of
83
Kaplan, Victoriana, p.113.
84
Kohlke, ‘The Neo-Victorian Sexsation’, p.8.
85
Abigail Dennis, ‘Ladies in the Peril”: Sarah Waters on neo-Victorian narrative celebrations and
why she stopped writing about the Victorian era’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 1:1 (2008), pp.41-52 (p.43).
 157

[pornographic] works successfully utilise the tools by which anti-pornography

feminists claimed women were oppressed in order to subvert the gendered
power.86

To a certain extent Maud thus enacts such a subversion by adapting her uncle’s training

to express her own sexuality and sexual desires.

Fingersmith, remaining decidedly more ambiguous about women’s potential

complicity in their own oppression than Starling’s novel, argues for the possibility of

female appropriation of language as a device for the expression of women’s desires,

transforming, like Maud, ‘the grossest rakes of fiction’ into ‘the secret book of my

heart’. Still, the question remains how genuinely from the heart such works are, seeing

as they are, after all, commercial products created for a consumer market, and regularly

adapted to the small screen by male directors. In this respect, Maud’s position seems to

somewhat resemble Waters’ own, as she, too, is a lesbian author writing lesbian sex for

a readership which is certainly not exclusively homosexual. In Airling Walsh’s

adaptation of Fingersmith we certainly find a number of shots and scenes which lend an

air of heterosexually oriented peepshow to Waters’ narrative.87 Maud and Sue’s sexual

encounter before the wedding night is, in the screen version, witnessed by Gentleman,

who passes the bedroom door which has been left ajar and watches the two women with

a deviant smile. As Ann Heilmann has pointed out, this sense of male voyeurism, absent

from the novel in this form, is also reflected in the promotional photos for and the DVD

cover of the adaption, in which we see Sue and Maud half-dressed and turned to each

other, ignorant of Gentleman standing next to them at a short distance.88 Inevitably, this

raises issues regarding the extent to which such narratives of lesbian experience can

86
Waters, ‘Sexing it Up?’, p.261.
87
In comparison to Fingersmith much more subtle in terms of sex, it is not surprising that Affinity
(1999), despite having been published before Fingersmith, was the last of Waters’ first three novels to be
adapted for the BBC. Here, director Andrew Davies introduced a male fiancé who is non-existent in the
book and who attempts to rape the novel’s protagonist Margaret, an addition which in part feels like an
attempted justification for Margaret’s subsequent romantic interest in a woman, the prison inmate Selina.
88
Ann Heilmann, ‘The New Victorians: Contemporary Fiction in the Nineteenth Century’, Inaugural
Lecture presented at the University of Hull (7 April 2008).
 158

actually be subversive, compromised – as they potentially are – by market demands and

sales targets. The risk which arises here is that homosexuality, like the Victorian,

becomes an erotic and exotic, desired other for the heterosexual reader and viewer,

leaving Waters an exploiter of the market value of two women making love on page and

on screen, rather than a historiographer of lesbian voices.

Kathleen A. Miller concludes her analysis of Fingersmith by claiming that the

novel proposes a ‘tradition of female erotic literature [which] promises to include: a

loving relationship between two consensual partners, as opposed to the female

victimization, objectification, and exploitation encouraged by male-dominated

pornography,’89 but I would argue that, overall, the novel is much less decidedly

positive in its treatment of pornography and women’s author and readership. Taking

into account Waters’ own position, Fingersmith – although not intended to end in

ambiguity – certainly reflects the contradictory status of women within the pornography

trade, as Maud’s roles as victim, accomplice, consumer and producer merge, like

Waters’, into one complex identity, demonstrating that ‘the process of sexualisation,

including the pornographication of mainstream culture, has created new spaces for

female sexual display’,90 and that in order to understand the complexity of these new

spaces and women’s position within and towards them, we may, as Clarissa Smith puts

it, have to ‘be prepared to let go of some of our fondest assumptions about gender,

power and pleasure’.91 That is, Fingersmith forces us to critically engage with female

experiences and sexual expressions which cannot be so easily classified within

established, neat categories and discourses of women’s sexualities, sexual

89
Kathleen A. Miller, ‘Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith: Leaving Women’s Fingerprints on Victorian
Pornography’, Nineteenth Century Gender Studies, 4:1 (Spring 2007), Accessed: 1 June 2010,
http://www.ncgs journal.com/issue41/miller.htm.
90
Brian McNair, ‘From Porn Chic to Porn Fear: The Return of the Repressed?’, Mainstreaming Sex:
The Sexualization of Western Culture, ed. by Feona Attwood (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), pp.55-73
(p.68).
91
Clarissa Smith, ‘Pleasing Intensities’, Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualization of Western Culture,
ed. by Feona Attwood (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), pp.19-34 (p.34).
 159

empowerment and victimisation, and, unlike Starling’s text, it does not discard

pornography as a potential means of doing so.

Conclusion

In The Journal of Dora Damage, Lucinda notes, in an afterword she composed for the

publication of her mother’s journal, that Dora anticipated the pornographication of

culture which has become such a defining aspect of today’s Western world: ‘My mother

must have known [...] that all the abolition of Holywell-street would achieve was the

migration of a handful of pornographers into other premises, and an easier thoroughfare

for vehicles and pedestrians to navigate’ (DD, 445). Dora dies when the accessibility of

pornography for the working classes started to increase steadily towards the end of the

nineteenth century, when it ‘had become no longer the privilege of the wealthy, but

available from barrows in every market’ (DD, 445).

In their historical settings, both novels point towards the present day, in which

pornography is no longer confined to a small street in London or a secluded estate in the

country, but is, notoriously, only a mouse-click away. Fingersmith and The Journal of

Dora Damage utilise the Victorian past in order to investigate critically our own time,

when, once again, women’s roles in the sexualised marketplace are changing and are

yielding some unexpected results regarding women’s positions within these new spaces.

Starling and Waters certainly force their readers to consider the politics of our

consumption of the neo-Victorian sexsation. After all, however critical our readerly

gaze, we can neither claim to possess Ashbee’s scientific detachment, nor can we deny

our delight in consuming – like Knightley or Lilly’s guests – the sexual and textual

awakenings of our neo-Victorian heroines. As a genre, neo-Victorian fiction, with its

ambiguous, sexsational status as a symptom of and contributor to the sexualisation of

culture, offers itself as a medium for the representation of the risks and challenges these
 160

new uncertainties pose as well as of the new potentials they may offer. If, as Attwood

suggests, sexuality and sexual performance function as means of self-definition in a

time in which the nature of identity is becoming ever more fluid,92 then neo-

Victorianism’s obsession with sex is, as in previous decades, not only a way of simply

defining ourselves by ‘sexually critiqu[ing] and/or liberat[ing] the past’ but also a valid

and effective avenue through which we can critically and self-consciously explore new

and ever more publicised female sexual identities and their implications for women and

feminist theory and practice.93

92
Attwood, ‘Introduction’, p.xvii.
93
Kohlke, ‘The Neo-Victorian Sexsation’, p.352.
 161

CHAPTER FOUR
Pimping the neo-Victorian prostitute: the feminist politics of sex work

The issues Fingersmith and The Journal of Dora Damage raise in relation to the textual

and sexual politics and economies of pornography inevitably prompt questions

regarding neo-Victorian representations of the non-fictional trading of sex in the form of

prostitution. Within this thesis, sex work is the feminist concern which demonstrates the

most visible (and also the most depressing) similarities between the nineteenth,

twentieth and twenty-first centuries, particularly if we consider the legal, moral and

socio-medical discourses which have influenced feminist standpoints on prostitution

from the Victorian period to recent decades. In neo-Victorian fiction, the popularity of

the figure of the madwoman, discussed in Chapter Two, is perhaps rivalled only by a

woman whose sexuality cannot so easily be classified, rationalised and pathologised:

the prostitute. As Miriam Elizabeth Burstein observes in her blog The Little Professor:

Things Victorian and Academic, the prostitute has become a compulsory component of

the contemporary neo-Victorian: ‘there must be at least one prostitute’, she notes, ‘who

will be an alcoholic and/or have a heart of gold’.1 This chapter first traces prostitution as

a feminist issue from the mid-nineteenth through to the twenty-first centuries in order to

then examine the representations of female sex workers in Linda Holeman’s A Linnet

Bird (2004) and Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002) within the

contexts of both the historical settings they utilise and the contemporary feminist issues

in prostitution which they evoke. Analysing in particular the sexual economies and

politics these texts assign to prostitution, I argue that Holeman’s and Faber’s returns to

the nineteenth century function, if to very different extents, as critiques as well as

replications of Victorian and contemporary feminist discourses surrounding sex work.

1
Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, ‘The Prostitutes’ Progress’, The Little Professor: Things Victorian and
Academic (27 September 2005) Accessed: 1 October 2011, http://littleprofessor.typepad.com
/the_little_professor/2005/09/the_prostitutes.html
 162

Constructing the prostitute: discourses and politics

The Contagious Diseases Acts introduced in 1865-1869 were the legal embodiment of

the mid-century discourses of contagion which then surrounded and continued to define

prostitution. This new legislation and the debates which brought about its repeal in 1886

functioned, in A.N. Wilson’s words, ‘as a powerful stimulus to the Women’s

Movement’.2 The Acts formalised an already existing link between female sex workers,

pollution and contamination since they ‘defined [prostitution] as a major health hazard’

and caused women in the sex trade to be seen, by many, not as endangered victims of

their male clients’ diseases, but instead ‘as sources of contamination, passing on

syphilis or gonorrhoea to unsuspecting men’,3 a medical rationale which activists such

as Josephine Butler famously challenged.

For the middle classes in particular this physical threat was intrinsically linked to

a moral hazard: the danger that the corruption and deviance they associated with

unregulated female sexuality and, thus, with prostitutes could contaminate their

domestic realm through husbands’ and fathers’ use of what they considered to be

physically and morally ‘polluted’ women. Hence, it was not for the suppression of

prostitution or of the crime and public nuisance often associated with it that the

Contagious Diseases Acts were passed, but predominantly for the protection of male

clients, especially soldiers, and for the safeguarding of the middle and upper classes.

Prostitution as a social and medical issue was considered to originate from the sex

worker, who, as a writer in the Lancet put it in 1888, allegedly made it impossible for

men ‘to walk to and from their business without having the social evil thrust upon them

night after night and year after year’.4 Therefore, it was prostitutes rather than their

clients who were perceived as being in need of regulation and who were stigmatised and
2
A.N. Wilson, The Victorians (London: Abacus, 2002), p.310.
3
Joyce Outshoorn (ed.), ‘Introduction: Prostitution, Women’s Movements and Democratic Politics’,
The Politics of Prostitution: Women’s Movements, Democratic States and the Globalisation of Sex
Commerce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp.1-20 (p.6 and p.7).
4
‘The “Social Evil” in London’, Lancet, 8 December 1888, p.1146.
 163

criminalised.

Similarly, the Contagious Diseases Acts had consequences only for sex workers.

Male sexuality and men’s use of prostitutes remained largely unchallenged and were

perceived to have entirely natural and unavoidable causes, while women were subject to

both physical and geographical regulation, the latter usually taking the shape of attempts

to limit prostitutes and brothels to certain districts within a city.5 The Acts meant

physical control over a wide range of women because not only prostitutes but ‘any

woman found in the street could be picked up by the police and forced to submit herself

to intrusive medical inspection and subsequent detainment in a locked hospital’,6

allowing ‘male clients, doctors, magistrates, and police access to and control of the

female body’.7

The works of mid-century novelists and social commentators illustrate many of

the legal, moral and medical concerns which motivated the passing of the Contagious

Diseases Acts. The threat of the spiritual and moral contamination of the middle classes

came to be embodied in literature by the prostitute’s close relative, the fallen woman.

This sexually deviant female, who had often given in to seduction and hence abandoned

her task of upholding the principles of her class (and by extension the health of the

nation), was considered as being on the downward path toward the sex trade and, like

the figure of the prostitute, an ‘agent of connection and of disease both physical and

social’.8 Mid-Victorian fiction and journalism in particular expressed the sense of

danger created by the possibility that such moral and bodily dangers could potentially

be concealed behind a respectable facade and infiltrate and contaminate the well-

guarded purity of the domestic sphere in the guise of seemingly reputable but in truth

5
Outshoorn, ‘Introduction’, p.7.
6
Wilson, The Victorians, p.474.
7
Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1980), p.128.
8
Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), p.8.
 164

fallen women.9

In 1861, Henry Mayhew expressed a related concern which was to become central

to feminist fiction and thought in the later decades of the century. Mayhew could not

refrain from acknowledging the similarities between prostitution and marriage when he

wrote of the relationship between ‘a kept mistress’ and a man as ‘the nearest

approximation [within prostitution] to the holy state of marriage’.10 This comparison,

for Mayhew, functioned as a reinforcement of the idea that prostitution poses a threat of

contamination to the middle and upper classes. William Acton, four years earlier, had

stated that it was ‘in the interest of the commonwealth’ to prevent women from ‘falling’

because ‘never one of them but may herself, when the shadow is past, become the wife

of an Englishman and the mother of his offspring’,11 thus making explicit the threat the

kept mistress’ class mobility posed to the nation.

From the 1860s onwards, however, the Contagious Diseases Acts and the ‘whore

stigma’ they attached to any woman who dared to walk the streets without a male

guardian fuelled feminist writers’ and activists’ critiques of ‘the prevailing social view

of women as “relative creatures” [...] defined by their familial relationships with men’.12

Although women repealers were by no means unanimous in their views, many

emphasised that the economic concepts underlying prostitution very much mirrored

those of marriage. Fin-de-siècle women writers such as Mona Caird, Olive Schreiner,

Sarah Grand and George Egerton, unlike Dickens, Mayhew or Acton, saw marriage not

as similar to but as ‘a type of prostitution’ and drew attention to the fact that a woman

9
See: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), Charles Dickens’ Bleak House
(1853), William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848), to name but a few. See also the newspaper
coverage of the Constance Kent murder trial between 1860 and 1865 in: Kate Summerscale, The
Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, or, the Murder at Road Hill House (London: Bloomsbury, 2008).
10
Henry Mayhew, [1861] London Labour and the London Poor: A Cyclopaedia of the Condition
and Earnings of those that Will Work, those that Cannot Work, and those that Will Not Work, Vol. IV
(New York: Cosimo, 2009), p.213.
11
William Acton, Prostitution: Considered in its Moral, Social, and Sanitary Aspects in London and
Other Large Cites (London: John Churchill, 1857), Accessed: 4 August 2009, http://books.google.
com/books?id=XJsrHfQqL5sC&pg=PR3#v=on epage&q&f=false, p.73.
12
Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, p.125.
 165

selling herself to a man in marriage in return for her upkeep and an elevation in social

status was accepted as the norm, while outside of wedlock the exchange of sex for

money was considered corrupt and a sin.13

Many feminist fictions in the later decades of the century hence associated the

prostitute with varying degrees of economic and moral agency and constructed her

either as a degraded woman deserving of pity, or as a worker attempting to survive in a

society in which women’s opportunities for paid work were limited.14 Although by

‘contributing to new images of female sexual identity through representations of the

prostitute’ some novelists of the 1880s and 1890s in particular managed to challenge the

restrictive categories which medicine, the law and middle-class morals had created for

sex workers, they often fell back on exactly these categories.15

Equally, the majority of women’s groups, early feminists and activists who sought

the repeal of the CD Acts actively relied on traditional assumptions regarding female

sexuality and normative femininity as the very foundations of their work, reinforcing

the roles of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ women:

because they found it politically expedient to depict ‘fallen women’ as passive

victims of evil machinations, repealers were understandably not moved to
scrutinize the actual motives, social origins, and current life-styles of registered
prostitutes. Instead, they relied on Acton’s study, or fell back on the already
familiar stereotypes.16

The image of the suffering and mistreated woman served the repeal cause: women who

were willing to repent and who admitted to the evil of their ways were worthy of help

since they ‘were felt to be “appropriate objects of solicitude”’, but those who saw no

wrong in their profession and rejected religious and middle-class values remained

demonised as ‘shameless, degraded and evil, not deserving of a feminist’s sympathy

13
Stephanie Forward, ‘Attitudes to Marriage and Prostitution in the Writings of Olive Schreiner,
Mona Caird, Sarah Grand and George Egerton’, Women’s History Review, 8:1 (1999), pp.53-80 (p.73).
14
Forward, ‘Attitudes to Marriage and Prostitution’, p.54.
15
Emma Liggins, ‘Prostitution and Social Purity in the 1880s and 1890s’, Critical Survey, 15 (2003),
pp.39-55 (p.53).
16
Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, p.111.
 166

and care’.17

Similarly, there was no framework addressing the double standard which

feminists themselves upheld through their unquestioning acceptance of a class system in

which they were superior to working-class women and without which they would have

been unable to pursue their activism: ‘Feminist repealers,’ Walkowitz explains, ‘rarely

had personal qualms over the fact that they owed their leisure and domestic freedom to

the drudgery of workingwomen. They basically accepted this relationship as a natural

feature of existing class relations’.18 At the same time, feminist discourses surrounding

women from the British colonies reinforced rather than challenged existing imperial

power structures and the image of the third-world woman as inferior to her British

sisters. Antoinette Burton illustrates that feminist and abolitionist illustrations of Indian

women often served as a means of justifying British women’s intervention and,

consequently, their role in the empire:

Discussions of Indian women in feminist papers rarely occurred without reference

either to the superior condition of British women or to the responsibility of British
women for saving their Indian sisters. What feminist writers told their audiences
through their representations of Indian women was that colonial womanhood
existed in an enslaved state for the purposes of British feminist imperial reform
activity.19

Nineteenth-century feminist criticism of third-world prostitution therefore frequently

exemplifies Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous assessment that ‘the subaltern cannot

speak’ within critical discourses which are ‘the result of an interested desire to conserve

the subject of the West, or the West as Subject’.20 Overall, many activists,

commentators and novelists throughout the nineteenth century attempted to draw

attention to the conditions of prostitutes in Britain as well as to the consequences they

17
Liggins, ‘Prostitution and Social Purity’, p.41.
18
Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, p.119.
19
Antoinette M. Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial
Culture, 1865-1915 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994), p.101.
20
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, Marxism and the Interpretation of
Culture, ed. by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1988),
pp.271-313 (p.308 and p.271).
 167

thought these conditions had for British society and Britain as a nation. In doing so,

social purists, abolitionists and feminists alike employed discourses which intentionally

or unintentionally re-established rather than undermined the issues and structures at the

heart of the politics and circumstances they were determined to challenge.

Since the nineteenth century the legal contexts in which prostitution is considered

by national and international law have shifted to a certain degree, but the discourses –

feminist and other – which currently surround sex work have undergone very little

change since the final decades of the Victorian period. It was in the 1880s that

prostitution came to be described as ‘white slavery’ and was put, for the first time, in

the context of human trafficking,21 a concept which came to define the legislation of

prostitution throughout the twentieth century and up to the present day. After the

inception of the British and Continental Federation for the Abolition of Government

Regulation of Vice in 1875 and the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts in 1886,

abolitionism dominated the international legal developments concerning the sex trade

until the middle of the twentieth century,22 a period which also marked the

criminalisation of prostitution and its procurement ‘regardless of the consent of the

women involved’.23

Joyce Outshoorn observes that ‘prostitution and the trafficking in women returned

to the political agenda of most post-industrial democracies by the end of the 1970s’.24

Little less than a century after the Victorians, this development was once again

intricately linked to fears and discourses of contamination and disease. The renewed

interest, Outshoorn observes, ‘was accelerated by the emergence of AIDS in the mid-
21
Outshoorn, ‘Introduction’, p.9.
22
Ibid., pp.7-8. The term abolitionism, for the purposes of this chapter, describes ‘the position that
prostitution should be banned and third parties criminalised, with the prostitute herself not liable to state
penalties’ (Outshoorn, ‘Introduction’, p.8). Outshoorn illustrates that abolitionist intent is evident in the
International Convention for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic (1910), the International
Convention to Combat the Traffic in Women and Children (1921), the International Convention for the
Suppression of the Traffic in Women of Full Age (1933), and the International Convention for the
Suppression of the Traffic in Women (1949).
23
Ibid., p.9.
24
Ibid., p.8.
 168

1980s, which gave rise to renewed worry about the health hazards of sex’,25 linking

prostitutes with the threat of contagion by using them as the ‘[scapegoat] for

transmission of AIDS to the general population through unprotected contact with

clients’.26 The Victorian link between physical and moral contagion, too, resurfaced

when, in the mid-1980s and 1990s, the debates over kerb crawling as an (arrestable)

offence ‘came on to the public agenda primarily via local constituency concerns about

the moral and environmental “pollution” caused’.27

Similarities and continuities between Victorian and modern discourses and

practices surrounding prostitution can also be found outside the realm of the political,

moral, legal and statistical. In his discussion of nineteenth-century gentlemen’s

guidebooks to the London sex trade, Ronald Pearsall comments that ‘the Victorian

“swell” looked for qualities in their prostitutes that would be inconceivable

nowadays’.28 These apparently no longer sought after characteristics include, he

continues, ‘genteel behaviour, […] lustiness and energy’, as well as ‘a ready wit’.29 Yet

the description of Jane Fowler in the Victorian sex trade directory Hints to Men About

Town (1840) is not so very different from that of Demi on the much debated website

PunterNet, a highly controversial, California-run database which holds clients’ detailed

reviews of prostitutes and establishments: Jane Fowler ‘is tall, slender, of graceful form

and carriage […]. Jane […] possesses excellent tact in managing a charming repulse to

the eager advance of a vigorous gallant for the purpose of enhancing the enjoyment,

which she well understands how to take share of’.30 Demi’s reviewer, in comparison,

25
Outshort, ‘Introduction’, p.8.
26
Maggie O’Neill, Prostitution and Feminism: Towards a Politics of Feeling (Oxford: Polity Press,
2001), p.32.
27
Johanna Kantola and Judith Squires, ‘Prostitution Policies in Britain, 1982-2000’, The Politics of
Prostitution: Women’s Movements, Democratic States and the Globalisation of Sex Commerce, ed. by
Joyce Outshoorn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp.62-82 (p.68).
28
Ronald Pearsall, The Worm in the Bud: The World of Victorian Sexuality (Thrupp: Sutton
Publishing Ltd., 2003), p.258.
29
Ibid.
30
The Old Medical Student, Hints to Men About Town (Liverpool: George Davis and Co., 1840),
cited in Pearsall, The Worm in the Bud, pp.257-258.
 169

notes:

one of the nicest and cleanest places you will ever find. Operates a generous
loyalty plan in addition to 45 min appts for the price of a 30 min appt if you arrive
before 1pm. [...] Young (18) and well spoken/educated. […] A very affectionate
and passionate young lady who enjoys her job and enjoys pleasing as well as
receiving pleasure. She […] gives a true GFE [girlfriend experience] in all
respects.31

As many other descriptions from both sources show, cleanliness and an ability to have

basic, comfortable conversation are also desirable, and the impression that the prostitute

enjoys her job is what constitutes the ‘girlfriend experience’ so frequently praised on

PunterNet, while a lack of enthusiasm, flawed looks and neglected hygiene are

commonly the reasons for negative reviews, relating back, once again, to fears of

contagion and pollution.

As has perhaps been illustrated best by Harriet Harman’s 2009 request that Arnold

Schwarzenegger, as governor of California, close down PunterNet,32 the website

illustrates several contemporary feminist concerns surrounding the sex trade. Its

database of ‘field reports’ which review the looks, sexual services and prices of female

sex workers and which indicate to other punters whether or not the reviewer would

return and recommend the woman in question provide a case for both those feminists

who consider prostitution as the epitome of women’s oppression and exploitation by

men and those who view sex work as a valid form of labour. Especially if one considers

the search function which allows visitors to browse the database of reviews by

parameters such as name, keyword(s) and location, PunterNet can be viewed from

either of these positions: the pseudo-scientifically named ‘field reports’ represent, one

may argue, a clear form of men’s objectification and degradation of women and their

bodies, rendering the term ‘product reviews’ perhaps more appropriate for these

31
‘Field Report No. 70709: “Demi” of Milton Keynes’, PunterNet, Accessed: 19 January 2010,
http://www.punternet.com.
32
See: Deborah Summers, ‘Harman urges Schwarzenegger to “terminate” prostitute website’,
Guardian (30 September 2009), Accessed: 19 January 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/
sep/30/harriet-harman-arnold-schwarzenegger-prostitution.
 170

evaluations since the system explicitly makes women products to be purchased, rated

and (not) recommended to other men; at the same time, however, one may consider

PunterNet as a business register valuable to both punters and sex workers, since it

provides valuable advertisement for prostitutes (whose client numbers will increase

with more positive reviews and more online exposure).33

While Outshoorn acknowledges that up to four feminist stances on prostitution

can be identified today,34 she and the majority of commentators agree that these two

perspectives outlined above form the general divide in the twenty-first century.35 Such

positions are, of course, not mutually exclusive; feminists who regard prostitution as an

exploitative ‘patriarchal institution that affects all women and gendered relations’ may

disagree, or at the very least consider problematic, the idea of sexual/erotic labour as a

‘freely chosen [...] form of work’, but they may at the same time still agree that

prostitutes ‘deserve the same rights and liberties as other workers, including freedom

from fear, exploitation and violence’.36 The truly divisive issues, then, is the concept of

choice, its limitations, and its potentials. Scholars such as Wendy Chapkis have

considered erotic labour as potentially ‘liberatory terrain for women’,37 but others, such

as Natasha Walter and Ariel Levy, consider this so-called liberation as an illusion which

causes women to reinforce their own objectification and exploitation in a capitalist

sexualised marketplace.38 Internationally, the divide has resulted in two major alliances

33
An Independent report stated that prostitutes who use PunterNet were, ironically, grateful to
Harman for the publicity with which her campaign against the site provided them. See: Jerome Tayler,
‘PunterNet prostitutes thank Harriet Harman for publicity boost’, The Independent (2 October 2009),
Accessed: 20 May 2009, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/punter-net-prostitutes-thank
-harriet-harman-for-publicity-boost-1796759.html
34
Outshoorn, ‘Introduction’, p.9.
35
See, for example: O’Neill, Prostitution and Feminism, p.17; and Jo Doezema, ‘Ouch!: Western
Feminists’ “Wounded Attachment” to the “Third World Prostitute”’, Feminist Review, 67 (Spring 2001),
pp.16-38 (p.17).
36
O’Neill, Prostitution and Feminism, p.17.
37
Wendy Chapkis, Live Sex Acts: Women Performing Erotic Labour (New York: Routledge, 1997),
p.1.
38
Natasha Walter, Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (London: Virago, 2010), pp.39-62; Ariel
Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (London: Pocket Books, 2005),
pp.179-182.
 171

against trafficking, namely the Coalition against Trafficking in Women (CATW) and

the Global Alliance against Traffic in Women (Global Alliance). The former, run from

the US, demands the abolition of prostitution, while the Thailand-based latter ‘holds on

to the distinction between forced and voluntary prostitution’ and ‘calls for the

decriminalisation of prostitution and the combat of trafficking and forced prostitution’.39

One significant difference between Victorian and more recent discussions of

prostitution is the organisation and presence of sex workers in dedicated collectives and

activist groups. Such organisations demand that ‘prostitution [...] be identified as work,

within the context of national and international labour law. They argue that women

should have the same rights and liberties as other workers’.40 Sex workers’

organisations also draw attention to the fact that ‘[m]any “whores” who are also

feminists or feminist-informed’ do not have the opportunities ‘to engage in debate about

male oppression and the problems related to supporting patriarchy’.41 This claim is part

of a much wider issue regarding the silencing of sex workers’ voices, be it in feminist

activism and scholarship, or in policy making processes. Johanna Kantola and Judith

Squires observe, for example, that even if groups such as the ECP (English Collective

for Prostitutes) have representation in front of parliamentary groups, evidence from

parties such as the police, local authorities, health professionals and residents’ groups

are generally given more attention and are addressed to a greater extent in the eventual

recommendations.42

This silence is also evident in feminist scholarship and activism on either side of

the ‘choice’ divide. In her participatory action research with sex workers, Maggie

O’Neill has found that many prostitutes are as suspicious of researchers as they are of

male clients and/or pimps. Despite good intentions, feminist researchers often fail to

39
Outshoorn, ‘Introduction’, p.10.
40
O’Neill, Prostitution and Feminism, p.30.
41
Ibid.
42
Kantola and Squires, ‘Prostitution Policies in Britain’, p.72.
 172

engage with the women they encounter, and conduct their work in a manner which can

be as objectifying as the act of prostitution itself. O’Neill illustrates how ‘[r]esearchers

are sometimes seen as little more than pimps: coming into the field to take, they then go

back to their campus, institution, or suburb where they write up the data, publish and

build careers – on the backs of “others”, of those they took data from’; hence, she

continues, these research practices ‘may be perceived by the women as another form of

pimping’.43

Similarly, Jo Doezema draws attention to the discourses employed by CATW,

more specifically its leader Kathleen Barry, regarding sex workers in the third world.

Comparing Barry’s language to that of the nineteenth-century feminist movements

investigated by Burton, Doezema demonstrates that, similar to the practices of Victorian

feminists, ‘CATW’s construction of “third world prostitutes” is part of a wider western

feminist impulse to construct a damaged “other” as justification for its own

interventionist impulses’.44 Here, ‘the “injured body” of the “third world trafficking

victim” [... still] serves as a powerful metaphor for advancing certain feminist interests,

which cannot be assumed to be those of third world sex workers themselves’.45 While

CATW hears and utilises testimonies of women involved in prostitution, they assign to

specific testimonies ‘the status of absolute truth’, meaning that ‘only certain versions of

prostitutes’ experience are considered “true”‘.46 Nevertheless, organisations which

support the legalisation of prostitution can equally ‘slip into orientalist representations

of third world sex workers [... through a] dichotomy between “voluntary” western sex

workers and “victimized” third world sex workers’.47

Although based on a consciousness of difference and of power discrepancies

among women, third-wave feminism has been subject to similar criticisms. Among the
43
O’Neill, Prostitution and Feminism, p.50.
44
Doezema, ‘Ouch!’, p.16.
45
Ibid.
46
Ibid., p.27.
47
Ibid., p.18.
 173

major current positions on sex work, it is generally aligned (and aligns itself) with the

demand for the legalisation of prostitution. As Bridget Crawford puts it in her

assessment of a potential third-wave feminist legal theory surrounding sex and sexual

services, it is because of their acceptance of pluralism as given that ‘third-wave writers

seem reluctant to label any form of sex-work – whether pornography, prostitution or

stripping – as entirely “bad” for women’.48 On a theoretical basis, the third wave fits

well with O’Neill’s vision of ‘[feminist thought which acknowledges] that for some

women prostitution gives a good enough standard of income, relative autonomy and can

be fitted in around child care’.49 Like Wendy Chapkis, for example, third-wave theory

addresses the liberatory and subversive potential of prostitution for women. Sex work,

or erotic labour, is considered as a way of performing sexuality, of capitalising on one’s

body and, ultimately, of profiting from women’s exploitation by men by using it as a

means of ‘taking advantage of men’s apparent need to sexualize and degrade women’.50

From this point of view, then, the prostitute, rather than the male punter, ‘has the

morally (and perhaps economically) superior position in the relationship’.51 Within this

context, the third wave ‘acknowledge[s] how female submission has been fetishized as

what is sexy’, but yet emphasises the ‘potentially subversive role of the so-called

dominated female’.52

Third-wave feminism’s acceptance of the postmodern notion of multiple

narratives and truths for women’s lives and experiences is central to its treatment of

prostitution as a feminist issue. Crawford explains how ‘third-wave feminists do not

dismiss categorically sex-work, but they recognize it as multi-faceted – problematic yet

48
Bridget Crawford, ‘Toward a Third-Wave Feminist Legal Theory: Young Women, Pornography
and the Praxis of Pleasure’, Pace Law Faculty Publications (Pace University Law Faculty, 2007),
Accessed: 17 July 2009, http://digitalcommons.pace.edu/lawfaculty/243, p.49.
49
O’Neill, Prostitution and Feminism, p.31.
50
Crawford, ’Toward a Third-Wave Feminist Legal Theory’, p.57.
51
Ibid.
52
Ibid., p.50.
 174

profitable to some women’;53 yet, this is also where she locates, to a large extent, one of

the third wave’s major problems. Drawing on Jodie Freeman’s analysis of the political

theories underlying the positions of prostitutes’ rights groups,54 Crawford asserts that

third-wave feminists’ focus on individualism, autonomy and personal choice is a

‘theoretical weakness’ which leads to an insufficient consideration of the ‘relations

between men and women’, meaning that ‘gender subordination and social structures,

like prostitution, which reinforce that subordination, remain outside the third-wave

analysis.55 While critiques such as Crawford’s are common and third-wave feminism’s

emphasis on the individual is often categorically dismissed as an ineffective and self-

defeating practice, its strengths and potentials remain largely unacknowledged.

Individual narratives, self-centred or not, are always defined by the social

constructs which impact on and create them and, thus, ‘gender subordination and social

structures’ are concepts which can be analysed and deconstructed on individual as well

as broader, more collective terms. Individual narrative and the analysis of societal

systems are not, as Crawford perceives, mutually exclusive; rather, the

acknowledgement and understanding of sex workers’ different and often contradictory

realities should result in the formation of theories and practices which address and cater

for prostitutes’ (shared) needs, instead of putting in place structures and facilities which

serve a feminist agenda which relies on an artificially conceived sense of union among

sex workers, between sex workers and feminist scholars/activists, and between feminist

scholars/activists themselves. To ignore individual narratives as a fundamental basis of

feminist theory and practice is to ignore the different conditions of sex workers and the

differences in power among women more generally:

53
Crawford, ’Toward a Third-Wave Feminist Legal Theory, p.50.
54
Jodie Freeman, ‘The Feminist Debate over Prostitution Reform: Prostitutes’ Rights Groups,
Radical Feminists and the (Im)Possibilities of Consent’, Pornography, Sex Work and Hate Speech, ed. by
Karen J. Maschke (London: Taylor and Francis, 1997), pp.209-244 (p.220).
55
Crawford, ‘Toward a Third-Wave Feminist Legal Theory’, p.57.
 175

the importance of listening to life-stories is that not only do they give us better
access into the complexity of lived relations, the interrelationship between the
micrology of our lives and broader socio-political structures of power and
signification, but we can more easily engage with the complexities of
subjectivities, difference and identities.56

Accordingly, O’Neill proposes that individual experience and the ‘multiple standpoints

of women working in prostitution’ must function as the very basis of the ‘reflexive

interrelationship between feminist thought/research, women’s lived relations and

policy-oriented practice’.57

While the third wave’s employment of individual narratives hence certainly does

not function as the analytical dead end as which Crawford perceives it, another aspect of

her critique remains to be addressed by third wavers and, here, the reliance on the

existence of diverse realities and voices could once again be the key. Crawford

legitimately points out that third-wave theory’s view of sex work as an employment

option which women can chose freely poses crucial questions about economic, class and

power privileges:

Third-wave feminists for the most part ignore or gloss over the social and
economic conditions that lead to prostitution. They view a woman’s decision to
engage in prostitution as an economically-savvy way of maximizing her own
assets [….] Yet the voices of the third wave are the voices of privileged women
who have the time, education and economic ability to write for publication.58

Crucially, women’s entry into prostitution remains predicated upon their social and

economic backgrounds, as does the notion of choice.

However, while this idea does require more complex and less distanced

assessment from third-wave theorists, they are by no means as blind to the issue as

Crawford claims. They advocate that ‘[f]eminism and sex work aren’t [...] mutually

exclusive [and that ...] women need to have the right and freedom to choose how to live

56
O’Neill, Prostitution and Feminism, p.47.
57
Ibid., p.41.
58
Crawford, ‘Toward a Third-Wave Feminist Legal Theory’, p.57.
 176

their lives as sexual beings. This includes prostitution’59; yet, at the same time, third-

wave feminists acknowledge that practices in the sex market ‘aren’t [...] black and white

issues’ but are, as Crawford herself puts it, multi-faceted and problematic, to say the

least. Although O’Neill does not label herself as a third-wave feminist, the practices she

suggests for feminist research and intervention surrounding sex work are motivated by

principles central to third-wave theory and could thus make for a fruitful way of

translating third-wave theory into (academic) practice. Referring again to the

importance of individual narratives, O’Neill suggests that feminists must create

knowledge ‘for’ and research ‘with’ rather than ‘on’ the sex industry and those

participating in it,60 that is, they must enable the creation of ‘a space for women

involved in prostitution to be heard, and, in turn, for feminist research to inform theory

and practice around women’s involvement in the sex industry’, an aim which ‘can serve

to resist, challenge and change sexual and social inequalities via feminist praxis on an

individual and a collective level’.61

Holeman’s The Linnet Bird and Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White, to

different extents, illustrate and explore the correlation between Victorian and twenty-

first century feminist discourses on women’s sex work through their engagements with

questions surrounding routes into and out of prostitution, sex workers’ choice, and their

(economic) agency. However, in doing so, Holeman and Faber replicate Victorian

discourses and representations of prostitution. Their novels therefore exemplify the

issues which defined the relationships between feminist theory, feminist practice and

women’s experiences of prostitution in the Victorian period, and which continue to

problematize these same relationships today.

59
Kimberley Klinger, ‘Prostitution, Humanism and a Woman's Choice: Perspectives on
Prostitution’, The Humanist: A Magazine of Critical Enquiry and Social Concern, 63:1 (Jan/Feb 2003),
pp.16-19 (p.16).
60
O’Neill, Prostitution and Feminism, p.49. O’Neill also emphasises that such work must include
the role of men, particularly those who are involved in the industry as pimps and punters, identities which
have to date remained largely unexplored. See: O’Neill, Prostitution and Feminism, p.154.
61
Ibid., p.32.
 177

Re-colonising feminism: prostitution and Western superiority in The Linnet Bird

Holeman’s The Linnet Bird is the narrative of Linny Gow, who in 1839 decides to

record the events of her so far short but – even by the standards of neo-Victorian fiction

– excessively sensational and dramatic life, starting with her recollections of her work in

1820s Liverpool as an exploited and abused child prostitute and later as a streetwalker

in a community of female sex workers. Linny is rescued by Geoffrey Smallpiece, also

known as Shaker, and, living with her middle-class rescuer and his devout mother, she

unwillingly finds herself being educated by Mrs Smallpiece in matters of etiquette as

well as in female accomplishments and is soon introduced into the family’s social

circles as Shaker’s orphaned cousin from Morecambe. Linny befriends the seemingly

modern-minded Faith and, in 1830, both girls leave England for India; Faith in the hope

of finding a husband, Linny to fulfil her desire for travel and adventure. Similar to

Holman’s later neo-Victorian novels The Moonlit Cage (2005) and In a Far Country

(2008), the second part of Linny’s narrative presents us with an exoticised yet also

idealised account of the Indian subcontinent and its inhabitants, replicating, through

Linny’s voice, both nineteenth-century Orientalism and Western feminists’ assumed

moral superiority.

However, as she discovers the intricacies of British life in India, Somers Ingram, a

much sought after but homosexual bachelor, reveals himself to be a figure from her

hidden past and the novel’s Heathcliff figure who is both violent toward yet attractive to

the heroine. Afraid Linny might expose his sexual preferences and jeopardise his

professional and social standing, Somers blackmails her into marrying him so he can

maintain a masquerade of respectability while pursuing his carnal desires. Linny

submits to matrimony with the emotionally and physically violent villain who, on one

occasion, rapes her in a fit of combined anger and arousal. Shortly after, in yet another

overly dramatic and fanciful plot development, Linny is abducted by Daoud, a Pathan
 178

with whom she then has a short but intense love affair and to whose child she later gives

birth, pretending the boy is her husband’s. Eventually, Somers dies of malaria, or so it

seems, leaving Linny to return to England together with her son, who embodies her love

for and memories of Daoud.

Throughout the first part of Holeman’s novel, prostitution is a symptom of male

violence, consumption and power, and associated with dysfunctional family relations.

After her mother’s death, Linny is forced into prostitution by her unemployed step-

father Ram Munt at the age of ten. Ram attempts to vindicate his actions with his dire

financial situation and points out that it is, in fact, a common enough duty for a daughter

to sell her body in aid of her relatives, as ‘[m]any a lass helps out her family when

they’ve fallen on hard times’62 (LB, 7). Linny’s narrative, however, makes it explicit

that economic necessity is not the primary reason Ram exploits her body; rather, he

seeks to satisfy his own greed and compensate for his incapability to maintain

employment: ‘I had been put to work for men by Da in the winter of my eleventh year,’

Linny writes, because ‘[h]e was dissatisfied by the small wage I earned at the

bookbindery, and had recently been laid off his job at the rope-maker’s for turning up

top one too many times and spoiling the hemp in spinning’ (LB, 5). At the same time,

Ram passes on the abuse he was subjected to as a young sailor when he reminds his

step-daughter: ‘Weren’t I buggered meself, over and over on the ships, when I were not

much older than you? And it did me no harm, did it?’ (LB, 7). Exercising this sinister

power over Linny becomes an act of revenge which is not only materially but also

sexually rewarding for Ram. Looking to her step-father for help while her first customer

brutally forces her into submission, Linny not only perceives her home as a place of

death but also witnesses her guardian masturbating as he watches her being abused:

62
Linda Holeman, The Linnet Bird (London: Headline, 2004), p.7. Hereafter this text is referred to as
LB after quotations in the text.
 179

[A] knock across my jaw that sent me flying. [...] My shift was pushed up round
my waist, and Mr. Jacobs’s body was heavy on mine. [...] Sweat gleamed on his
upper lip, even though the fire was out and the room cold as a tomb. But almost
worse than the pain and horror of what was happening to me at the mercy of Mr.
Jacobs was that Da – when I turned my head to look for him, hoping he might be
moved to come to my rescue – watched from his stool, his face fixed in an
expression I’d never seen before, one hand busy under the table. (LB, 9)

Linny becomes a source of pleasure for some regular, less violent customers, and in

retrospect claims that ‘in spite of an unnerving evening here and there, the majority of

the men were simple and unimaginative, wanting the most basic release from what they

saw as their tortured state’ (LB, 33). Nevertheless, her narrative makes clear that

prostitution is a physically and mentally harming practice, caused by men’s supposedly

‘tortured state’ and the assumption that it is their right to purchase and violate women

for the purpose of ‘basic relief’ from that state. That Linny’s case is intended as a

representation of women’s condition in patriarchal society becomes clear if we consider

the heroine’s mother. Not a prostitute but a fallen woman, Linny’s mother was first left

by a man when she carried his child and then, homeless, met Ram, her last hope for a

life off the street. Linny’s fate, it seems, is a hereditary one, as Ram breaks her mother’s

spirit in a similar way in which he breaks his step-daughter’s will when Linny attempts

to resist her first punter:

With a bully’s thrust of his chest he’d tell us [Linny and her mother] about how
he’d discovered her, drenched to the skin and wandering in the rain without a
penny to her name. [...] ‘I was never one to turn away a maid in distress [...] Took
her in and gave her a meal and a fire to warm herself. She might have been proud
at one point, aye, but it didn’t take long to persuade her that my roof and my bed
were a damn sight better than what waited for her out in the streets. [...] In due
time I even let her use my name, so she didn’t have to carry the shame of a
bastard child’. (LB, 11-12)

The psychological effects of her sexual exploitation cause Linny to develop conscious

and unconscious mental coping strategies, ways of ‘making out’,63 as Maggie O’Neill

calls it. Some women, O’Neill notes, ‘manage to make out by separating their body

from their soul’, but some also experience a ‘coldness’ in feeling in their ‘relationships

63
O’Neill, Prostitution and Feminism, p.85.
 180

and interrelationships’ as a result of prostitution and such coping strategies.64 Linny

escapes into a separation of body and mind during her first sexual experience with a

punter when her physical pain becomes overpowering: ‘My body burned raw at its

centre, yet my mind tripped and ran, stumbling away [...] And then I heard my mother’s

voice, faint but clear. She recited the second stanza of “The Green Linnet”, a poem that

had been her favourite, and from where she had drawn my name’ (LB, 9). After the

traumatic encounter, Linny resolves to become emotionally ‘cold’ and states, ‘I swore

that I would never again cry over what a man might do to me for I knew it would do no

good. No good at all’ (LB, 9). Yet, she fantasises about inflicting violence on her step-

father and her clients in revenge for the pain they have forced her to endure; she

imagines ‘ways to kill Ram Munt. They were varied and usually torturous, and

invariably involved my bone-handled knife. I also planned the ways I could kill each of

the men my father brought me to’ (LB, 32).

As noted in the introduction to this chapter, social and geographical segregation

was and still remains an issue for female sex workers and is inextricably connected with

notions of moral and physical contagion which must be contained. Once Linny is

brought to punters on a daily basis after her work at the bookbindery, she becomes

excluded from the working-class community in which she has grown up:

There was no time for friendship now. [...] Minnie and Jane accepted my story
that I had to feed my step-father, or face the back of his hand, and they still smiled
at me often, but I felt the loss of their companionship keenly. I missed the visits to
the neighbours too. Some evenings, when the weather was mild, Mother and I had
stood out in the court with other women and girls who lived in Back Phoebe Anne
Street. [...] Now I’d pass those women with my head down, following Ram, sure
they knew what I was off to do. I often heard whispers and mutterings, and knew I
was now a regular source of gossip, but no one ever stepped forward to speak to
me or ask how I was. They knew their place, these women. (LB, 26-27)

Once she has left Ram to work as a full-time streetwalker, she becomes subject to the

city’s informal spatial segregation and solicits her business on Paradise Street, where,

64
O’Neill, Prostitution and Feminism, p.85.
 181

despite and because of her segregation from working-class communities, she finds the

companionship of other prostitutes, all of whom work for the same female pimp, Blue.

Unlike Ram, Blue is not abusive and receives a portion (rather than all) of her girls’

wages. Linny is ‘thankful for her protection’ (LB, 74) and, despite having to share a

room and bed with her fellow workers, often thinks fondly of the sisterhood she

experienced during the time she worked for Blue. Having secured, with Shaker’s help, a

position at the library of a gentleman’s club, Linny feels a ‘troubling awareness of loss’

and admits that she ‘no longer shared the easy laughter and camaraderie of the girls in

Paradise Street’, is ‘less spontaneous, more tightly reined in’ (LB, 155); later, in polite

society in India she admits

[t]here were a few times [...] when my thoughts strayed to a crowded, noisy chop
house where I had eaten many a greasy pie with the other girls from Paradise
Street. There, the stories had flowed easily, the laughter was genuine, the
camaraderie honest. I knew I had experienced a freedom there that no one in these
rooms had known. (LB, 226)

Holeman suggests that prostitution in Victorian England was ‘a trade largely organized

by women rather than men’ and that it could offer a certain form of financial freedom to

women,65 but the dichotomy she creates is a far too simplistic one by both Victorian and

modern standards, as it implies that prostitution is a safe haven of sisterhood when run

by women alone, but a violent hell when organised by men. Consequently, when Linny

has the chance to become a high-class prostitute for a male pimp, she refuses his offer

because his conditions, despite promising a more luxurious lifestyle, are reminiscent of

the circumstance under which she was exploited by Ram:

‘You’ll have your own room and clothing – good clothing [...] You won’t need
money for anything. All your meals will be brought to you. You won’t be going
out except for the entertaining I plan.’ [...] There was something about him that
made me think of Ram and his control over me. What was I doing? I would lose
the freedom I now knew. I imagined myself a prisoner in a locked room, the door
opening only to allow in a man, then locked again. And if the man proved foul in
his requests, or even caused me pain, there would be nobody to protect me, and no
means of escape. (LB, 84)

65
Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, p.25.
 182

One may argue that Linny’s positive experience of Paradise Street is due to her choice

to become a streetwalker there after having nearly died at the hand of a vengeful

syphilitic punter. But choice, in Linny’s case, is a very limited concept. When Shaker’s

mother suggests that her son’s new lodger is immoral and proud of her trade, Linny

argues that prostitution is economically the most attractive and most promising out of a

very small number of options:

If I were still working at the bookbinder’s, I would now be earning enough to

rent the corner of a room in a lodging-house. I would pay half of my wage to the
crimp who cheated everyone under her roof, and live on the same ration of
bacon, chalky bread and weak tea. Perhaps one day I would marry, and move to
another corner of another room. [...] So I chose the only way I hoped might get
me away from that future. (LB, 124)

Equally, sex workers’ agency and potential for self-empowerment are questionable at

best. When working for Ram as a young teenager, the only means of power Linny

possesses is to steal from her customers. ‘Stealing from the men who took from me,’

she explains, ‘made me feel powerful in an adult way: I was not only deceiving the

customers, but also Ram Munt. The objects themselves were of no importance to me:

this new power was the treasure’ (LB 34). Thievery, as previously discussed in Chapter

One in relation to Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith, becomes a way for women to undermine,

to whatever small extent, an exploitative patriarchal economy, and hence a way to feel

empowered within the confines of that system.

Linny’s eventual marriage to Somers Ingram in India and the narrative focus on

the British marriage market abroad inevitably draw a comparison between matrimony

and prostitution and between the economic and empowering potentials they each may or

may not offer. Linny agrees to marry Somers despite her option of returning to England

and to a safe life with Shaker. She believes that staying in India with the man who

blackmails her into marriage, and whom she perceives with combined ‘attraction and

repulsion’ as ‘intriguing, but discomfiting’ (LB, 237), will help her realise her true

potential and the ‘true life’ (LB, 188) outside of prostitution to which she feels
 183

biologically destined: ‘I knew it was my blood that made me different [from the other

prostitutes on Paradise Street]. And there was something else. I knew I wouldn’t be

staying in this life: there was [...] something bigger for me’ (LB, 70). Thus implicitly

rendering her fellow sex workers unworthy of ‘something bigger’, Linny soon realises

that life as a ‘respectable’ woman is not so very different from life as a streetwalker, for

illness and physical deterioration ensue from both her initial profession and her marital

union with Somers. After having been rescued from the streets by Shaker at the age of

seventeen, Linny considers her reflection with shock: ‘I didn’t know the hollow-eyed

woman in the mirror. She bore a resemblance to the ruin I had called Mother. Where

was Linny, little Linny Gow, the child with the clear eyes and hair like the ripest of

summer’s pears?’ (LB, 127). Later, after the birth of her son David, Linny fears that her

son’s illegitimacy may be exposed, an anxiety which – together with her husband’s

violence – leads her into opium addiction and, consequently, mental and physical

deterioration. However, the traditional association of the prostitute with moral and

physical disease is destabilised. Linny’s last customer in her time with Ram Munt is a

man who, in the last stages of syphilis, attempts to revenge himself by killing prostitutes

and collecting their hair. The association between contagion and prostitution is

established, but disease and danger are firmly associated with the sociopathic punter

rather than the sex worker (LB, 52).

Linny’s new life also requires the same, if not more, acting skills of her than her

work as a Liverpool prostitute. Already as a young teenager, Linny imitates the people

and the talk around her both to further her own social advancement and to entertain her

clients. When her regular Thursday appointment, Uncle Horace, takes her out for their

customary meal, Linny attempts to learn from the polite society around her: ‘I

memorized their [the ladies’] language and articulation, which, I now knew, was finer

than my mother’s had been. It was easy, a game to play’ (LB, 24).When she finally
 184

comes to utilise this acquired skill first during her time with Shaker and later in India,

Linny admits to feeling ‘less genuine’ (LB, 155), ‘aware that I had to live up to my

created background’ (LB, 156), a task which she comes to describe as a ‘charade’ (LB,

157). Her marriage to Somers requires her to wear a ‘tight mask’ (LB, 293) reminiscent

of the ‘thick layer of powder and rouge’ (LB, 127) behind which she used to hide her

face on Paradise Street. ‘Feigning interest in the men’s stories’ at the numerous parties

in India is, therefore, only one version of what Linny calls the ‘tiresome game that I had

played too many times in so many forms’ (LB, 225). The novel makes clear that women

who do not engage in such performances have no hope for survival. Meg, an initially

outspoken and seemingly liberated friend of Linny’s who aspires to be a writer also

eventually succumbs to opium addiction after her marriage. Faith, Linny’s spirited but

naive companion, marries a mixed-race man for love against her father’s will and lives

first on the margins of colonial society before committing suicide in order to spare the

mixed-race child she carries from the fate of its father, who was lowered to the bottom

ranks of the East India Trade Company once his ethnic background had been revealed.

As Kirsten Pullen has argued in her historical approach to sex work’s

occupational, cultural and discursive connections with acting, the concept of

performance can function both as protection and as a means of regaining agency to

contemporary prostitutes. While in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries actresses

were commonly likened to prostitutes, ‘the contemporary prostitutes’ rights movement

has reversed the trope of the actress/whore in order to insist that prostitutes are “like”

actresses’, a strategy, Pullen argues, which enables sex workers to highlight their

identities as workers, profit from the high status attributed to actresses in the twenty-

first century, and utilise the notion of performance as a means of physical and emotional

protection in their work.66 For Linny, however, acting – be it as prostitute or wife –

66
Kirsten Pullen, Actresses and Whores: On Stage and in Society (Cambridge: Cambridge
 185

functions only as a form of survival, as the most basic means of physical protection.

Not unlike the limited power Linny achieves by stealing from her clients as a

young girl, the control she believes she has over Somers when agreeing to his sinister

marriage proposal is little more than imaginary. Somers may not receive his inheritance

and be considered suspicious by society if he does not marry soon, but he does hold a

secure and high position in the East India Trade Company in addition to his already

accumulated wealth. Linny, on the other hand, will have her newly gained reputation

destroyed both in India and in England if she refuses Somers’ proposal. Nevertheless,

she assumes that once he has exposed her as an ex-prostitute she will still be able to

accept Shaker’s marriage proposal and live a happy, quiet life, a somewhat disillusioned

idea considering that Shaker’s existence will also be at risk by the exposure of Linny’s

immoral past. Linny clings to her imagined power in a situation in which, in fact, her

agency is once again limited by the choices available. Describing Somers as less

assertive than usual, she recalls how,

seeing his body’s involuntary reaction – his breathing, his voice, that touch of his
moustache – I felt a small sense of pride, of accomplishment, for I knew then that,
no matter how he tried to pretend that my decision meant little to him, my final
answer had been the one he’d hoped for. [...] While it might be true that he found
a part of me loathsome, as I did in him, there could be no denying that, for all his
bluster, I held some power over him. (LB, 280)

Overall, Linny’s life in India consists of equal illusions and idealisations. Upon her

arrival in the country, she finds that the British have created an ‘English home away

from home’ (LB, 207) where ‘the rigidity of the line between master and servant is more

noticeable’ than in England and race and nationality largely determine social status.

This colonial practice is misplaced and creates an uncanny manifestation of England in

the colony, an unheimlich and distorted version of an English home in which everything

is imitated but nothing homely, in which ‘[m]usic might be played on a piano that

always sounded out-of-tune’ (LB, 226). Linny is disappointed to find her host, Mrs

University Press, 2005), p.174.

 186

Waterton, ‘content to shut out the Indian world and concentrate on the one she knew’

(LB, 220), and is keen to ‘experience [...] the real India’ (LB, 232),67 a notion which

throughout the novel remains unquestioned and hence problematic. For Linny, the ‘real’

India appears to be an amalgamation of orientalist images of a strange and dangerous

country and its people, and at the same time offers an idealised picture them. We are

presented with imagery of India as confusing, diseased and menacing, particularly when

Linny first sets sight on the country upon her arrival in Calcutta:

The dock was smothered with human forms; men in the ragged loincloths that I
knew, from my reading, were called dhotis [...]; beggar children with huge,
beseeching eyes; and mangy yellow dogs. Everywhere brown-skinned men,
women and children sat, stood and wandered about, some eating, some sleeping.
It was a mass of moving, jabbering, stinking humanity. [...] I had never swooned,
thinking women who did so were weak. But now I feared that the immensity of
sights, sounds and smells, the bright heat that encased my body, might squeeze me
senseless. (LB, 203)

The high number of child deaths are, to Linny, the result of the ‘the inexplicable yet

terrible grasp of India’ (LB, 305) and even away from the urban ‘foetid alleys and

torturous lanes, the twisting underbelly of Calcutta’ (LB 227) she finds herself unable to

distinguish the servants of her host’s home and resorts, as if studying animals, to

memorising their physical features: ‘As the majority [...] dressed in simple white dhotis,

shirts and turbans, their feet bare, I found it difficult to distinguish between them.

Within a few days, though, I could recognize faces, height and a distinctive manner of

walking’ (LB, 218).

However, Linny also idealises the country’s inhabitants in sharp contrast to what

she perceives as the general – and apparently inherent – deficiencies of the British.

When she first observes a Pathan, a man from the ‘North West Frontier, way up beyond

Peshawar, on the border with Afghanistan’ (LB, 204), he appears to her not only as

stereotypically united with his horse (and thus with nature), but he has the appearance of

67
This intention and parts of Holeman’s plot clearly adapt E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924),
but in her engagement with colonialism Holeman lacks the multilayered and complex perspective Forster
provides in A Passage and any allusions to Forster remain superficial.
 187

a statue, of an idealistic representation of his people:

The man had long black hair oddly similar to his horse’s mane. His white teeth
shone in his sun-darkened face, and I could even see the ebony glisten of his long
eyes. Suddenly he leaned forward, dropped his head and appeared to speak into
the horse’s ear, which pricked forward. Immediately the creature stopped its
frantic head-tossing and stood as if mesmerized. They looked as if they had been
chiselled from one piece of magnificent stone. (LB, 203)

But while Somers and most of his countrymen agree that the natives of the colony are

inferior and that, because ‘[t]heir own world is so tumultuous, so undisciplined, [...] it’s

a comfort to them to be told what to do, and to know what to expect if they don’t obey’

(LB, 236), Linny is represented as the morally superior Western feminist, both in

relation to the expatriate British and in relation to the Indian people. She identifies with

her hosts’ servants, most notably when Mr. Waterton pays a native by throwing ‘a

number of coins on to the ground’ and Linny remembers how ‘only eighteen months

ago it had been me on my knees in dirty streets, collecting my pay’ (LB, 206). She

learns Hindi, communicates with the locals and forms a relationship with her ayah; in a

letter to Shaker, she complains that ‘[a]lthough I have been treated admirably by every

brown person I have met, the English harbour underlying hostility towards the Indians.

Towards them, Shaker – and it is their own land. The East India Company [...] is like a

stern master, forcing the people of India in directions they cannot want to go’ (LB, 228).

Linny’s assessment that the natives ‘cannot want’ this relationship with the colonists

implies that she is capable of determining what they should want, and it is this

assumption of superiority toward the Indian people which characterises her relationship

to them.

Even though her relationship with Malti, her ayah, appears to be an amicable one

and is defined by Linny’s good intentions, it does appear that their connection serves

more to illustrate Linny’s superior morality and generous acknowledgement of equality

than to create a bond between the two women. Repeatedly, Linny congratulates herself

when describing her relationship to Malti. Disinterested in activities such as shopping,

 188

she proudly writes the following:

I give Malti, my confidante, who seems to adore me for no other reason than that
she has been given the task of caring for me, a shopping list, a large basket and
chit. She rides off to the Hogg market and collects what is needed for the next few
meals, or goes to Taylor’s Emporium, with its wide clean aisles of gleaming
silverware, sparkling china, crystal, jewellery and all manner of things English.
She feels important and happy doing this, and tells me she is the envy of her
counterparts, whose memsahibs would never entrust them with such decisions.
(LB, 304)

The British goods and the responsibility bestowed upon Malti must naturally be

appreciated by her. Linny forgets how, when Shaker first informed her of the position

he secured for her, she challenged his assumption that this was what an ex-prostitute

would be happy about: ‘Did you think to ask me if I would like a job in a library?’ (LB,

136).

The balance between feminist critique and an exoticised idealisation of India’s

people remains an uneven one throughout the narrative. A lasting and loving

relationship between a man and woman cannot exist within a Western cultural

framework and the institution of marriage, or so it seems when Linny discovers love

and sexual pleasure for the first time with Daoud, a Pathan, who shortly after their affair

must continue his travels. Yet, while British customs are critiqued throughout the novel,

Holeman offers only an idealised and almost utopian image of a Kashmiri settlement of

women with whom Linny lives for a short amount of time. The heroine embraces these

women’s lifestyle and their traditions, but once again the idyll of sisterhood is disrupted

when the husbands return to the settlement for a brief period of time and render their

wives submissive and less sociable. The critique, here, is neither overt nor convincing,

and Holeman leaves intact the exotic image of the female community in which

everything is ‘so simple’ (LB, 388); where Linny, for the first time, does not have to be

an actress and must literally unmask herself by unclothing in front of the other women.

‘Here, in Kashmir, I could be who I was,’ she claims, adding the romantic notion that

‘[she felt herself] opening, unlocking, the rusty hinges giving away with a sound like
 189

the wings of birds as they startle into flight’ (LB, 402).

It is not surprising, then, that no men exist in Holeman’s happy ending, at least not

in the conventional or uncompromised sense. Somers dies not of the consequences of

malaria but of the poison which Linny carefully and secretly feeds him when his illness

takes a turn for the worse. His physician, who had been ordered to confine Linny to a

madhouse and take her son away from her, is easily persuaded otherwise by a

substantial amount of money, allowing Linny to return to England. There she lives with

her son, as the neighbour of Shaker and his wife. In contrast to the threatening British

physician in India, Shaker is feminised both by his disabling tremble and by his new

profession as a practitioner of homeopathy.

Holeman’s novel does explore the oppression and violence of prostitution as a

patriarchal practice which arises from and reinforces women’s inferior status within

society. The liberatory potentials of the trade remain relative at best, and the only

solution the novel offers is a society divided by sex, an idealistic and unrealistic image

of an all-female community which is able to keep at bay and/or exercise control of the

threat of male power. In her attempt to criticise colonial practices, Holeman reverts to

illustrations which reinstate Western feminism’s assumed moral superiority. Here, we

have a ‘disquieting [...] incarnation of standpoint theory’68 which is also present in some

of the author’s other work: in The Moonlit Cage, the veiled Eastern heroine must be

shown her ‘true’ self by being unveiled and finding her supposedly liberated identity in

an ‘advanced’ Western world. In The Linnet Bird Holeman utilises the neo-Victorian

prostitute in order to advocate and reinforce her own feminist viewpoint on sex work

rather than to explore and represent women’s varied experience of prostitution and the

potentials it may or may not offer them. By extension, the novel’s protagonist, then,

functions as the voice of the morally superior Western feminist who acts on behalf of an

68
Burstein, ‘The Prostitute’s Progress’.
 190

Eastern female subject without taking into consideration that subject’s right to define

and articulate her own needs. Through her heroine, Holeman liberates the victimised

(and exceptional rather than common) prostitute from her cruel profession and not only

alleviates her own superior status as a writer but also reaffirms the superiority of

Western feminist thought and practice by ensuring that ‘the subaltern cannot speak’ for

itself and is rendered ‘helpless’ without its Western heroines. While thus critiquing the

sex trade and its harmful effect on women, Holeman ‘pimps’ not the prostitute, but the

colonies for their sexsational appeal.

Selling Sugar: the sexual and textual economies of The Crimson Petal and the White

In Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White, sex – and, for that matter, almost

everything and everyone in the novel – functions primarily as a commodity which can

be exchanged or exploited for material profit and/or personal benefit, not least in the

form of his skilled prostitute protagonist, Sugar. Both historically and geographically

removed from Holeman’s setting, the novel’s narrative unfolds in 1870s London against

the backdrop of a rising capitalist consumer culture drawn to the enticing facades of

new department stores and the alluring messages of large-scale advertising campaigns,

Faber’s anti-heroine, an aspiring author, ascends from her mother’s brothel among the

poverty of St. Giles to becoming, first, the mistress of her infatuated client William

Rackham and, later, the governess of Rackham’s daughter Sophie (a position in which

we discover the obligatory ‘heart of gold’ Burnstein ascribes to neo-Victorian

prostitutes).

But while the novel’s historical setting may well illustrate a certain ‘delight in the

new consumer culture of the 1870s’, it does also serve a much more elaborate and

indeed more critical and contemporary purpose than to demonstrate unquestioningly a

 191

‘more positive sense of the possibilities of the market’,69 particularly regarding the sex

trade and the positions Faber’s fittingly named fictional product – Sugar – and her

fellow prostitutes occupy in it. In light of not only the persistence and extraordinary

expansion and diversification of the sexual marketplace since the nineteenth century but

considering, moreover, the disappointingly persevering issues surrounding prostitution

and women’s (sexual) exploitation outlined in the introduction to this chapter, The

Crimson Petal’s status as both a comment on and product of the sexual politics and

economies of the contemporary literary and feminist landscape is undeniable.

Framing his narrative by likening the relationship between writer and reader to

that of prostitute and punter, Faber provides a fictional plethora of sexual transactions

and abuses which illustrate a variety of issues pertinent in not only historical but also

contemporary feminist debates on prostitution. However, returning to and rewriting the

time in history in which today’s vast sex trade and the laws surrounding it originate,

Faber’s novel exemplifies the objectification of female sexuality in the sex trade and in

the literary market place as much as it explores the oppressive as well as liberatory

potentials of prostitution. At the same time as The Crimson Petal’s historical narrative

successfully illustrates women’s complex positions within the twenty-first century sex

trade, its author also renders himself the pimp and his readers the punters of his fictional

commodity, his prostitute protagonist.

Faber furnishes each of his prostitute characters with a personal history

illustrating their respective entries into the sex trade and reflecting both past and present

routes into prostitution which seemingly vary in the degrees of female agency they

involve, but which ultimately highlight that the concept of choice remains, as for

Holeman’s Linny, a highly limited and relative one. Taking his inspiration mainly from

69
Chris Louttit, ‘The Novelistic Afterlife of Henry Mayhew’, Philological Quarterly, 85 (2006),
pp.315-341 (p.329).
 192

Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1861) and,70 in the following

instance, also from W.T. Stead’s infamous ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’

(1885),71 Faber presents us with Alice and Claire, two girls who upon their arrival in

London fall prey to the ploys of ‘white slavery’, today better known as human

trafficking:

They are brothel girls in the truest and lowest sense: that is, they arrived in
London as innocents and were lured into their fallen state by a madam who,
resorting to old stratagem, met them at the railway stations and offered them a
night’s lodgings in the fearsome new metropolis, then robbed them of their money
and clothing. Ruined and helpless, they were then installed in the house, along
with several other girls similarly duped or else bought from parents or
guardians.72

While Alice and Claire’s forced entry into the trade illustrates a route into prostitution

which became in the later decades of the nineteenth century a popular trope, they also

embody the contemporary issues of global trafficking in women and children and the

now much more frequent occurrence of a woman or girl being ‘abducted against her

will [...] and [...] forced into prostitution’.73 For Claire and Alice the sex trade is not a

choice, and their participation in it is, instead, the result of crime, of trafficking.

A somewhat different image emerges when we encounter Caroline, a friend and

former neighbour of Sugar’s in St. Giles. Caroline, originally a ‘respectable Yorkshire

wife’ (CP, 25), came to London after her husband’s death and worked as a seamstress

until her young son fell ill, requiring treatment for which his mother’s meagre wages

could not pay. Having sought out a doctor for her dying child, Caroline finds the

70
For an analysis of instances in which Faber draws on Mayhew, see: Louttit, ‘The Novelistic
Afterlife of Henry Mayhew’, pp.328-333.
71
Stead’s ‘Maiden Tribute’ appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette in July 1885 and provided a detailed
account of child trafficking in London, based on Stead’s undercover investigation, in which he himself
purchased a child-prostitute in order to prove – after Josephine Butler’s uncovering of child trafficking in
Belgium in the 1870s – that such transactions were possible and, indeed, not at all uncommon in
England’s metropolitan underworld. Stead’s methods were, of course, morally questionable, with the
journalist and his readers ‘hovering self-righteously about unsavoury places to which they were
irresistibly drawn’ (Wilson, The Victorians, p.475), an uncomfortable paradox to which I shall return at a
later stage in relation to Faber.
72
Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White (London: Canongate, 2002), p.70. Hereafter this
text is referred to as CP after quotations in the text.
73
Sarah Bromberg, ‘Feminist Issues in Prostitution’, Feminist Issues (1997), Accessed: 10 May
2010, http://www.feministissues.com.
 193

physician unwilling to help unless she provides him with payment in an alternative,

sexual form. She sells her body for her child’s medical care, but the boy dies

nevertheless, leaving the young woman, in her view, with no reason to maintain

respectable work. For Caroline, prostitution is from then on the more favourable option

in comparison to the badly paid and physically challenging hours spent in a factory.

Echoing Linny’s argument in her debate over the profession with Shaker’s mother,

Caroline tells Henry, William Rackham’s religious brother who attempts to carry out

rescue work: ‘I’ve ‘ad work in a factory, and I know that to earn two shillings [...] I

should ‘ave to work many long hours, breakin’ my back in stink and danger, with never

a minute to rest, and ‘ardly no sleep’ (CP, 325). Caroline’s choice to enter and remain in

the sex trade is a limited one at best, with prostitution being first the only possible

means to care for her child and, later, a physically less strenuous and financially more

rewarding option than the work and pay provided by the unequal employment

opportunities of a market which even today, despite equality laws, remains inhospitable

to the needs of women with children (single or in partnerships).74

Resembling much-quoted contemporary statistics on the amount of prostitutes

who were raised in care homes or foster families,75 experienced (sexual) abuse and used

drugs in childhood, at the core of Sugar’s entry into prostitution – as with Holeman’s

Linny – lies her dysfunctional family, more specifically the absence of a maternal

figure. Her mother, the brothel keeper Mrs Castaway, forces her into the trade at the age

of thirteen; six years later, Sugar still works in the establishment named after and owned

by Mrs Castaway, and she painfully recalls the night on which her mother first sold her

to a male client:

Six years have passed since the howling night Mrs Castaway (then in much
74
See, for example: Mike Brewer and Gillian Paull, ‘Newborns and New Schools: Critical Times in
Women’s Employment’, Research Report No.308 (2006), Department for Work and Pensions, Accessed:
20 March 2011, http://research.dwp.gov.uk/asd/asd5/rrs-index.asp.
75
See: O’Neill, Prostitution and Feminism, pp.78-84 and pp.95-120; and Ariel Levy, Female
Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (London: Pocket Books, 2006), pp.180-181.
 194

shabbier garb in the candle-flickering gloom of the old house) tiptoed up to

Sugar’s bed and told her she needn’t shiver anymore: a kind gentleman had come
to keep her warm. Ever since then, there has been something of the nightmare
about Mrs Castaway, and her humanity has grown obscure. Sugar strains to recall
a more nourishing, a historical figure called simply ‘Mother’ who tucked her in at
night and never mentioned where money came from. (CP, 283)

Although Mrs Castaway is very much present in her daughter’s life, and unlike Linny’s

still alive, from this night on her role as a loving guardian becomes a matter of the past

as she turns into a ‘historical figure’ by becoming Sugar’s pimp. The brothel keeper

exploits the young girl not simply for her own and her daughter’s survival but sells her

daughter’s body to better her own station in life, to replace her old, ‘shabbier garbs’.

Sugar is reminded by her mother that ‘if we are to have a happy and harmonious house

here, I can’t treat you any differently from my other girls’ (CP, 285), marking the

beginning of their employer-employee relationship and the termination of their mother-

daughter bond. The roles of Mrs Castaway and the nameless abductress of Alice and

Claire thus hint, similar to Holeman’s novel, at women’s complicity in the active

organisation and maintenance of the sex trade and, consequently, at first glance appear

to subvert the assumption that, ‘superficially, prostitution seemed to operate as an arena

of male supremacy, where women were bartered and sold as commodities’.76

But a closer look at Mrs Castaway reveals glimpses of even this cold-hearted and

unlikeable character’s exploitation at male hands. Indeed, the brothel keeper’s selfish

avarice stems not purely from a desire for money but also from malice towards her

young daughter’s sexual and moral innocence. Sugar, at the age of fifteen, asks her

mother why she must still perform the unspeakable acts despite her mother and her

being, in Mrs Castaway’s words, financially ‘quite comfortable’ (CP, 800); in response,

the brothel keeper makes it explicit that her selling of Sugar’s body functions as a

means of passing on the oppression and degradation she herself has suffered at male

hands through prostitution, an act reminiscent of Ram Munt’s need to re-establish a

76
Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, p.31.
 195

sense of power by prostituting Linny after he experienced sexual abuse during his time

as a sailor. Suggesting a continuous and seemingly inescapable cycle of women’s sexual

exploitation and oppression, she asks her young charge, ‘Why should my downfall be

your rise? Why should I burn in Hell while you flap around Heaven?’ (CP, 801). This

catholic fear of sin and guilt also manifests itself in Mrs Castaway’s obsession with

images of Mary Magdalene, which she procures from around the world and which

dominate the brothel’s parlour, an ironic hint, perhaps, at the Magdalene Asylums for

fallen women first established during the nineteenth century,77 but an indication also of

her desire to be redeemed and forgiven like the repentant biblical adulteress and

prostitute. The novel’s illustrations imply, then, that men are chiefly responsible for the

inception of the sex trade, and that its maintenance is guaranteed not only by male

consumer demands but also by women’s internalisation of and complicity in each

other’s exploitation.

The novel hence acknowledges the diverse reasons for women’s routes into the

sex trade, from those who are victims of trafficking to those whose economic status

allows for few or no other options, and those who have experienced child (sexual)

abuse. Just as women’s ‘entry into prostitution appears to have been circumstantial

rather than pre-mediated’ in the nineteenth century,78 the narrative’s representations also

reflect the circumstances prevalent in today’s sex industry, in which, as Sarah Bromberg

points out, one must ‘take into account the diversity of reasons of why people enter the

profession’.79 While the circumstances of Faber’s sex workers’ routes in prostitution are

hence variable, it appears that they all, nevertheless, are predicated upon a ‘fundamental

relation of domination and subordination’ between men and women.80

77
‘Magdalen Homes’, Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work, Vol.2, ed. Melissa Hope Ditmore
(Santa Barbara: Greenwood Publishing, 2006), pp.268-272.
78
Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, p.14.
79
Bromberg, ‘Feminist Issues in Prostitution’.
80
Kathy Miriam, ‘Stopping the Traffic in Women: Power, Agency and Abolition in Feminist
Debates Over Sex-Trafficking’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 36:1 (2005), pp.1-17 (p.4).
 196

The Crimson Petal offers a more optimistic vision of sex work’s emancipatory

potentials in its representations of Sugar’s career within the trade. While Alice and

Claire, after their abduction, never obtain any financial independence and are forced to

sell their bodies ‘in return for snug new clothes and two meals a day [...] guarded at the

back-stair by a spoony-man and at the front by the madam, unable even to guess how

much or little they are hired for’ (CP, 70), Sugar’s situation is in many respects rather

different and more complex in that it offers material profit as well as a certain degree of

independence. As her name indicates, she is first and foremost her mother’s commodity,

a good to be sold. This becomes perhaps most explicit when William Rackham suggests

to purchase Sugar from Mrs Castaway for his sole use. During the negotiations between

William and Sugar’s mother, it is clear that for the pub in which Sugar solicits clients

she is ‘an attraction – a draw-card’ (CP, 166), while to Mrs Castaway she is ‘one third

of what we’re reputed to offer’ (CP, 164) and, if sold to William, a much demanded

good which becomes ‘perpetually unavailable’ (CP, 164).

Nevertheless, Sugar has certain advantages over prostitutes like Alice and Claire,

and her old friend Caroline. Early on in the narrative we are made aware that she ‘stood

out [...] an aloof and serious child amongst a hubbub of crude laughter and conviviality’

(CP, 34), and that, like Linny, she ‘is able to read and write [and ...] actually enjoys it’

(CP, 34). Sugar’s literacy, wit, ‘freakish memory’ (CP, 36) and, above all, her

willingness to ‘submit to anything [....] with a smile of child-like innocence’ (CP, 35)

allow her to choose her clients from among the middle and upper classes, that is, from

among those men who are able to pay whichever price she – rather than her mother –

decides to fix for her services. Aware of her assets, Sugar is one of the many Victorian

prostitutes who, according to Walkowitz, ‘negotiated their own prices and [...] were as

likely to exploit their clients as to suffer humiliation at male hands’,81 making her also,

81
Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, p.31.
 197

in contemporary terms, a sex worker who ‘recognises[s] an opportunity to make an

extraordinarily high income’.82 Considering that she is forced into prostitution by her

mother, Sugar is thus neither ‘free of male domination’ nor ‘simply [one of the] passive

victims of male sexual abuse’.83

That Faber’s heroine exploits men as much as they take advantage of her is

evident in the strategies she employs in her treatment of William Rackham. Able to

ascertain the needs of her new client from first laying eyes on him, she is entirely aware

of the kind of services she must provide in return for his payment and to secure him as a

regular and well-paying customer. Hence, during their first appointment, her

observation that William ‘is an infant searching for a warm bed to sleep in’ (CP, 174) is

not a sentimentality, but a calculated assessment which leads her to the conclusion that

‘if she will but smooth his greasy golden curls off his sweaty brow, he’ll give her

anything she asks for in return’ (CP, 174). Sugar acts as a caring mother figure as soon

as she leads him away from the pub and towards Mrs Castaway’s, ‘gliding two steps

ahead of him, her hand trailing behind almost maternally, the gloved fingers wiggling in

empty air as if expecting him to seize hold like a child’ (CP, 105). When William, too

drunk and tired to perform any sexual acts, wakes up in her room the next morning only

to discover he has stayed the night and urinated in his sleep, Sugar, calling him a ‘poor

baby’ (CP, 115), continues her performance and washes her customer with the ease and

seemingly unconditional love of a mother who cleans her infant: ‘The sharp stink of

stewed piss wafts up, inches from Sugar’s nose, but she doesn’t flinch. For all the effect

the stench has on her unblinking gaze, her serene brow, her secret half smile, it might as

well be perfume’ (CP, 115). Eventually, Sugar becomes a living Oedipal fantasy when,

having cleaned up her charge, she only sends William on his way after having satisfied

him orally and, upon his initiative, via intercourse. Rackham happily returns again and

82
Bromberg, ‘Feminist Issues in Prostitution’.
83
Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, p.31.
 198

again for her services, a sign that Sugar’s performance has skilfully disguised how

‘she’d happily have done without getting fucked in the end’, despite having made ‘as

much money as she would have had from three individual men’ (CP, 124).

Sugar’s manipulation of William reaches one of its many peaks when, shortly

after he has secured her for his sole use, she persuades him to take her away from the

filthy parts of the city by slyly enquiring, during one of their meetings at the brothel:

‘And do you have anything to purify the drinking water? You don’t want to see me

carried off by cholera!’ Bull’s-eye, she thinks, as a shudder passes through him’ (CP,

248). Indeed, this evocation of the fears of pollution and contagion has the intended

effect and William installs her in a flat in Marylebone, a move which represents

precisely what Sugar has aimed at and which, hence, must be received in a manner as

calculated as the method through which it has been achieved:

‘It’s as if all my birthdays have come at once.’ ‘Dear Heaven!’ Rackham declares.
‘I don’t even know when your birthday is!’ Sugar smiles as she selects, from the
jumble of contending responses in her head, the perfect sentence to send him on
his way, les mots justes for the closure of this transaction. ‘This will be my
birthday from now on,’ she says. (CP, 269)

Undoubtedly, William’s renting of her new rooms is, here, not perceived as a romantic

gesture, but as a transaction toward which Sugar has worked and to which she has

actively contributed. Through her actions, and despite her traumatic childhood, Faber

thus forces us to consider an ‘economist’ approach towards prostitution, that is, to view

the sex worker as ‘an agent who strategically and instrumentally uses property in her

person (e.g. her sexuality) to further her economic self-interest’.84

Even Sugar’s role as a commodity in the exchange between Mrs Castaway and

Rackham appears, at first, more complex than one may expect. Once Mrs Castaway has

drawn up the terms and conditions under which she is willing to sell Sugar to Rackham,

it is up to her daughter to accept or decline his offer. Considering her limited options,

84
Miriam, ‘Stopping the Traffic in Women’, pp.5-6.
 199

Sugar decides that as long as William provides her with the necessary cash, ‘If he wants

her name on a contract, well, why not?’ (CP, 172). For her punter, the purpose of his

purchase is to ‘have Sugar entirely to himself’ (CP, 127), that is, to make her the

property of one man rather than many. The similarities between this arrangement and

the institution of marriage are by no means subtle and, as in Holeman’s novel,

performance is key to both the role of wife and prostitute. If, as Angela Carter suggested

in The Sadeian Woman (1979), ‘marriage is legalised prostitution,’ and if, consequently,

‘prostitution is itself a form of group marriage’ then Sugar’s sex work with only one

man seems close to traditional wedlock.85 This similarity becomes most apparent when

William compares the marriage contract drawn up by Lord Unwin, his wife Agnes’

father, with the paperwork he signs for Mrs Castaway: ‘Looking back on it now, the

contract for Agnes’s hand was extraordinarily laissez-faire – much less demanding of

him than this one here’ (CP, 168). On the surface, then, it appears that the prostitute is

economically in a more secure and independent situation than the wife, especially since

‘Lord Unwin showed [...] precious little [parental protectiveness] for Agnes’ (CP, 169)

and made ‘no mention, either, of [...] how Agnes’s style of life was supposed to be

safeguarded’ (CP, 169). Ironically, by formally ensuring that William must pay Sugar

‘whatever makes her happy’ (CP, 168), the malicious Mrs Castaway exercises more

parental care for her daughter than Lord Unwin showed for Agnes when he gave her

away in marriage.

However, Faber does not render the matter as simple as that. Throughout her

position as William’s mistress and as his daughter’s governess, Sugar becomes – in a

somewhat wifely fashion – increasingly anxious and paranoid about how to best ensure

that William remains happy and does not discard her, especially not in favour of his

wife. Agnes is able to spend William’s money however she pleases and perceives this as

85
Angela Carter, [1979] The Sadeian Woman (London: Little Brown Book Group, 2006), p.67.
 200

a payback for the torture he inflicted on her through intercourse and subsequent

pregnancy and childbirth as well as for his financial difficulties and her lack of luxury in

the first years of their marriage. William remains attracted to Agnes and her sexual

innocence and passivity, so much so that he rapes her after her physician, Dr. Curlew,

has drugged her into a deep sleep. Cleaning his sperm from his wife after this act of

violation, it is clear that at home William perceives himself as the (sinister) carer for his

ill wife, while in Sugar’s company he is the one to be cared for. That both women are

dispensable becomes evident toward the novel’s open ending. William fires Sugar in the

belief that she carries his child and arranges to have Agnes incarcerated in a lunatic

asylum. Nevertheless, it is Sugar, used to a greater degree of independence than Agnes,

who is able to extricate herself and William’s daughter from the situation, while Agnes

depends on Sugar’s welfare and, we can only speculate, dies.

It is these tensions between the novel’s illustrations of prostitution as a form of

exploitation and commodification on the one hand and its liberal depictions of sex work

as a valid and even empowering occupation on the other which enable Faber to

interrogate contemporary feminist issues in prostitution. However, the narrative

development and resolution of these ambiguities exemplify both Faber’s perceived need

to paint a diverse picture of the sex trade as well as his own literary exploitations of the

image of the female sex worker as an emancipated agent. Throughout the novel, the

narrator’s liberal view of the prostitute protagonist and her profession runs counter to

Sugar’s own perceptions, which are largely revealed by snippets of her novel-in-

progress, a fictional, semi-pornographic autobiography. Contrary to the notion that

Sugar is the fictional embodiment of Carter’s vision of a woman who has learned to

‘[regard] her sexual activity as her capital [...] as though, in fact, the opening of it

allowed her access to a capital sum which had been frozen by virginity’,86 in her own

86
Carter, The Sadian Woman, p.67.
 201

narrative empowerment is not attained through sexual transactions but, rather, through

the brutal slaughtering of the men who demand her services. Addressing men with the

words, ‘Vile man, eternal Adam, I indict you’ (CP, 412), Sugar sets out to ‘tell the truth

about prostitution’ (CP, 334) through her graphic, fictional revenge plot and lets her

heroine pessimistically explain that ‘there is no hope for children in this world [...] if

male, they will become filthy swine like you. If female, they will be defiled by filthy

swine like you’ (CP, 769). Her novel, Sugar illustrates, will be ‘a tale that fearlessly

points the finger at those who are to blame’ (CP, 334).

However, Sugar’s novel and her writing of it function as narrative tools which

allows Faber to extinguish both his heroine’s as well as his own radical feminist voice

with that of the more liberal narrator. In a piece on the writing of The Crimson Petal,

Faber confesses that when he first started drafting the novel he was ‘a radical feminist

driven by many of the same things as Sugar, my prostitute heroine’.87 Explaining how

he intended to have Sugar’s life come a cruel end (crushed by the wheels of a cab) in

order to emphasise her inexistent prospects of a life outside of prostitution, he goes on

to admit that the novel, in this pessimistic first draft, ‘nagged at my conscience from its

drawer’.88 Faber’s conscience and writing processes hence become reflected in Sugar’s

conception of and attitude toward her novel as radical feminist anger subsides and is

replaced by the optimistic realisation that her situation has, at least materially, changed

for the better since her early days in St. Giles.

Attempting to complete her novel not from the grim room in which her mother

first forced her into prostitution, but from the ‘her sunlit study in Priory Close’ (CP,

334), Sugar begins to perceive it as a pressure rather than an encouragement that ‘all the

fallen women of the world are relying on her to tell the truth’ (CP, 334) because this

87
Michel Faber, ‘Victorian e-values’, Guardian (1 June 2002), Accessed: 2 February 2010,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/jun/01/fiction1.
88
Ibid.
 202

‘truth’, for her, is no longer reality. She admits that her writing somehow fails to

illustrate ‘the story of her own life’ (CP, 228) because it represents only its darkest

period, ‘her early life in Church Lane’ (CP, 228). That Sugar deliberately omits any

positive experiences becomes clear when she thinks about the content of her book:

Is there any good fortune in this story? None! Good fortune, of the William
Rackham kind, would spoil everything. The heroine must see only poverty and
degradation; she must never move from Church Lane to Silver Street, and no man
must ever offer her anything she wants – most especially, rescue into an easier
life. Otherwise this novel, conceived as a cry of unappeasable anger, risks
becoming one of those ‘Reader, I married him’ romances she so detests. (CP, 228-
9)

Sugar refuses to accept that her life has – that whatever limited extent – improved and

forgets that her former friends and fellow sex workers are either dead of disease or, in

the case of Caroline, in arguably worse situations than her. Insisting that ‘her childhood

[was] every bit as hopeless as the childhood of anyone toiling for Rackham

Perfumeries’ (CP, 411), but aware that ‘her lot is better than theirs now’ (CP, 411),

Sugar remains adamant that she is still ‘their voice’ (CP, 411).

When her inability to continue the original plot of her novel finally forces Sugar

to confront and acknowledge the changes which have occurred in her life, she feels that

‘permeating almost every line, souring every remark, tainting every conviction [in her

story], is prejudice and ignorance’ (CP, 412). Sugar’s fiction, rather than ‘telling the

truth about prostitution’, is represented as contributing toward an ‘iconography of

female victimisation’ because it portrays her work as a universal experience of women’s

exploitation as which,89 due to the economically and morally complex issues involved

in prostitution, it cannot function. Sugar’s subsequent exclamation, ‘I’m false! False!

False to the bone!’ (CP, 485), echoes, perhaps, Faber’s own thoughts, although it

remains unclear whether this applies to Sugar being crushed by a cartwheel instead of

eventually escaping into a future unknown to the reader, or his decision to overwrite his

89
Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian
London (London: Virago, 1992), p.245.
 203

own and his heroine’s radical outcry against women’s sexual exploitation.

Optimistically speaking, these narrative developments perhaps signal a critique of

feminist theories which victimise sex workers regardless of the experiences and lived

realities of women involved in the trade. If, as O’Neill suggests, feminists must create

knowledge ‘for’ and research ‘with’ rather than ‘on’ the sex industry and those involved

in it, then Sugar’s question about the actual effects and benefits of her textual, violent

revenge is an apt one: ‘All these straw men meeting grisly ends: what flesh-and-blood

woman is helped by it?’ (CP, 412).

But while Faber’s illustrations of female sex work on one level clearly reflect the

diversity and complexity of the issues which pertain to contemporary feminist thought

on prostitution and on the wider sex industry, on another plane they also exemplify his

literary and economic exploitation of Sugar. If we recall once more clients’ reviews of

Victorian sex worker Jane Fowler in Hints to Men about Town and of Demi on the

website PunterNet: both women’s apparent enjoyment of their work or, rather, their

ability to provide the ‘true girlfriend experience’ is key to their success in the sex trade.

Equally, Sugar’s professional achievements – so More Sprees in London, Faber’s

fictional equivalent to Hint to Men about Town, tells us – depends on her ability to feign

pleasure in her punters’ most unimaginable demands, while it is Alice and Claire’s

incapability to match such enthusiasm which causes William Rackham to leave their

establishment in frustration. It is the literary equivalent of the ‘girlfriend experience’ so

praised among PunterNet contributors which Faber sells us in the form of his prostitute

protagonist. Just as Sugar must appear to delight in her work in order to satisfy her

clients, Faber must provide his readers, eventually, with a strategic and empowered

business woman rather than the unattractive image of a vengeful, angry and exploited

victim.90

90
It is also interesting to note here that Sugar never faces the unattractive prospect of a forceful
 204

The Crimson Petal’s illustrations of the act of writing as an act of prostitution

through its ‘implicit association of contemporary readers with the customers for Sugar’s

sexual favours’ do make its author a fitting twenty-first century counterpart of W.T.

Stead.91 Faber makes clear that his reader becomes a neo-Victorian punter and he a neo-

Victorian pimp the moment we consider purchasing his book, and, with it, his fictional

and sexual product, Sugar: ‘And yet you did not choose me blindly. Certain

expectations were aroused. Let’s not be coy: you were hoping I would satisfy all the

desires you’re too shy to name, or at least who you a good time’ (CP, 3). If Stead, with

his shocking illustrations of Victorian sex trafficking in the Maiden Tribute, ‘professes

to deplore what [his work] describes’ while at the same time ‘offer[ing] the reader the

pornographic thrill to read all about it’,92 then Faber takes his own ambiguous feminist

place in the complex sexual marketplace he sets out to explore, while at the same time

challenging our readerly desires.

Conclusion

Both Holeman and Faber remind us of the continuing issues in feminist rhetoric and

politics surrounding prostitution. Much like Faulks’ Human Traces (discussed in

Chapter Two) replicates the medical discourses and practices it critiques, Holeman

involuntarily reinforces rather than challenges the continuing perception of Western

feminisms as superior to its third-world counterparts and, unlike Starling’s The Journal

of Dora Damage (analysed in Chapter Three), A Linnet Bird does not criticise or

interrogate the (post)colonial power structures to which it subscribes. If, as Marie-Luise

Kohlke notes, neo-Victorian fiction’s sexualisation of the past constitutes the twenty-

medical examination under the Contagious Diseases Acts, an experience which – albeit to further conflate
the roles of prostitute and wife – is instead displaced onto Agnes, the novel’s madwoman. While this
certainly supports some of Faber’s explorations of the gendered economies of sex within and outside of
prostitution, it nevertheless also makes Sugar a more attractive character.
91
Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First
Century, 1999-2009 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p.13.
92
Wilson, The Victorians, p.475.
 205

first century equivalent of nineteenth-century Orientalism,93 then Holeman’s novel is

not only a prime example of the neo-Victorian sexsation in its exoticisation of the past

but it is also a replica of Orientalism in its exoticisation of the East. Faber also

undoubtedly (but unashamedly) contributes to and profits from neo-Victorian fiction’s

sexsational appeal. The Crimson Petal highlights the ambiguities and problematics

which lie at the heart of contemporary feminist approaches toward prostitution, and,

much like third-wave feminists, it acknowledges and critically explores its own

contribution to the material culture which houses these complex exploitative economies.

Yet, what becomes clear despite the different levels of literary sophistication evident in

these two neo-Victorian novels is that at the heart of the genre’s repeated returns to the

figure of the (neo-) Victorian prostitute lies more than simply the desire to pimp her for

her commercial appeal. Rather, neo-Victorian fiction’s representations of the sex trade

illustrate its on-going relevance as a feminist issue and, therefore, the continuing need to

interrogate the sexual economies and politics which shape women’s entries into and

experiences in prostitution, be they liberatory or oppressive, profitable or exploitative.

93
Marie-Luise Kohlke, ‘The Neo-Victorian Sexsation: Literary Excursions into the Nineteenth-
Century Erotic’, Probing the Problematics: Sex and Sexuality, ed. by Marie-Luise Kohlke and Luisa Orza
(Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2008), pp.345-356.
 206

CHAPTER FIVE
Writing women’s lives: neo-Victorian fiction as feminist biography

The previous parts of this thesis have explored the complexities of and relationships

between matrilineal narratives, sex/uality and gender as aspects of female identities and

their constructions. This final themed chapter will take a step back and widen its

analytical perspective in order to consider the textual constellations in which these

interrelated components are arranged to form and illustrate women’s lives in neo-

Victorian biographical fiction. By tracing the gendered developments and problematics

of life writing and analysing the ways in which the literary recoveries of Catherine

Dickens (1815-1879) and painter Gwen John (1876-1939) in particular negotiate the

representations of various, shifting and often contradictory aspects of female identities, I

investigate the ways in which neo-Victorian fiction can function as feminist biography,

that is, as biography which utilises as well as critically engages with the potentials and

challenges that postmodernist and third-wave theories surrounding history, gender and

identity pose to the genre of life writing and its practices. Neo-Victorian biographical

fiction, I argue, can serve not only as a feminist means of undermining traditional

perceptions of what constitutes biography, identity, and a person’s life but also as a

mode of questioning our definitions and constructions of historical periods and their

societies and cultures.

Gender and biography: constructing the female subject

Aligned with the realist narratives prominent during much of the nineteenth century,

Victorian biography focused predominantly on communicating a chronologically

arranged and carefully selected collection of factual and formal particulars concerning

its subjects’ lives. According to Mary Evans, the ‘paucity of the information provided
 207

was matched only by the limited number of works published within the genre’.94 The

range of figures Victorian biographers deemed worthy of attention was equally

restricted, focused as it was, on white, dead, middle or upper-class men whose lives

were portrayed in line with what social norms judged as acceptable. While accounts

written by their widows have since been classified as ‘hagiographies: written lives

stripped of the unattractive and unacceptable behaviours and characteristics of their

famous dead husbands’,95 male authors have also been guilty of the glorification of their

subjects through the omission of certain details from their publications. One of the most

famous examples, here, is perhaps John Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens, the first

Dickens biography, begun when he was still alive and published only two years after his

death in 1870. Dickens’ marriage to and infamously public separation from Catherine

Hogarth – to whose own biographies I shall turn shortly – were intentionally

marginalized by Forster, who, as Elisabeth Glitter points out, ‘positioned himself as the

ultra-protective gatekeeper of Dickens’s reputation’,96 a difficult stance to maintain

considering he was both a biographer who had to maintain a certain level of integrity

and Dickens’ close friend.97 Like Forster’s work, Victorian biographies more generally

focused on the construction and reinforcement of acceptable, coherent, public identities.

During the first half of the twentieth century, however, modernism began to

challenge established biographical practices. Lytton Strachey’s famous portrayals of

Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Thomas Arnold and General Gordon in

Eminent Victorians (1918) not only defied the Victorian maintenance and celebration of

respectable public lives but functioned, in David Harvey’s words, as their ‘creative

94
Mary Evans, Missing Persons: The Impossibility of Auto/Biography (London: Routledge, 1999),
p.17.
95
Liz Stanley, The Auto/Biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/Biography
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), p.181.
96
Elisabeth G. Gitter, ‘The Rhetoric of Reticence in John Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens’.
Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction, 25 (1996), pp.127-139 (pp.127-130).
97
Ibid.
 208

destruction’.98 In his use of psychoanalytic theory as a means of uncovering so far

untouched layers of a person’s identity, Strachey possessed ‘a supremely effective

weapon with which to attempt to reveal the reality behind public facades’,99 an aim

which subverted Victorian biographical practices and began what would throughout the

century become a popular and ever increasing readerly desire for revelatory life writing.

In the 1920s and 30s, modernist writers of fiction equally experimented with

(auto)biographical subjects, representing human experience as inherently subjective and

fragmentary.100 Among several other prominent authors, writers such as Gertrude Stein

questioned how we experience life and what exactly constitutes a person’s biography.

Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) is not what its title proclaims – at

least not in the conventional sense. Rather, the novel is narrated by a fictionalised Alice

B. Toklas (Stein’s real-life partner) and, as readers, we experience, from Alice’s view,

her circle of friends, her role within that circle and the various relationships between the

persons it contains. Focusing partly on famous male artists such as Henry Matisse, Stein

also includes traditionally marginalised characters in her narrative, such as her

housemaid Helene. Out of these numerous illustrations, a textual portrait of Alice B.

Toklas emerges, comprised of various smaller, interlinked pieces.101 With narrative

strategies and techniques such Stein’s, literary modernism thus pre-empted questions

and issues which came to preoccupy postmodernist and feminist theories, as well as

feminist biographers, in the second half of the century: subjectivity and the nature of

time, history and identity.

The emergence of postmodernism in the 1960s and 1970s saw a continuation and

further complication of the concepts which modernists had begun to interrogate and

98
David Harvey, The Condition of Post-Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p.19.
99
Ibid.
100
Stanley, The Auto/Biographical I, p.17.
101
For critical discussions of Stein’s writing as a form of literary cubism see: Marianne DeKoven,
‘Gertrude Stein and Modern Painting: Beyond Literary Cubism’, Contemporary Literature, 22:1 (1981),
pp.81-95; and Marilyn Gaddis Rose, ‘Gertrude Stein and the Cubist Narrative’, Modern Fiction Studies,
22 (1976), pp.543-555.
 209

which lie at the very heart of life writing. Critics’ by now famous exposures first of the

socially and culturally conditioned and hence selective nature of the narrative which had

come to bear the title ‘history’ and later of identity as constantly performed, constructed

and shifting meant that biographers could, in theory, no longer be expected (or expect)

to convey a consistent, truthful and complete picture of their subject. The postmodern

destabilisation of categories such as history, truth and the self consequently posed a

substantial challenge to the validity of the life writer’s work and, as Sharon O’Brien

highlights, threatened to problematize the very existence of life writing as a genre: ‘If

the self is considered decentred, multiple, or unknowable, how can any genre purport to

give us the “presence,” “essence,” or meaning of a self?’102

At the same time as postmodern theorists raised these issues, second-wave

feminists also sought to deconstruct existing concepts of history and identity in order to

create a new, female historical narrative which included and valued women as important

makers of and contributors to history, continuing the work Virginia Woolf had so

famously begun with A Room of One’s Own (1929). While on the surface

postmodernism’s desire to challenge grand narratives would suggest an easy alliance

with feminism, the relationship between postmodern and feminist theory has been

fruitful as well as problematic and as such has fundamentally shaped third-wave

feminism. The concerns debated and shared by feminist and postmodernist critics are

most apparent in feminist biography, a genre which was first theorised during the mid-

1970s and which has continued to be a subject of debate among feminist scholars and

writers through to the present day.103

Introductions to previous chapters of this thesis have outlined clearly visible shifts

between the second and third waves in their treatments of certain feminist issues, but
102
Sharon O’Brien, ‘Feminist Theory and Literary Biography’, Contesting the Subject: Essays in the
Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism, ed. by William H. Epstein
(West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1991), pp.123-133 (p.125).
103
For one of the first essays on feminist biography as a genre, see: Peggy Rosenthal, ‘Feminism and
Life in Feminist Biography’, College English, 36:2 (October 1974), pp.180-184.
 210

feminist biography is not marked by such a palpable transition. From its very inception

during the height of the second-wave movement, feminist life writing has engaged with

postmodern theories of history and identity and, through this, addressed issues whose

negotiation had, by the turn of the new millennium, become the very foundation of

third-wave feminism as well as of the theory and practice of feminist biography. For

feminists in the 1960s and 1970s, biographical narratives served a particularly crucial

role in the re-inscription of women into a history from which, traditionally, they had

been excluded. Focusing first almost exclusively on the lives of what they considered

notable feminist figures (such as leading names in the women’s suffrage movement

earlier in the century or well-known women authors), feminist biographers soon also

turned their attentions to ‘the daily lives of anonymous women’, motivated by ‘a strong

concern with the specificity of the experiences of women as marginalised subjects of

historical discourse’.104 This reclamation of the past through feminist biography

functioned, then as much as now, as one of the most fundamental purposes of the genre:

to render women subjects rather than objects of history and to challenge the discourses

and perspectives which have hitherto determined their inferior existence in history.

When writing feminist biography, Kathleen Barry argues,

the first demand upon the researcher is to reveal the subject as a subject. [...] In
women’s biography, this most often means retrieving lost subjectivity,
subjectivity lost because it has been historically suppressed and subjectivity lost
because women’s actions have been determined and essentialized to their sexual
and/or reproductive functions.105

However, this undertaking would be rendered futile if feminist biography was to simply

replicate the forms and structures of traditional life writing which for so long had

excluded women and reinforced the very discourses which rendered them historically

insignificant. As early as 1974, Peggy Rosenthal critiqued biographies published by the

104
Susanna Scarparo, Elusive Subjects: Biography as Gendered Metafiction (Leicester: Troubador
Publishing, 2005), p.42.
105
Kathleen Barry, ‘The New Historical Syntheses: Women’s Biography’, Journal of Women’s
History, 1:3 (Winter 1990), pp.75-105 (p.76).
 211

Feminist Press (in this case, biographies written by feminists about Elizabeth Barrett

Browning, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Constance de Markievicz), arguing that their

authors failed in their attempts to ‘sustain a double view, looking both at the particular

life of the subject named in the title and at the lives of women in general’,106 without

losing sight of their subjects or generalising about women of the period in question.

Consequently, while utilising postmodern theory and its proclamation of the subjectivity

of history as a basis for their critique of traditional modes of life writing, feminist

biographers and scholars were soon forced to reflect also upon the problems

postmodernism presents to the genre of feminist biography.

If, as Susanna Scarparo argues, ‘what distinguishes feminist biography [...] is the

focus on the self as gendered’ then the genre’s validity is inevitably endangered by an

alliance between feminism and postmodernism. Although the two share a scepticism

‘about beliefs concerning truth, knowledge, power, the self, and language that are often

taken for granted within and serve as legitimation for contemporary Western culture’,107

feminism relies on the assumption that women constitute an essentially different group

whose interests warrant particular attention because of their sexual difference and

gender. As Sue Thornham points out, feminism ‘and its political claims are made on

behalf of a social group, women, who are seen to have an underlying community of

interest, and of an embodied female subject whose identity and experiences [...] are

necessarily different from those of men’.108 Consequently, even if feminism ‘embrace[s]

differences between women and accept[s] a position of partial knowledge(s)’,109 gender

and sexual difference still remain its defining raison d’être. In this context, then, a

feminist alliance with postmodernism may mean that feminism is facing its own

106
Rosenthal, ‘Feminism and Life in Feminist Biography’, p.180.
107
Jane Flax, ‘Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory’, Signs: Journal of Women
in Culture and Society, 12:4 (1987), pp.621-643 (p.624).
108
Sue Thornham, ‘Postmodernism and Feminism’, The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, 2nd
edition, ed. by Stuart Sim (London: Routledge, 2005), pp.24-34 (p.27).
109
Ibid., p.26.
 212

invalidity and must acknowledge its privileging of women as a ‘metanarrative of

emancipation’ in demise which itself ‘should be deconstructed and opposed in the name

of difference’.110 Postmodernism’s ‘rejection of all universal theories and ideas’ is thus

a stance which both validates and annihilates any form of feminist theory and practice,

including a feminist rewriting of history and a genre which argues for the need to record

gendered narratives of women’s lives: ‘A postmodernist feminism, in which sexual

difference is no longer seen as a fundamental organizing category, but is replaced by the

concept of multiple and shifting differences threatens to make a feminist politics

impossible’.111

Craig Owens takes this theoretical clash between feminism and postmodernism

one significant step further by arguing that the relative absence of female and feminist

voices in postmodernism suggests the postmodern project ‘may be another masculine

invention to exclude women’.112 Postmodernism may, potentially, have become what it

so fervently sets out to deconstruct and challenge: a grand narrative. Feminist critics

Kathleen Barry and Liz Stanley are equally apprehensive about postmodernist theory

and its impact on feminism, particularly in the context of feminist life writing. Barry

contends it is ‘highly suspicious [...] that the emphasis has been placed on decentering

the subject just at the time when women’s history has made significant gains by

centering on women as the subject of its study’.113 Stanley, equally cautious, points out

the irony intrinsic in theories by critics such as Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes,

whose famous calls for anti-essentialism and the death of the author are very much

associated and indeed rely upon their status as ‘authoritative authors, French

intellectuals’; ‘a rich irony,’ Stanley illustrates, ‘for there is no de-centering of the

110
Thornham, ‘Postmodernism and Feminism’, p.26.
111
Ibid., p.28.
112
Craig Owens, ‘The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism’, The Anti-Aesthetic:
Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. by Hal Forster (Port Townsen: Bay Press, 1986), pp.57-82 (p.70).
113
Barry, ‘The New Historical Syntheses’, p.93.
 213

authorial subject here’.114 These theories, then, serve their creators in that they

automatically invalidate any question of the authors’ identities and the impact these may

have on the very theories which proclaim their metaphorical deaths. Consequently, to

remark that these supposedly dead authors are first-world, ‘white male authorities,

patricians’ and ‘self-styled theorists’ who ‘themselves are apparently not there in their

texts’, and to ‘protest [hence] at exclusion’ inevitably leads to being treated as

‘primitive’ and as ‘a naive clinging to the wreckage of bourgeois humanist referential

essentialism’.115 The death of the author is, then, ‘a very convenient death’ for those

whose authority, and indeed authorship, it helps to maintain. At a time when several

minority movements gathered significant momentum, this ‘suicide’ – in Stanley’s terms

– was ‘no suicide at all. This “suicide” is alive and well and still calling the theoretical

shots’ through its self-proclaimed death. Overall, the postmodernist de-centering of the

subject, Barry suggests, may eventually render ‘the study of women again [...]

ahistorical’,116 by denying women their existence as subjects, rather than objects, of

history.

Considering feminism’s problematic relationship with postmodernism as well as

with traditional biography, the challenge posed to feminist biographers is three-fold.

Firstly, it must reject and subvert the practices of traditional modes of life writing which

‘feminist readers connect with patriarchal as well as Western humanist definitions of the

self’.117 At the same time, in doing so, it must negotiate – rather than simply reject – the

potentials and problematics of postmodernist theory in order to maintain the validity of

biography as a genre and the legitimacy of a gendered approach to that genre. At the

turn of the new millennium, these challenges have resulted in new and fruitful feminist

biographical forms and strategies which have been increasingly theorised and practiced

114
Stanley, The Auto/Biographical I, p.16.
115
Ibid.
116
Barry, ‘The New Historical Syntheses’, p.93.
117
O’Brien, ‘Feminist Theory and Literary Biography’, p.126.
 214

since the 1990s and which continue to undermine ‘the notion of the unified self without

discarding a focus on gender’, hence ‘preserving the benefits that biography can offer to

feminism as well as to the narration of women’s lives’.118

Perhaps the most fundamental aspect of feminist biography as critics define it

today is its acknowledgment of the impossibility to recover the past (be it personal or

historical, recent or distant), to accurately reconstruct an individual’s experience of it,

and to create a textual image which represents the so-called ‘real’ person, the essence of

the biographical subject or of a particular group or network. While traditional biography

‘often tends to endorse [...] the view that the “real” person can be identified and

presented to the reading public’, feminist life writers acknowledge that, as Evans

explains, this ‘search for the “real” person is doomed to disappointment’ and that ‘the

notion of the “reconstruction” of a biographical subject is an intellectual non-starter’.119

This is not only because this ‘real’ person does not actually exist and ‘cannot be

contained, let alone be represented, in print’ but also due to our inability to capture and

represent the past as it was experienced by the subject who lived it.120 The absence of a

‘real’ subject to recover is, then, one of the reasons biographies cannot claim facticity

and should be considered, like fiction, as naturally ‘artful enterprises which select,

shape, and produce a very unnatural product’.121

Consequently, instead of attempting to ‘dispense of all interpretative frameworks’

so as not to detract from their supposed authority,122 feminist biographers frequently

demonstrate an awareness of the processes involved in influencing the construction of

their subjects. Like fiction, the life narratives feminist biography presents are heavily

influenced by their authors and thus by their personal, historical, social and cultural

backgrounds. But where postmodernism proclaims the death of the author, feminist
118
Ibid., p.130 and p.129.
119
Evans, Missing Persons, p.138 and Stanley, The Auto/Biographical I, p.7.
120
Ibid., p.7.
121
Stanley, The Auto/Biographical I, p.4.
122
Ibid. See also: O’Brien, ‘Feminist Theory and Literary Biography’, p.124.
 215

biographers step in the opposite direction not only by being aware of and drawing

attention to the influence their identities may have on their texts but also by discussing

the research and writing processes involved in their work. ‘Authorial power,’ Stanley

reminds us, is involved in any form of life writing, both ‘in relation to who is deemed a

“fit subject” [... and] how their life and work is represented, including what sources are

accepted as authoritative and treated as preferable to other contrary sources’.123 Self-

reflexivity is therefore as crucial a component of feminist life writing as it is of third-

wave feminism and in both contexts postmodernism has challenged feminist critics ‘to

think, read, and write in an unprecedented hypercritical and self-reflexive manner, in a

way that undermined much of what feminist historical practice [...] had come to rely on

as “sound” methodology’.124

By emphasising how ‘one’s own inevitable location in the present determines the

history of the past one writes’,125 feminist biographers also highlight the impact of their

own relationship to their biographical subject and its development throughout the

research and writing processes. ‘Self-conscious feminist politics’ affects, Scarparo

suggests, authors’ ‘relationship[s] with their subjects as well as their interpretative

processes’,126 and Stanley goes as far as arguing that as a life writer ‘“doing biography”

changes how you think about yourself, and this in turn changes how you understand the

subject; and both impact more widely on how the auto/biographer sees and analyses

other social persons, events and processes’.127 Given the subjective nature of biography

and considering feminists’ self-consciousness of that subjectivity, it is not surprising

that different writers construct various different lives for one person, depending on the

sources they choose, how they decide to interpret and represent them, and what their

123
Stanley, The Auto/Biographical I, p.9.
124
‘history, postmodern’, The Women’s Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third-Wave
Feminism, Vol.1, ed. by Leslie Heywood (London: Greenwood Press, 2006), pp.177-178 (p.178).
125
Scarparo, Elusive Subjects, p.39.
126
Ibid., p.157.
127
Stanley, The Auto/Biographical I, p.159.
 216

own relationship to their subject is.

Feminist biography’s self-awareness also leads to a potentially greater

empowerment and involvement of the reader. By openly discussing the complex

processes of writing biography and by acknowledging that there is no one singular true

biography of any one subject the genre refutes modern biography’s assumption that

‘writers can cope with complexity, [while] readers have to be protected from it’.128

Postmodernism, Stanley argues, only superficially empowers readers by denying the

author’s ‘dominant authorial presence’,129 a strategy which deprives readers of the

opportunity to ‘answer back’ and which also does not provide any ‘means for how this

empowering is to occur, other than that it is’.130 Feminist biographers, in contrast, can

‘open up the production processes of biography to critical inquiry from readers’ by, for

example, making available a wide and diverse range of sources to their readers and

accounting for ‘what facts, opinions and interpretations they find preferable and

why’.131 Taking into consideration the existence of other, differing biographies of their

subjects and the inherent partiality of their own works, writers can thus invite their

readers to participate actively in the construction of the biographical subject both

through their imagination and by providing them with the opportunity to locate the

biography ‘as one competing version among others’.132 Biographical subjects, for

feminist writers, are hence always ‘subjects in progress’,133 constantly constructed and

reconstructed by themselves as well as by their readers.

But feminist life writing does not only acknowledge the multiplicity created

through its own processes and narratives but also the subjective, diverse, fluid and

potentially contradictory nature of its subjects’ identities. Rather than attempting to

128
Stanley, The Auto/Biographical I, p.11.
129
Ibid., p.17.
130
Ibid.
131
Ibid., p.251 and p.10.
132
Ibid. p.10.
133
Scarparo, Elusive Subjects, p.42.
 217

uncover the ‘complete’ person traditional life writing so desperately seeks to present in

order to ‘offer us a chance to stabilise the uncertainties of existence’,134 feminist

biography must, in turn, avoid enforcing an artificial sense of commonality between

women and creating an impossibly coherent, singular identity for its particular subjects.

It must, then, accept multiplicity and difference as inherent when considering women’s

experiences in life. Rather than relying on conceptualising this difference in terms of

mutually exclusive opposites, however, it becomes, within this context, ‘polymorphous

and groundless’, ‘a phenomenon that is constantly constructed, reconstructed,

performed, and deconstructed’.135 At the same time, the genre’s acknowledgement of

the individual subject’s changeable and complex – rather than fixed and singular –

identities can lead to productive reassessments and deconstructions of women’s roles.

As Stanley suggests, feminist biography ‘can show us as quite no other kind of writing

can that “power” and “powerlessness” are complex matters, most certainly not two

poles of a dichotomy but often co-existent in the same piece of behaviour done by the

same person at exactly the same moment in time’.136 Feminist biography, then, builds

on the multiplicity of women’s experiences based on their respective circumstances

(including for example ‘time, place, gender, community, education, religious and

political conviction, sexual preference, race and ethnicity [and] class’),137 while also

accepting the multiplicity and complexity of its individual subjects. In doing so, it

‘[shows] the importance of, and the indomitable uniqueness of people who share social

structural similarities’.138

In order to break out of ‘the prison created by the need for the coherent self’ and

to challenge the notions on which this need is based,139 feminist life writing must,

134
Evans, Missing Persons, p.1 and p.131.
135
‘history, postmodern’, p.177.
136
Stanley, The Auto/Biographical I, p.165.
137
Ibid., p.243.
138
Ibid.
139
Evans, Missing Persons, p.23.
 218

furthermore, push the artificial boundaries traditional biography has imposed on the self

and on the narratives which illustrate that self. This approach includes, first of all, a

subversion of the traditional physical and psychological limits of biographical enquiry.

Instead of considering its subjects in isolation and ‘[training] a spotlight on them and

them alone’,140 feminist biography, like third-wave feminism, considers identities as

‘ways in which people come to understand who they are in relationship to others and the

social world’.141 ‘No person,’ Stanley contends, ‘is an island complete of itself’, and

writers of feminist biography must, consequently, ‘[reject] a narrow version of “self”

and [argue] for its social construction within a network of others’, a construction which

can demonstrate how much subjects ‘share with their peers and also that everyone is in

some sense unique’.142 Considering the biographical subject within their social networks

can, however, not only give us a more complex sense of the subject themselves but it

can also paint a picture of the historical contexts in which they existed. As Barry puts it,

biography ‘reveals society and history if we follow the subject into her interactions with

others, through the networks and constellations from which she moves into and through

society, through political and economic structures, from the past toward the future with

the history which brought her to these present interactions’.143

A second limitation which feminist life writing attempts to lift is the notion that a

biographical story must begin with birth or childhood and conclude in death. Receptions

and representations of a subject and their work beyond their physical lifetime

undoubtedly create a presence which may well be considered part of a biographical

narrative, continuing the constant construction and reconstruction of the subject and its

identities. Consequently, Sharon O’Brien suggests, ‘we might want to ask whether

struggles over possession of papers and manuscripts as well as representation and

140
Stanley, The Auto/Biographical I, p.9
141
‘identity’, The Women’s Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third-Wave Feminism, Vol.1, ed.
by Leslie Heywood (London: Greenwood Press, 2006), pp.181-183 (p181).
142
Stanley, The Auto/Biographical I, p.10, p.14 and p.250.
143
Barry, ‘The New Historical Syntheses’, p.101.
 219

reputation constitute part of the “life story” stretching well beyond the writer’s

death’.144 While these start and end points require reconsideration, we must also

negotiate afresh the order in which the developments between them are presented by

challenging and destabilising accepted narrative structures which enforce an artificial

chronology upon the life and identities of a biographical subject.

If, overall, feminist critics and lifer writers challenge us to class biography as an

artificial product, ‘a mythical construct of our society and our social needs’,145 and,

therefore, as a form of fiction rather than non-fiction, the suitability of neo-Victorian

fiction as a genre for feminist biographical practice is perhaps not surprising. Neo-

Victorian fiction, as I have argued throughout this thesis, is not simply a nostalgic

revisiting or critical reassessing of the past but a clear and cogent reflection of the

society and culture in which it is conceived. Likewise, Evans observes that the

biographies of historical women – in the shape of fiction or non-fiction – serve as a

reclamation of the past which is,

ideally, not just a voyage back into the history of a particular group, but equally a
reclamation of the present. Whatever we may wish to say about the past, it cannot
be relived, whereas the reinterpretation of history, the recognition of marginal,
disenfranchised and powerless groups can serve to empower in the present.146

If biography cannot ‘sever its links with narrative fiction’ then the utilisation of the neo-

Victorian genre and its overtly fictional nature can support rather than detract from the

aims and effectiveness of feminist life writing.147 As Stanley emphasises, admitting to

the artificial nature of biography and employing the self-conscious methods of feminist

life writing ‘does not mean that such writings have no points of connection with the

material realities of everyday life’; rather, it highlights the intricacies of the connection

between literary representation and life as an individual lives and perceives it.148 Neo-

144
O’Brien, ‘Feminist Theory and Literary Biography’, p.131.
145
Evans, Missing Persons, p.1.
146
Ibid., pp.9-10.
147
Ibid., p.24.
148
Stanley, The Auto/Biographical I, p.243.
 220

Victorian fiction, through its revisiting of the historical past and its fictional nature, can

facilitate the negotiation of realism and a postmodern rejection of it, neither of which,

according to Stanley, ‘will do’ in the case of feminist biography and for the

representation of women’s lives.149

However, neo-Victorian fiction also shares common features with mainstream

biography, most notably in its obsession with the revelation of sexual detail. Evans

illustrates that since the early twentieth century and the publication of Lytton Strachey’s

Eminent Victorians (1918), mainstream biography has become more and more

revelatory, particularly regarding the details of its subjects’ sex lives.150 The 1960s

witnessed an increasing (and more public) concern with matters of sex/uality and it was

again Lytton Strachey who marked a significant development in the history of life

writing, albeit this time as the subject rather than writer of biography.151 Michael

Holroyd’s 1967 biography of Strachey was the first to illustrate explicitly in meticulous

detail the (homo)sexual practices of the Bloomsbury group. Holroyd’s work, as Evans

puts it, thus ‘shift[ed] the boundaries of revelation’ within the genre of biography by

revealing aspects of the biographical subject’s identity which had previously remained

private and hidden from public view.152 Modern biography, to this day, has become

defined by this idea of complete revelation, by the desire of the author to expose and by

the reader to know more about the biographical subject, including a familiarity with

their most intimate psychological and, most importantly, sexual details. Evans

critiques modern biography because its revelatory tendencies mean ‘we are no longer

left alone with our fantasies, our conjectures and guesses about individual people; the

149
Stanley, The Auto/Biographical I, p.243.
150
Strachey’s famous portrayals of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Thomas Arnold and
General Gordon not only defied the Victorian maintenance and celebration of respectable public lives but
functioned, in David Harvey’s words, as their ‘creative destruction’. In his use of psychoanalytic theory
as a means of uncovering so far untouched layers of a person’s identity, Strachey possessed ‘a supremely
effective weapon with which to attempt to reveal the reality behind public facades’. See: David Harvey,
The Condition of Post-Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p.19.
151
Evans, Missing Persons, p.3.
152
Ibid.
 221

“colouring in” is done for us’.153 However, as an analysis of the fictionalised

biographies of Catherine Hogarth (Charles Dickens’ wife) and Welsh painter Gwen

John illustrates, neo-Victorian biographical fiction, like ‘auto/biography, provides us

with the voyeuristic pleasures of experience’,154 while also encouraging us to contribute

to the re-imagining of its biographical subjects and, by extension, ‘to question and

further develop feminist, as well as conventional, assumptions regarding the writing of

history and biography’.155

Subverting the Dickensian gaze: the feminist lives of Catherine Dickens

While some works of neo-Victorian biographical fiction give voice to previously

silenced or ignored figures such as Saartjie Baartman (the ‘Hottentot Venus’) or

Elizabeth Wilson (Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s lady’s maid), others rewrite the life

stories of better known figures such as Isabella Beecher Hooker and Harriet Beecher

Stowe or Constance Fenimore Woolson. The woman whose literary recovery lies at the

heart of Hebe Elsna’s Unwanted Wife: A Defence of Mrs. Charles Dickens (1963) and

Gaynor Arnold’s Girl in a Blue Dress (2008), however, has long remained famous and

anonymous at the same time. Mrs. Charles Dickens is well known as the wife of the

great Victorian author; yet the person hidden behind this marital name, Catherine

Hogarth, has only recently come to light when increased scholarly interest in her

identity and character motivated first a study of her book of recipes and,156 most

recently, Arnold’s novel.

Hogarth was born in Scotland in 1815 and moved to England together with her

family in 1834. In the same year, she first met Charles Dickens, who had secured her

153
Evans, Missing Persons, p.6.
154
Ibid., p.143.
155
Scarparo, Elusive Subjects, p.161.
156
See: Susan M. Rossi-Wilcox, Rossi-Wilcox, Susan M. Dinner for Dickens: The Culinary History
of Mrs Charles Dickens’s Menu Books (Blackawton: Prospect Books, 2005). Rossi-Wilcox’s study
investigates Hogarth’s book of recipes and uses it as an illuminating framework through which we gain
new perspectives on Hogarth’s life, her domestic abilities and her relationship to Dickens.
 222

father as one of his early benefactors. She and Charles became engaged in 1835 and

married in April 1836. Not long after, their first child was conceived and from then on

Hogarth spent most of her married life pregnant. Between 1837 and 1852 she bore her

famous husband ten children and suffered several miscarriages. Hogarth’s sister

Georgina joined the Dickens household in 1842 as companion and helper to her elder

sister, who by then had four children in her care. Hogarth’s book of recipes, What Shall

We Have for Dinner? Satisfactorily Answered by Numerous Bills of Fare for from Two

to Eighteen Persons,157 was first published in 1851 under the pseudonym Lady Maria

Clutterbuck and subsequently went through five (known) editions.

By 1858, Charles had convinced himself not only that he and Catherine were no

longer suited for each other but also claimed that he had never really loved her in the

first instance (despite letters from their courtship which give quite a different

impression). To Catherine’s and her parents’ surprise and anger, Georgina sided with

Charles after the couple’s separation and remained at Tavistock House, causing the

rumour of an incestuous relationship between Dickens and his sister-in-law, something

which Charles tried to silence publicly through a statement printed in various

newspapers and magazines. Meanwhile, eldest son Charley, then twenty-one, continued

living with his mother at the modest house for which Catherine had settled in addition to

one servant and an annual allowance. As has by now become popular through, amongst

other accounts, Claire Tomalin’s The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and

Charles Dickens (1990) and Channel 4’s series Dickens’ Secret Lover (2008), Charles

was at the time having an affair with the young actress Ellen Ternan, who is thought to

have been the major reason for his leaving his wife. Catherine, who was eventually

reconciled with Georgina, died of cancer in 1879 and left some of the letters she had
157
Lady Maria Clutterbuck, What Shall We Have for Dinner? Satisfactorily Answered by Numerous
Bills of Fare for from Two to Eighteen Persons (London: Bredbury and Evans, 1851), Accessed: 1 May
2009, http://books.google.co.uk/books?id =dT4CAAAAQAAJ& dq=clutterbuck%2C%20dinner&pg=
PP7#v=onepage&q&f=false. The book was reprinted by Kessinger Publishing in 2008 and a transcript of
the 1852 edition and 1854 appendix is provided in: Rossi-Wilcox, Dinner for Dickens, pp.20-74.
 223

received from her husband in the happier years of their marriage to the British Museum

to ensure ‘that the world may know he loved me once’,158 a phrase now frequently

quoted by scholars. Despite the title of Tomalin’s study of Dickens’ mistress, there was

certainly more than one woman rendered invisible by the Dickensian shadow. While

new light is being shed on Ellen and Catherine through recent and forthcoming

publications,159 Georgina’s life and character, for example, still remain mostly in

darkness.160

Although this thesis focuses exclusively on neo-Victorian fiction, it is worth

considering Elsna’s non-fictional Unwanted Wife, the first ever biography of Hogarth,

which is feminist in its approach but, unlike Arnold’s novel, does not employ the

strategies which would become so central to feminist theory and feminist life writing

only years after its publication. From as early as the proclamation of its title on the front

cover, Elsna’s text raises numerous questions for a twenty-first century feminist reader.

Her intention, so the title tells us, is to write ‘a defence’ of Hogarth, an ambition which

– given that up until the later decades of the twentieth century most Dickens scholars

had believed the author’s illustrations of his wife as a dull and incompetent wife, mother

and housekeeper – seems a justified aim. However, the question arises why an author

with the feminist intention of defending Hogarth would rob her subject of her rightful

name by referring to her as ‘Mrs. Charles Dickens’ in her subtitle. By reducing

Catherine’s identity to her status as her husband’s wife – his property – Elsna’s title

reinforces the invisibility of the woman which the text supposedly sets out to defend. Of

course the omission of Catherine’s name may, instead, be a way of indicating from the

very beginning that, as Charles Dickens’ wife, she was no person in her own right.

158
Catherine Dickens, cited in Rossi-Wilcox, Dinner for Dickens, p.305.
159
See: Rossi-Wilcox, Dinner for Dickens; and Lillian Nayder, The Other Dickens: A Life of
Catherine Hogarth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010).
160
The only biography of Georgina Hogarth, now over fifty years old, is Arthur A. Adrian’s
Georgina Hogarth and the Dickens Circle (London: Oxford University Press, 1957).
 224

Alternatively, it may be a means of emphasising that ‘Mrs. Charles Dickens’ was a role

fulfilled by more than one woman: Mary, the sister-in-law whom Dickens idealised and

who died in his arms; Georgina, the sister-in-law who ran his household after Catherine

had been forced to leave; and his mistress, Ellen Ternan, who was at his side when he

died. Or is the choice of ‘Mrs. Charles Dickens’ simply a marketing strategy built on the

consciousness that few potential readers may recognise Catherine Hogarth or even

Catherine Dickens as the wife of the famous Victorian author?

If the title of Elsna’s work is thus – from a feminist viewpoint – confusing,

structure and content do not add much (positive) clarification. It is Georgina joining the

Dickens household which introduces the narrative and it is her rather than Hogarth’s

death which concludes it. As in the title, Catherine remains unnamed on the opening

page, something not too unusual if Elsna were not focusing, instead, on Georgina and

once again making Catherine nothing more than Dickens’ wife: ‘In the year 1842 a little

girl of fourteen [...] left her parents’ home to become the companion of her elder,

married sister, and to act as nursery governess to that sister’s young children. Her name

was Georgina Hogarth, and her twenty-six-year-old sister was the wife of Charles

Dickens’.161 The figures which, to the author, seem worth naming, here, are clearly

Georgina and Charles.

Unwanted Wife focuses on Catherine’s life from her courtship and engagement

onwards. Her relationship to Charles is portrayed as an entirely unhappy one from start

to finish. ‘More than once,’ Elsna imagines, ‘Catherine must have considered breaking

off the engagement, for Charles made little or no attempt to please or understand her. To

address a beautiful, nineteen-year-old girl as “Dearest Pig” was scarcely complimentary’

(UW, 18). Elsna’s descriptions of Charles as a husband grow increasingly condemnatory

161
Hebe Elsna, Unwanted Wife: A Defence of Mrs. Charles Dickens (London: Jarrolds Publisher,
1963), p.13. Hereafter this text is referred to as UW after quotations in the text.
 225

throughout the text. Commenting on the couple’s frequent travels during Catherine’s

pregnancies, the author illustrates how ‘before Charles lost all interest in her [Catherine]

he dragged her hither and thither at his will, often under most uncomfortable conditions’

(UW, 114). Her final verdict on their relationship and marriage goes even further: ‘In

truth, this gentle, religious, loving woman, who bore no malice against the husband who

treated her so callously, has been as badly served by posterity as she was by the genius

with the sadistic impulses whom she had the great misfortune to marry’ (UW, 115).

During and after the separation, Elsna portrays Catherine as a woman who,

ironically because of her status as victim, was empowered to some extent, but who

selflessly ignored her advantageous position for Charles’ good. We are reminded that

Catherine could have made her husband ‘appear as the unpopular figure in a

matrimonial cause célèbre, to be cut by his friends, denigrated in the eyes of the world,

perhaps asked to resign from his clubs,’ knowing that these ‘would be blows from which

he would never recover’ (UW, 115). His wife, however, ‘finally and quietly [...] decided

that this must not be, for the sacrifice she would be called upon to make would be small

in comparison’ (UW, 115). This martyr-like representation of Catherine, who sacrifices

her reputation for the well-being of Charles and the children, culminates in Elsna’s

opinion on Catherine’s character and in her illustration of her reconciliation with

Georgina. Charles had published a letter and a statement in which he openly accused

Catherine of being a bad mother and wife and biographers have often considered

Catherine as a weak personality for settling for an allowance and a house without

fighting for her standing and the custody of her children. Elsna, however, argues that

Catherine’s behaviour and decisions were quite the opposite: to her, they illustrate a

strength of character achieved through ‘her deep sense of religion, [...] her dignity, her

self-respect and the compassion which reached out to her intransigent husband’ (UW,

109) – in short, her infinite selflessness as mother and wife and her resemblance (if not
 226

in Charles’ eyes) to the perfect Victorian middle-class woman.

Catherine’s role in the text as the angelic victim of the cruel Charles is reinforced

by Elsna’s portrayal of Georgina – who has often been made at least partly responsible

for the break-up of the marriage – as a young, calculated villainess. Initially, Elsna

considers Georgina’s course in life as resulting from parental neglect and Charles’

manipulative influence. Having witnessed Dickens’ dubious obsession with Mary,

Catherine’s mother should, so Elsna argues, have prevented Georgina from following in

her sister’s steps: ‘From the moment that Charles professed to see “a second Mary” in

the little Georgy, maternal apprehension should surely have been aroused and Georgy

forthwith removed from Devonshire Terrace’ (UW, 23). Initially, Georgina also seems

blameless when it comes to her relationship to the great writer. ‘The child,’ Elsna

explains, ‘was [...] inevitably exposed to all the fascination and flattery of the brilliant

Charles, who [...] did seduce her loyalty, and so filled her thoughts and captured her

spirit that any idea of marriage and a home of her own was swept from her mind’ (UW,

23).

Not long after, however, the narrative transforms Georgina into a scheming young

woman, both in her behaviour towards Charles and towards Catherine. We read of how

‘the seventeen-year-old came to certain decisions. From her point of view the most

important thing in the world was to make herself so essential to Charles that he could not

contemplate life without her’ (UW, 25). Henceforth, Georgina – ‘the cat who walked

alone’ (UW, 27) – supposedly utilised ‘uncritical adoration’ and ‘a constant, never-

failing interest in his work’ (UW, 25-6) in order to secure Charles’ trust. Elsna is

determined that ‘Georgina loved only Georgina. There was Charles, and she wrapped

herself around him, but does the ivy necessarily love the wall to which it clings for

support?’ (UW, 27). Realising that Catherine becomes more and more irritating rather

than dearer to Charles, Georgina, the schemer, is unable to understand how her sister can
 227

be ignorant of the means her legal and emotional relationship to Charles provide her to

fix the marriage: ‘She [Catherine], as Charles’s wife, held so many good cards but

seemed to be completely unaware of it’ (UW, 104).

Georgina’s role as exploitative sister reaches a climax when Elsna describes the

day Catherine leaves the family home (then Tavistock House), unknown to her, for the

last time. After a severe argument between Charles and Catherine, her parents came to

console their daughter, while her furious husband left the house telling only Georgina

that he would not return until his wife and her family had been forever removed from his

home. Unaware of this, Catherine and her parents decided to go on a short holiday,

which was, ironically, supposed to make Charles believe that Catherine had left him

forever and hence bring him to his senses and beg her forgiveness for his transgressions.

Georgina, who ‘had visioned power, and [...] now worked for her own ends’ (UW, 26)

knew that their departure was exactly what Charles wanted, but made no attempt to

prevent her sister from leaving. Elsna, pitying Catherine and her parents, notes that ‘it

was, poor souls, beyond their comprehension that Catherine was now not of the slightest

value to him [Charles]’ (UW, 109). Later, Georgina thus becomes ‘the traitor who with

the one word “Stay” could have prevented her [sister’s] departure’ (UW, 109). This

scene and the subsequent silence between the sisters until Catherine fell fatally ill serves,

once again, only to dramatize and emphasize Catherine’s saintly character. Not long

before her death, Catherine tells Georgina that she saw ‘no occasion’ (UW, 225) for her

sister’s remorse, as ‘circumstances had been against them all’ (UW, 225).

Consequently, the younger sister’s villainous role in Unwanted Wife does not only

reinforce Catherine’s status as helpless and ignorant victim (of both Charles and

Georgina) but it also absorbs her sister’s part as the supposed protagonist of the text.

Elsna’s choice of title, then, seems indicative of her treatment of Hogarth. Unwanted

Wife is indeed a defence of a woman who fell prey to her husband and sister-in-law, a
 228

victim who has remained silent and, hence, must be heard. However, the voice Elsna

gives Hogarth is at best a pitiful and reductive one and, in fact, hardly a voice at all. Like

the marital name used in her title, Elsna actively undermines Catherine as a woman and

as an autonomous being by silencing her through a focus on Georgina and, if

representing Catherine at all, making her a characterless martyr to femininity, a

symbolic victim of patriarchy. But despite textually re-inscribing the oppression she

seeks to highlight, Elsna’s portrayal of Catherine manages to illustrate the shortcomings

of previous representations of Catherine by biographers who adopted Charles’ view of

her and hence illustrated Catherine as the incompetent wife who was not a victim, but

who instead made her husband the victim of her supposed shortcomings in the feminine

roles assigned to her. Not dissimilar to Sebastian Faulks’ Human Traces, discussed in

Chapter Two, Unwanted Wife, then, illustrates the processes involved in the silencing of

a woman’s life, while at the same time contributing to them.

The first obvious difference in Gaynor Arnold’s Girl in a Blue Dress is that

Arnold’s work is a novel, a proclaimed work of fiction, which reinvents Catherine’s

voice through the first-person narrative of Dorothea (Dodo) Gibson, wife of famous and

eccentric writer Alfred Gibson. Whereas Elsna claims a certain amount of truthfulness

through her traditional biographical narrative, Arnold has no such pretentions and

admits, in her afterword, that although the text is a thinly veiled biography of Catherine

Dickens, it takes many creative liberties. Unlike Unwanted Wife, Girl in a Blue Dress

leaves no doubt as to whose narrative this is and, in contrast to both Elsna and Rossi-

Wilcox, the fictional Catherine’s life does not begin with her engagement to the famous

writer but, rather symbolically, with his death: ‘My husband’s funeral,’ Dorothea

Gibson begins her narrative, ‘is today’.162

162
Gaynor Arnold, Girl in a Blue Dress (Birmingham: Tindal Street Press, 2008), p.1. Hereafter this
text is referred to as BD after quotations in the text.
 229

Whereas Elsna writes Catherine as the angelical woman Dickens advocates in so

many of his novels (but whom he obviously did not see in his own wife), Arnold, in

turn, uses some of Dickens’ fictional characters and conflates them with members of the

Dickens family. Most significant for my discussion is, of course, Arnold’s choice to

name her fictional Catherine Dorothea (or, more frequently, Dodo). While the phonetic

resemblance to Dora of Dickens’ David Copperfield may be a vague one, the

characteristics and life of David’s first wife can easily be mapped onto Dickens’ later

opinions of Catherine and they also shape Arnold’s treatment of Dodo in Girl in a Blue

Dress. Dickens’ Dora suffers a (fatal) miscarriage and, by the time Charles had started

writing David Copperfield, Catherine had already lost more than one child during

pregnancy. Unlike Elsna, Arnold portrays an extremely passionate and loving courtship

between Alfred and Dodo, modelling it on David’s dandyish pursuit of Dora. Dodo

recalls how Alfred fell in love with her for her beauty and tells us that her looks were

‘why he first loved me, after all. You are so beautiful, Dodo, I’m the luckiest man in the

world!’ (BD, 65). ‘During our engagement,’ she continues, ‘there was nothing he

wouldn’t do for me. He made me laugh when I was with him, and when we were apart,

his letters made me cry with pleasure’ (BD, 65). The only obstacle during their

engagement is Arnold’s invented disapproval of Dodo’s father, who is soon pacified by

the arrangements of a prolonged engagement.

As Catherine Waters observes, the flaw of David Copperfield’s Dora is her

‘failure to comprehend domestic economy,’ making her ‘an inappropriate partner for the

hero of middle-class self-making’.163 This ‘failure’ is adopted in Arnold’s novel, but

prompts an affectionate and patient response from Alfred. When he asks Dodo, ‘Let us

imagine we were married, Dodo. How should you propose to spend the princely sum [of

fifteen shillings a week]?’ (BD, 65), she admits to the reader that she ‘never had any

163
Catherine Waters, Dickens and the Politics of the Family (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997), p.168.
 230

reasons to make proposals about money, and […] could not imagine how to do it’ (BD,

65). Embarrassed by Alfred’s exposing of her incompetence, she tells us: ‘I had always

thought myself practical, someone with housewifely skills in darning and sewing and

mending, in arranging flowers, and decorating a screen. But I realized suddenly that I

knew nothing of importance’ (BD, 66). What Arnold emphasizes here through her

appropriation of Dickens’ Dora is that even if Catherine had been a bad housekeeper, it

would have been most likely due to her upbringing and the impracticality of the typical

accomplishments ladies of the time were expected to possess. Having helped Dodo to

arrive at some of the more simple conclusions regarding the running of a house, Alfred

good-naturedly comments, ‘Excellent. At the advanced age of twenty, Miss Dodo learns

to keep house!’ (BD, 66).

Sexuality is a topic which Elsna omits, representing Catherine’s numerous

pregnancies as if they were the results of acts which occurred on account of Charles’

rather than Catherine’s affections. Arnold, however, utilizes the fictional nature of her

work in order to imaginatively fill in some of the gaps which historical documentation

has left. Throughout Dodo’s accounts we are given the impression that she physically

desired Alfred as much as he desired her. In the course of relating the period of their

engagement, she mentions the intimate nature of some of Alfred’s letters: ‘Sometimes

I’d read passages to Alice and Sissy [Mary and Georgina], although there were other

passages I kept to myself – passages that made me blush; that made me long for the day

when we’d be married’ (BD, 65). Later, she explains that sex was an enjoyable past-

time to her, but also one of the only ways of being truly intimate with an author who

considered himself as a public possession: ‘Many women complain of the demands of

the bedchamber, but bedtime was for me only part of the day when I felt my husband

was truly mine; when he did not belong to his friends, his readers or the entire

population of England. And although I had to admit he became less ardent as our
 231

marriage progressed, he was always as kind to me as on our wedding night – the night

when I’d truly felt myself to be the happiest woman on earth’ (BD, 220). While sex and

sexuality have by now certainly become compulsory components in neo-Victorian

fiction, it is also an aspect which adds to the likeability of Dodo for contemporary

women, to whom sexuality, arguably, has become a defining aspect of identity.

Because of Dodo’s passion for her husband, motherhood is also a problematized

topic, rendering the Catherine stand-in more contemporary and less of a perfect

Victorian wife. During her first pregnancies, Dodo is not, as Catherine in Unwanted

Wife, an idealized mother figure. Instead, having become pregnant immediately after her

wedding, she is torn between happiness and doubt, wondering whether it is not too early

for her and Alfred to go from being a loving couple to being parents. When pregnant for

the second time, Dodo hopes to find advice and sympathy in Alfred’s sister and

explains:

Alfred may love children [...] but he doesn’t have to carry them inside him for
nine months and nurse them for goodness knows how long afterwards! I know it
is our women’s lot – but I feel so very despondent when I’m carrying, and no
doubt I shall be looking excessively fat before the month is out. Is it so selfish to
want a breathing space? A chance for Alfred and me to be sweethearts again?
(BD, 133)

When it comes the novel’s treatment of Georgina (or, as she is called in Arnold’s text,

Sissy), we do not quite find the selfish villainess with which we were presented in

Unwanted Wife. Although Arnold portrays Sissy as highly influential, Dodo is anything

but ignorant of her sister’s dominance in the household or her own status within it. She

remembers complaining to Alfred, ‘I am no longer mistress in my own home [...] Sissy

keeps all the keys in her possession, and today I can’t even arrange the flowers in the

drawing room because she has done them already’ (BD, 203). The reference to Sissy as

the keeper of the keys is reminiscent of the symbolic value keys hold in fictional

Dickensian households such as that in Bleak House. Esther Summerson, who is

entrusted with all the keys to the Jarndyce residence, is at the same time also the keeper
 232

of everyone’s secrets, the trustworthy confidante. It is, thus, not only the keys which

have changed possession from Dodo to Sissy, but also Alfred’s trust and Dodo’s role as

the head of domestic affairs. While she is aware that due to her many pregnancies and ill

health she ‘quickly came to live up to’ the description ‘poor Dodo’ (BD, 202), she also

acknowledges that, to some extent, she was not given the chance to be anything more:

‘As soon as she [Sissy] learnt that Fanny was expected,’ Dodo observes, ‘Sissy began to

treat me as an invalid’ (BD, 202). Nevertheless, Arnold does not simplify Georgina’s

role the way Elsna does and presents us with the other side of the story. The sisters’

meeting and reconciliation after Alfred’s death is, however, neither a quick nor an easy

one. One of the most significant points of discussion for the sisters is, for example, the

problematic question of who has the right to being called his widow – the woman who

took care of his household for the ten years preceding his death, his lawful (if separated)

wife who had not seen him in over a decade by the time died, or his mistress, who was at

his bedside when he passed away. Whereas to Dodo Alfred had been virtually dead

since their separation, for Sissy, she notes, ‘it is all so fresh and raw,’ so much so that

her sister claims, ‘I feel exactly like a widow’ (BD, 239).

Wilhelmina Ricketts, Alfred’s mistress, is also given a voice and Dodo’s meeting

with her forms the dramatic finale of the novel. As she grows bolder through her

reflections after Alfred’s death, Dodo eventually decides to visit Miss Ricketts in the

house in which Alfred installed his lover and her mother. Throughout the scene we are,

again, provided with an image of a tormented and torn Dodo, condemning Wilhelmina

and Alfred on the one hand, but blaming herself – her lack of intellect and her declining

looks – for her husband’s unfaithfulness. When mistress and wife finally meet, we hear

from the former about the difficulty of her position, of the fact that she was not simply

the well-kept mistress but, instead, had to sacrifice her propriety as well as her active

lifestyle as an actress for the reclusiveness of a quiet cottage.

 233

In a discussion between Rossi-Wilcox and John Sutherland on BBC Radio 4’s

Woman’s Hour, Sutherland remarked on how, by now, the actually invisible women in

the Dickens history were ‘the servant girls’, none of whom could be named even after

Rossi-Wilcox’s thorough research.164 Once again, where archives fail us, Arnold

supplements fact with fiction and even lends Dodo’s maids a voice to express their

opinions on the marriage break-up and the influence it had on them during and after the

separation. Dodo’s servant Wilson is a comically grumpy but also exceptionally frank

character, giving her mistress loyal service in the difficult years after her separation.

Bessie, a maid previously employed at Tavistock House when Alfred’s wife was still its

mistress, comes to visit Dodo and we witness a clash of ranks between the new and the

old servant. Their characters are by no means explored in depth, but, nevertheless,

Arnold handles their voices carefully enough to warrant the statement that no female

voice is lost in Girl in a Blue Dress. The novel is not only a revision of Catherine but

also of many more parties – including Catherine’s children – whose identities have

largely been lost in Dickens’ shadow.

Reviews of Arnold’s novel have, not surprisingly, been varied and include praise

for her original and credible representation of Charles and Catherine Dickens, to

critique for her openly feminist take on their life stories. One reviewer finds a particular

flaw in Arnold’s ‘clunking attempts to shoehorn a distinctly 20th-century feminist

perspective’ onto Catherine’s marriage and separation. To critique Girl in a Blue Dress

for assuming a contemporary feminist view is to imply that it is possible to discard

one’s historical, political and personal background when (re-)writing a life story. Such

criticism confirms, then, ‘that [at the start of the twenty-first century] what counts as the

biographical self in the western marketplace by and large remains wedded to quite

164
‘Dinner for Dickens’, Woman’s Hour, BBC Radio 4 (6 September 2005), Accessed: 27 July 2009,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/2005_36_tue_03.shtml
 234

conventional narrative forms’,165 that is, to the assumption that a biographer’s narrative

of a subject is transparent and wholly uninfluenced by critical, historical, personal or

political frameworks.

Arnold’s ending makes clear that this is neither her aim nor a possibility.

Reminiscent of the ghosts visiting Scrooge in A Christmas Carol (1843), Alfred appears

to Dodo in a dream and asks her to continue the novel he left unfinished after his death.

Having reminded him that he once accused her of having ‘no imagination’ (BD, 414),

Dodo receives the following reply: ‘Oh, you don’t believe everything I say, do you? I’m

a story-teller. We are, as a species, notoriously unreliable’ (BD, 414). Eventually, she

resolves, ‘Stay home I shall, but I do not plan to go back to my old, idle ways. I almost

feel I have Alfred’s blood running through my veins. I go to the little desk, and pull a

sheaf of paper towards me. I take up my pen. I hold it high up so I don’t dirty my

fingers. I dip it in the ink. And I start to write’ (BD, 438). The narrative makes clear that

Dodo intends to finish her husband’s work and, like Arnold, she will make Dickens’

text her own, using the existing material in order to create her own narrative, to find her

own voice. Arnold’s allusion to David Copperfield’s Dora allow her to illustrate how

Catherine has been trapped in the character her husband, the ‘notoriously unreliable’

story-teller, assigned to her through his fiction and his public statements, a character

which biographers later often co-opted as an unquestionable truth rather than a partial

product of Dickens’ imagination. Consequently, Alfred Gibson’s death enables Dodo to

recreate herself beyond this period-transcending existence as a supposedly weak and

unintelligent woman. Arnold does not end her story of Catherine with her subject’s

death, but, instead, the novel finishes with an optimistic hint towards Dodo’s future life

of activity and initiative.

Arnold, then, subverts Dickens’ Dora in order to liberate and rewrite Catherine as

165
Marilyn Booth and Antoinette Burton. ‘Editor’s Note’, Journal of Women's History, 21:3 (Fall
2009), pp.7-12 (p.7).
 235

a woman, lending her subject a voice which despite but also because of its fictional

nature does not, like Elsna’s, overwrite the woman it attempts to represent. Arnold

refuses to provide us with a traditionally coherent picture of Catherine and, instead,

emphasizes her narrator’s often contradictory and changing emotions, Dodo’s constant

struggle between self-pity and confidence, regret and optimism. Indeed, Dodo’s

dilemmas regarding sexuality and motherhood as well as her conflicting feelings

towards Alfred reflect the kind of contradiction which has become characteristic of

many women’s lives today and which has arisen, largely, because of the supposedly

liberating choices they have been given as a result of the feminist movement. Arnold’s

novel thus moves towards ‘the possibility that the female subject may occupy many

‘subject positions’, positions that vary according to ‘class, race, sexual preference,

family status, and age’ and are not mutually exclusive.166 There is, then, not only

diversity and contradiction within the lives of different women but potentially also

within each woman, and both of these notions are realised in Girl in a Blue Dress. In

Dorothea Gibson, Arnold revives Catherine Dickens and renders a historical life

relevant for contemporary female readers by using it as a means to articulate the

conflicts which arise out of women’s diverse backgrounds and the many co-existing

roles they inhabit in their lives as (single) mothers, wives, housewives, sexually desiring

and desired beings and/or successful career persons. Arnold’s fragmented and

contradictory depictions of Catherine, as well as her emphasis on the other female

voices silenced during Dickens’ life and in his biographies, contribute to ‘the [third-

wave] development of modes of thinking that can come to terms with the multiple,

constantly shifting bases of oppression in relation to the multiple, interpenetrating axes

of identity’.167

166
O’Brien, ‘Feminist Theory and Literary Biography’, p.130.
167
Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake, ‘Introduction’, Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing
Feminism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp.1-24 (p.3).
 236

Arnold presents us with a picture of who Catherine Hogarth may have been, while

also reflecting the significance her life holds for contemporary feminists and pointing

towards the future contributions yet to be made to this picture. Girl in a Blue Dress

successfully uncovers the processes involved in the neglect and misrepresentation of

Catherine as a biographical subject, reinforcing that ‘critical feminist biography entails

analysis of purposeful forgetting as much as it does the rematerializing of the

biographical subject’.168 Yet, the novel’s ending also indicates that she remains

inevitably defined as his wife/ widow. We do not know the liberties she plans to take

with his book, or if she will even attempt to finish it, or if in picking up the pen at the

end of the novel she commences the book we are reading (as in Starling’s The Journal

of Dora Damage, for example). Any portrait of Catherine remains therefore inescapably

haunted by Dickens’ ghost.

Gendering art, space and identity: Keeping the World Away

Forster’s Keeping the World Away, like Arnold’s novel, concerns itself with the life of a

woman who, until the 1960s, had often remained in the shadow of the famous men who

surrounded her. Continuing her interest in the life stories of historical women,169 Forster

takes as her starting point the childhood and early career of Welsh painter Gwen John,

whose work had largely been neglected in favour of that of her brother Augustus, and

who had once been primarily known as the mistress of famous sculptor Auguste Rodin.

It was during the onset of the Women’s Liberation Movement that feminists began to

acknowledge the significance of John’s portraits and of her intense studies of female

nudes. Since then, her work has been exhibited in the Tate Britain and the Welsh

168
Booth and Burton, ‘Editor’s Note’, p.9.
169
See, for example, her earlier works Lady’s Maid (London: Chatto & Windus, 1990) and Good
Wives? Mary, Fanny, Jenny and Me (2002). The former is a fictionalised account of Elizabeth Wilson’s
experiences as a lady’s maid to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, while the latter compares Forster’s own
experiences as a woman and wife to the lives of Mary Livingstone, Fanny Stevenson and Jennie Lee.
 237

National Museum and Gallery,170 and her life has inspired numerous biographies which

render her more than the one-time mistress of Rodin and the sister of Augustus (whose

work is now, ironically, often overlooked and his talent frequently considered inferior to

his sister’s).171

Forster’s fictionalised account of Gwen John spans the years of her childhood,

spent in Haverfordwest and later in Tenby, her education at London’s Slade School of

Art, and her years in Paris as a model and as Rodin’s mistress. However, it is here that

the novel breaks with biographical tradition as we subsequently follow not the painter’s

life but, instead, the journey of one of her paintings. Forster’s fictional version of John’s

A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris (1907-1909) traces its conception by John and,

later, its perception by other women throughout the twentieth century. In contrast to

Kate Walbert’s A Short History of Women, discussed in the opening chapter of this

thesis, Keeping the World Away does not connect women’s stories through familial,

genealogical ties; rather the stories of Forster’s women are connected through John’s

painting, the space it portrays and their respective relationships to the painting and that

space. Rather than framing her subject by her birth and death, Forster challenges the

boundaries of biography by exploring John’s life through the life of her painting, the

ways it is perceived by women who behold it after Gwen, and through the lives of those

women. Female identities are constructed and represented, then, through and around

gendered spaces, their artistic representations and women’s relationships to both.

Forster’s novel is divided into four parts, each one dedicated to a different woman

170
See: ‘Gwen John and Augustus John’, Tate Britain, 29 September 2004 – 9 January 2005,
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/john/.
171
Augustus’ prediction that ‘in 50 years’ time I will be known as the brother of Gwen John’ is much
quoted by biographers of the siblings. For works on the life and art of Gwen John see: David Fraser
Jenkins and Chris Stephens, Gwen John and Augustus John (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 2004);
Alicia Foster, Gwen John (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 1999); Cecily Langdale, Gwen John (New
Haven: Yale University Press); Cecily Langdale and David Fraser Jenkins, Gwen John: An Interior Life
(1986); and Mary Taubman, Gwen John: The Artist and Her Work (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1985). Candida Cave’s play ‘Still Lives’, performed at the Tate Britain in 2004, explores the relationships
between Gwen, her brother’s wife Ida, and her brother’s mistress Dorelia, who eventually came to live
with Augustus, his wife and their children.
 238

who acquires the painting. Part one moves from Gwen’s childhood and adolescence to

her time in Paris where, after her separation from Rodin, she completes the painting and

passes it on to her friend Ursula, who in turn loses it on her journey back to England. In

1908 we meet Charlotte – to whom part two of the novel is dedicated – a young girl

from an aristocratic British family with a close relationship to her liberally minded

father, Sir Edward, a collector of art. Charlotte comes into the possession of Gwen’s

painting because Sir Edward accidentally picks up Ursula’s case from Lost Property at

Victoria Station, and it is from hereon that the identity of its painter becomes unknown

to its beholders. While Charlotte and her father are on a tour of Europe and her mother

is looking after her pregnant eldest daughter, the painting is stolen from their house in a

burglary. We then encounter it again when, after World War I, Alan, a war veteran,

purchases it for his partner Stella, an amateur painter who leaves him not long after and

sells it to a local potter and his wife, Ginny.

In part four, we meet Lucasta, Ginny’s daughter, during World War II and the

years immediately following it. Working as a portrait painter after the war, Lucasta

decides to give the painting to her lover Paul, a married man, as a parting present when

she ends their affair, hoping the image will help him understand her motives for leaving

him. After Paul’s death in the 1980s, the painting falls into the hands of his widow,

Aisla, who had known both about his affair with Lucasta and his subsequent

transgressions with other women. When Aisla sells their house to Claudette Verlon,

Claudette recognises the painting as the (now very valuable) work of Gwen John. Aisla

dies in an accident in Florence and, subsequently, one of her sons sells the painting to

Claudette. The final part of the novel is not so much concerned with Claudette as with

Aisla’s granddaughter Gillian, an art student in present-day London. Gillian, who

knows of the painting’s existence because its sale has caused a lasting dispute between

her father and her uncle, makes it her mission to locate the piece and, through this,
 239

meets Claudette, who eventually decides to include Gillian in her will as the heir to the

painting.

It is Gillian’s perception of the painting which frames Forster’s novel and which

introduces us to its central concerns. Already in the preface we are reminded of the

instability of meaning and identity when Gillian reflects on the relevance of an artist’s

biography and intention to their work. The information she received in advance of a

visit to a London gallery, she tells us,

seemed irrelevant. Did she need to know where the artist was born, or trained? All
that mattered now, surely, were the paintings themselves and what she could see
in them. The artist’s intention didn’t matter, did it? If a painting didn’t speak for
itself, what use was it? She was convinced that art should be looked at in a pure
way, uninfluenced by any knowledge of the artist or the circumstances in which it
had been painted.172

However, Gillian’s conviction is soon shaken when, looking at one of Gwen John’s

works, she finds herself wondering about ‘the lives of the actual paintings, especially

one of hers. I was wondering where it had been, who had owned it, who had looked at

it. And other things – I mean, what effect did it have on the people who have looked it?

What has it meant to them, how have they looked at it, did they feel the same as I did,

did they see what I saw’ (KtWA, xi). There is never, Gillian’s thoughts suggest, a ‘pure’

way of considering art, of creating meaning, and Forster, one can assume, is as

suspicious of the death of the author as Liz Stanley and Kathleen Barry. Rather than

discarding biographical information as an interpretive framework, we are forced to

consider, instead, whether the various interpretations of Gwen John’s paintings and the

new narratives they create do not somehow form a part of the artist’s own biography,

whether the existence of her painting in other people’s lives is not an extension of her

own life narrative. Forster rejects the possibility of ‘pure’ reading, of objectively

making sense or interpreting. As we come to discover through the novel, these acts are

172
Margaret Forster, Keeping the World Away (London: Vintage, 2006), p.x. Hereafter this text is
referred to as KtWA after quotations in the text.
 240

always subjective and, more often than not, gendered.

Nevertheless, there is no question that the figure of the author, or in this case of

the artist, is itself always a construction, artificially created not only by the beholder of

their work, but also by the artist themselves. When we are first introduced to Gwen and

to the processes involved in the production of her art, it is significant that we witness

her creation of a self-portrait. Representing herself on canvas means, for Gwen, that she

must see herself as ‘a person who was not familiar but a stranger and then she could

begin to draw’ (KtWA, 17). The artist’s vision of herself is, then, not a revelation of the

true or ‘real’ Gwen John, but only yet another construction, a representation of how the

artist views herself, or, as we soon discover, of how she would like to be perceived. In

later attempts at self-portraits, Gwen presents herself ‘full-face and, increasingly, one

hand on her hip’, hoping ‘it suggested that she was in control and able to face herself

without shame’, while also knowing ‘it was a lie, but she wanted it to be a successful

lie, one that would not be questioned’ (KtWA, 35).

John has been described by her biographers as an introvert and recluse who

harboured hidden passion and energy below the surface, and Forster re-imagines the

artist’s negotiation of and struggle with these competing aspects of herself as a painful

repression of her feelings. By presenting a certain image of herself through her self-

portraits as well as through her behaviour in public, Gwen not only constructs her own

identity but also obsessively attempts to obscure the characteristics which she knows

are, at turn of the century, considered inappropriate in a woman. Convinced by her own

performance, she believes that

no one would doubt her own seriousness [as an artist]. Everything about her spoke
of it – her dark, restrained clothing, her solemn expression, her aloof, detached
demeanour. But there again they would be wrong. Her mind raced with millions
of violent and spectacular thoughts and ideas, and in the centre of herself she
stored a passion which might terrify people if they suspected it. It lay coiled
inside, powerful, making the occasional twist and thrust through her veins to
remind her that it was there, waiting, but still dormant. (KtWA, 30)
 241

Equally, after a romantic disappointment, Gwen is pleased that one of her latest self-

portraits does not exhibit her emotional pain and, instead, helps her to believe she is

what she would like to be: ‘calm and collected, aware of her own strength, a little

superior and extremely serious. This was to be a portrait of a woman who was no

adornment of the fair sex but a member of a new generation that intended its work to be

important [...] Sometimes, she felt she was a mere shadow of a person. Her portrait

reassured her that she was not’ (KtWA, 45). Her construction and performance of her

identity, then, reflect as well as create and reinforce Gwen’s sense of self.

It is Gwen’s relationship to her living space which renders the conflict between

the person she knows she is and the person she desires to be most obvious. The

significance of the relationship between identity and space becomes clear early on in the

novel, when Gwen feels as though ‘she was in a room with Jane Eyre, oppressed by the

mahogany and stifled by the red drapes. She fought for breath and there was a hissing in

her head. It was the room of her nightmares’ (KtWA, 19). Although unlike Jane Eyre

Gwen is never confined to any of her rooms by external force, her living space acquires

– at her own hand – the same purpose as that of Brontë’s famous red room: the restraint

of passion and emotion.

During her intense sexual relationship with Rodin, who installs her in a new set of

rooms, Gwen begins to turn her living space into a representation of the person Rodin

wishes her to be. Describing herself as ‘willing and hungry’ (KtWA, 61), ‘inwardly [...]

volcanic, as though burning lava filled her and would explode with the force of what

was beneath it, her overwhelming passion for him’, Gwen knows that ‘her maitre’

(KtWA, 68), because of her passion, ‘liked her “anonymously”, as a body, as a woman,

but she appeared not to be able to supply what he wanted emotionally and intellectually’

(KtWA, 69), that is, versions of Richardson’s heroines in Pamela and Clarissa – novels

which he gives his mistress to read. Rodin, Gwen reflects, seems to ‘marvel at her
 242

passion and even to be nervous of it’ (KtWA, 65). The room he rents for her is on the

tellingly named Rue St. Placide, where, he tells her, ‘she must be composed and calm

and let his own tranquillity enter her soul. Only then [...] would she do good work’

(KtWA, 65). ‘The cleanliness and order of her new surroundings’ (KtWA, 65) is intended

to achieve this state of mind, but Gwen is aware that by creating a room to Rodin’s

taste, she is deceiving both herself and him. The room, like her self-portraits and her

behaviour in public, is created by her as much as it creates her, representing both what

she would like to be and what she is not. It was ‘a clever exercise in deception’ (KtWA,

64), something to admire, but

it was not her, this room. It was an image of how her lover wished her to be, and
how she had tried to be. All the violent tumult in her was supposedly stilled here.
But the struggle went on, and no one, not even Rodin, knew how she was losing
the battle. Sometimes, she was afraid of the power of the room she had created.
She loved it, but it could make her want to scream and wreck it, hurl the chair out
of the window, tear the curtains to pieces, smash the flower pots, and then say to
Rodin, Look, behold, this is me. But she never did. She went on straining to match
herself to the room and make herself a true reflection of it. Gradually, this led her
to paint it, the room on the courtyard, the room as he would have her be. The lie.
(KtWA, 64)

In order to paint this room and to represent the woman Rodin wants her to be, but whom

she cannot be, Gwen feels she must ‘empty [the room] of herself’ (KtWA, 65). It is this

painting – Forster’s fictional counterpart of John’s A Corner of the Artist’s Room in

Paris (1907-1909) – and the space it portrays through which we come to know the

women on whom the rest of the novel focuses, and through whom, in turn, we also learn

more of Gwen despite the fact that she intended the picture to be empty of herself.

When the first version of the painting is finished, a version ‘painted with such joy’

(KtWA, 82) and hope, Gwen decides to part with it and ‘complete [the next] in a

different mood, and then hide [it]’ (KtWA, 82). It is only after having painted the room

with the awareness that it is a misrepresentation of her identity that Gwen can ‘be done

with trying to make herself into what her lover wanted’ (KtWA, 82). We part with Gwen

as she passes on the first painting to her friend Ursula, but, because of the painting, we
 243

never leave her entirely.

Gwen cautions her friend not to ‘look at it now’ and, instead, to wait and ‘look at

it when you are home, alone, in your own room’ (KtWA, 84), anticipating how each

woman’s relationship to her own space will shape her relationship to the painting and

the space portrayed within it. Perspective and context become crucial to the ways in

which other women perceive the picture as well as its painter. Each woman who owns

the painting literally and metaphorically reframes it. Ursula, upon leaving Paris for her

parents’ home, notices that ‘the frame was old and cracked and did not fit the canvas

exactly’ (KtWA, 85), and becomes the first to remove the frame that Gwen had chosen

for her work. Shortly after, Charlotte’s father ‘had thought the painting should be

properly framed and had chosen a frame himself’, but Charlotte, who falls in love with

the piece at first sight, ‘was not sure that his choice was right [...] A gilt frame

contradicted everything the painting was about and she could not understand why her

father, of all people, did not see this’ (KtWA, 113). Stella echoes Charlotte’s concerns

and remarks that ‘Whoever framed it didn’t paint it, I bet [...] The frame is wrong, [...]

all wrong’ (KtWA, 164). Eventually, Gillian admits that

the choice of frame was tricky [...] At first, she’d thought a simple, plain, narrow
wooden frame would suit it best, but the simplicity of the frame somehow worked
against the subtlety of the painting. She tried a broader frame, still of plain wood,
with the same result, then decided on a darker wood. This worked better, though it
was not perfect. (KtWA, 314)

With these acts of framing come different acts of interpretation, influenced by personal

as well as historical contexts. Ursula’s perspective on the painting differs greatly from

Gwen’s intentions. Ursula, knowing of Gwen’s unrequited love for Rodin, is not

deceived by the room’s seeming tranquillity, but instead feels that it expresses, rather

than conceals, her friend’s emotions:

It was [...] a life inside which has been brought outside. The empty chair, the
parasol leaning against it, the table bare except for the flowers – they were all
disguises [...] The corner of the room was soon invaded by the real Gwen, the
 244

distraught Gwen longing for her maitre who no longer deigned to visit her. He
would not be fooled. Indeed, Ursula found herself thinking, in all probability he
had never been fooled. Gwen had intrigued him, and he had undoubtedly felt
passion for her, but he had always been wary of being consumed by her, and when
that became too great a danger he had extricated himself. Ursula felt such pain for
her friend. She walked around the room, cradling the painting in her arms, and
there were tears in her eyes. (KtWA, 85)

Charlotte, who does not know who painted the picture, is ‘proud of being susceptible to

surroundings’ (KtWA, 114) and desires to become a painter herself. She begins to ‘live

in the painting, narrowing her eyes and hypnotising herself’, responding as Gwen John

would have wanted her to, feeling that the painter must be ‘a successful artist because

this room of hers was no garret’ and that they must be ‘quite alone, and content’ (KtWA,

113). The painting also promises, Charlotte believes, that ‘someone would come into

her life and change it’ (KtWA, 113), just as Gwen had hoped for Rodin’s return to her.

Charlotte soon discovers that her talents do not live up to her desires or expectations,

which had been heightened by the painting and romantic artist’s life Charlotte saw in it.

Like Gwen, Charlotte is disappointed and realises that the painting made her believe she

was someone she is not but rather than being sad, she explains to her mother that she

can still ‘be moved by art, she could admire and value what artist produced. She cared

about great art passionately, but she was not an artist’ (KtWA, 143); ‘a painting deluded

me’, she reflects, ‘into thinking I was something I clearly am not. That’s all’ (KtWA,

149).

After a burglary at the Falconers’ house, Alan purchases the painting for his

partner Stella. Ginny, who takes possession of the painting after Stella’s departure, is

struck by the fragility of the tranquil scene. ‘The apparent serenity, the prettiness, of the

painting did not fool her for a moment’, she claims, and, echoing Ursula’s impression of

the piece but without any knowledge of the artist’s identity, Ginny notes how ‘it looked

peaceful, innocuous, but she thought the hand that painted it might have trembled.

Effort was there, an absolute determination to remain calm. Someone’s breath was
 245

being held. And the sense of waiting, the anticipation of someone’s arrival, was painful’

(KtWA, 201). Ginny also questions to what extent her relationship to and perception of

the painting are influenced by the way she came to own it: ‘She thought perhaps that the

sense of mystery about it might be due merely to how it had come to her. This man who

was reputed to have found it on a junk stall in London, what was he like? And Stella

herself, fleeing from him, but why? All these questions attached to the painting, giving

it a significance it might not otherwise have had’ (KtWA, 202). For her, the identity of

the painter is irrelevant, as are the picture’s value, because ‘she loved it. It enriched her

life. It made her feel dreamy and content’ (KtWA, 202).

Ginny’s daughter, Lucasta, who inherits the painting from her mother, has at first

no particular relationship to the piece, but this changes at the end of World War II, when

Lucasta notices how the picture ‘now seemed to represent peace and peace was

something to be longed for. The state of mind it represented in that attic was enviable,

not dreary’ (KtWA, 216). Later, however, Lucasta’s perception of the painting changes

once again, and she reflects on the development of her relationship to it over the years,

from the years as a girl during which the pictures ‘had seemed a peaceful image, the

pretty corner of an attic, but also insipid, unexciting, even soporific’, to later years when

‘she had come to see it as triumphant, catching a mood of something gained after great

effort’, and finally to her present feeling that ‘it was surely a picture of sadness, a gentle

wistfulness, the reflection of an aching heart. She couldn’t hear its poignancy [...] It was

too full of heart-break’ (KtWA, 249). Aisla comes to own the painting through her

husband, who was given it by Lucasta, his mistress, when she broke off their affair.

After her husband’s death, Aisla decides to keep the picture, even when she is made

aware of how her late husband had come to own it. Her relationship to it, like Lucasta’s,

develops and changes over time. First, she ‘could hardly see it at all’ and ‘wondered if

she was getting any nearer to understanding it’ (KtWA, 269), but she soon grows fond of
 246

it, despite her inability to decide whether ‘this was a happy or a sad picture’ (KtWA,

276).

In Forster’s novel, then, each woman’s interpretation of the painting depends on

the relationship they have with their own spaces, a relationship which, in turn, reflects

individual struggles with their conflicting identities as wives, carers, mothers, artists,

lovers and independent women. At the same time, however, each new relationship

formed with the painting puts into perspective Gwen’s original connection to the space

depicted in the scene as well as her experiences during the period of her life with which

Forster presents us. Although this strategy is effective in that it avoids portraying John

as an isolated subject both during and beyond her lifetime, it is questionable why

Forster decides to leave Gwen at a point at which, in her real life, she became intensely

religious, culminating in her eventual conversion to Catholicism. This confirms Nell

Irvin Painter’s critique that one of the blind spots of feminist biography, and I would

argue of contemporary feminist theory and of neo-Victorian fiction, is its inability to

negotiate a secular representation of their subject while also adopting a serious (rather

than dismissive) approach of its subjects’ religious faiths.173

The gap created by this lack of attention to religion is, in the case of neo-Victorian

fiction, often filled with explorations of Victorian spiritualism, magic and

manifestations of the supernatural, including – to name but a few examples – Barbara

Ewing’s The Mesmerist (2007), John Harwood’s The Séance (2008), Christopher

Priest’s The Prestige (1995) and Sarah Waters’ Affinity (1999). As Rosario Arias and

Patricia Pulham note, the evocation of spirits, spectres and illusions suits the neo-

Victorian genre on a metafictional level as it enables authors to reflect (on)

‘Victorianism […] as a revenant or a ghostly visitor from the past’ whose

173
Painter, ‘Writing Biographies of Women’, p.163.
 247

‘textual/spectral traces’ haunt contemporary literature and culture.174 However, religion,

whose destabilisation by Darwinism was such a central concern in the mid and late-

nineteenth century, remains left behind, perhaps because it seems to offer little ground

for reflection to a secular Western readership in the twenty-first century, particularly

one which currently defines itself so strongly against the stereotype of a unanimously

religious East through exactly this secularism. Third-wave feminists, in an equal move

of avoidance, have engaged extensively with questions of multiculturalism, race and

ethnicity as gendered issues which are central to women’s lives today. Yet, to date, it

has largely failed to visibly accommodate or provide new approaches to women’s

relationships with various faiths. 175

Conclusion

As Painter points out, ‘sadly, much feminist biography, like much academic writing,

sacrifices a general readership to habits of scholarship’,176 a discrepancy which neo-

Victorian biographical fiction can bridge through its inherent concern with matters of

sex/uality and its openly fictional narratives, both of which facilitate the gendered

approach and innovative methods of feminist biography while at the same time adding

to the appeal of feminist life writing in the literary marketplace. Arnold’s Girl in a Blue

Dress and Forster’s Keeping the World Away thus successfully combine postmodern

identity politics with a distinctly gendered and feminist view on their female subjects.

Yet, despite their careful constructions of their subjects and the narrative benefits the

174
Rosario Arias and Patricia Pulham (eds.), ‘Introduction’, Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-
Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp.xi-xxvi (pp.xv-xvi).
175
Sarah Page. ‘Feminism and the Third Wave: Politicising the Sociology of Religion’, paper
presented at Thinking Gender: The Next Generation, University of Leeds (21-22 June 2006), Accessed: 1
August 2011, http://www.gender-studies.leeds.ac.uk/assets/files/epapers/epaper17-sarah-page.pdf. A
notable exception, here, is Carolyn D. Riswold’s Feminism and Christianity: Questions and Answers in
the Third Wave (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2009), and at the time this thesis is being finalised, it remains
yet to be seen whether France’s recent banning of the burqa and the uprisings of the Arab Spring will
engender more rigorous third-wave engagements with issues surrounding feminism and religion.
176
Nell Irvin Painter, ‘Writing Biographies of Women’, Journal of Women's History, 9:2 (Summer
1997), pp.154-163 (p.163).
 248

genre of neo-Victorian fictions offers, these texts also reveal further questions regarding

our readerly desires for the Victorians and how these expectations shape the

representations of the biographical subjects in these novels. While I have critiqued

Elsna’s early biography of Catherine for its victimisation of Dickens’ wife, we also

must ask whether Arnold’s text would be as appealing to and successful with a twenty-

first century audience had Arnold chosen to omit the fiction details of Dodo’s love life

with Dickens or had she rendered their conjugal visits less passionate. Similarly,

Forster’s narrative of Gwen John omits an aspect so essential to its subject’s life in

favour exploring, perhaps, themes which a secular readership can identify with more

easily. As with non-biographical neo-Victorian fiction, then, the characters of these neo-

Victorian biographies remain affected by the sexational and secular reputation of the

genre, that is, they are subjects to be consumed and, as such, reveal some of the blind

spots of neo-Victorian fiction as well as of contemporary feminism.

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CONCLUSIONS
The feminist politics of neo-Victorian fiction: reflections and blind
spots

We all belong to our own time, and there is nothing that we can do to

escape from it. Whatever we write will be contemporary, even if we

attempt a novel set in a past age.

Robertson Davies, The Merry Heart (1997)177

I began this thesis by proposing that neo-Victorian fiction’s portrayal of the nineteenth

century functions as a textual mirror in which, as contemporary beholders, we can

discern the features of our present more clearly. This function is not reserved for the

works of ambitious authors of literarily sophisticated historiographic metafictions;

rather, as Robertson Davies’ comment highlights, any narrative is inevitably influenced

by and always a direct product of the present in which it is written, regardless of its

author’s intentions. As such, neo-Victorian fiction and the ways in which it conceives of

the Victorian past will always reveal as much, and often more, about the present in

which it is produced as about the histories it reimagines.

The genre’s contemporary perspectives and relevance are especially pronounced

in its reflections of matters regarding women, gender and sexuality. Authors return to

the nineteenth century as a narrative backdrop to investigate the period’s significance in

the development of such contemporary feminist concerns, be it through mid-Victorian

beliefs surrounding female heredity, the legal and medical discourses of first attempts to

regulate the pornography and prostitution trades, the forming of new disciplines and

gendered theories in the mental health sciences during the fin de siècle, or the wider

impact of a combination of these cultural contexts on specific historical female figures.

177
Robertson Davies, The Merry Heart: Reflections on Reading, Writing, and the World of Books
(New York: Viking, 1997), p.358.
 250

Evoking and rewriting these histories from a twenty-first century perspective, the texts

discussed in this thesis do not turn their backs on the present but, instead, prompt us to

consider the ways in which the past compares to and shapes contemporary debates

concerning the feminist issues its narratives thematise. Through this, they do not

‘attempt to find resolution or to pass the blame’, but ‘return us to, develop us from, and

connect us with our Victorian precursors’.178 By contextualising specifically

matrilinealism, mental health, pornography, prostitution and feminist biography in their

respective histories as feminist issues and by considering their textual representations in

light of current third-wave feminist theories, the chapters of this thesis have

demonstrated that neo-Victorian fiction can act, in various ways and often to varying

extents, as a means of highlighting and critically exploring the factors which shape and

problematise contemporary feminist theory and practice as well as the processes and

politics at work in contemporary revisitations of the Victorian past.

The use of third-wave feminist theory as an analytical framework for my

readings, then, fulfils several crucial functions within this thesis. Firstly, it provides a

twenty-first century context for twenty-first century fictions. That is, third-wave

feminist theory has arisen out of, responds to and explores the same socio-cultural

conditions as the novels discussed in this project, and demonstrates a concern with

similar issues. Reading these texts within the context of current third-wave debates

surrounding the mother-daughter relationship, power relations in psychotherapy, the

oppressive and emancipatory potential of pornographic representations of women’s

sexualities, the gendered economics of sex work, and the application of postmodern

gender and identity theories in feminist biography highlights both the contemporary

nature of the texts in question by revealing their representations of and, frequently,

complex engagement with contemporary feminist concerns.

178
Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First
Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p.27 and p.32.
 251

At the same time, however, the combination of third-wave feminist theory and

neo-Victorian fiction also demonstrates that while certain critical perspectives on these

particular feminist issues have shifted over time, the central problems and debates

around which they revolve are by no means new. As the introductions to the previous

chapters have demonstrated, neo-Victorian fiction’s return to the nineteenth century

lends itself to the exploration of contemporary feminist issues because so many of these

debates and problems have their origins in the Victorian period and beg both

comparison to as well as distinction from contemporary culture, defeating simplistic

notions of either our similarity to the period or our drastic difference from it.

Like neo-Victorian fiction, third-wave feminism is inherently defined by its

continued attempts to negotiate and define its relationship to its predecessors,

specifically to the second wave but also to a longer feminist tradition more generally.

As my discussion of matrilinealism in Chapter One illustrates, third-wave feminism and

neo-Victorian fiction share this preoccupation with the connection between past and

present, and indeed their genealogical conceputalisation of that connection. Third-wave

analyses and utilisations of matrilinealism are indispensable to our understanding of the

genre’s continuing representations of the mother-daughter relationship, both within a

feminist context and within the wider context of neo-Victorianism’s construction of its

relationship to the Victorian past, as they highlight the pitfalls as well as the potentials

of such perceived genealogies for feminist theory and for historical notions of

periodization.

Third-wave feminism’s self-consciousness regarding its politics and practices

applies not only to its historiographic methods but also to its stance toward sexualised

consumer cultures, as I have demonstrated in the introduction to this thesis. The third

wave acknowledges and even consciously explores the contradictions that arise from

women’s attempts to critique and subvert exploitative economic structures, popular

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images of female beauty and oppressive sexual norms while at the same time

participating in those very practices and structures. Together with its historiographic

self-consciousness, third-wave theory therefore provides a fitting framework for the

exploration of neo-Victorian fiction’s own representations of gender and sex/uality in a

historical setting. It enables us to analyse and evaluate the effectiveness of neo-

Victorian fiction as a literary avenue of feminist enquiry, including the contradictions

and ambiguities which result from the genre’s sexsational appeal on the literary

marketplace and, thus, of its status as a product and beneficiary of the very culture it so

often seeks to critique.

While the texts discussed in this thesis vary in their formal executions, they

diverge also, and more importantly, both in terms of the nature of the relationship

between past and present which they propose and in their revisionary potentials and

politics. For example, Faulks’ Human Traces and Holeman’s A Linnet Bird, like Elsna’s

much earlier Unwanted Wife, in focusing on Victorian madwomen, prostitutes,

colonialism, and the dysfunctional marriage of Catherine Dickens respectively, clearly

aim to highlight and ‘rectify certain historical wrongs’ by attempting to provide

fictional voices for these female figures who largely have remained overlooked or

silenced in historical records.179 These texts suggest a positivist understanding of history

and, consequently, a degree of superiority by approaching their subjects from an ethical

and intellectual viewpoint supposedly superior to and more developed than the

Victorians’, therefore ‘inscribing an insurmountable difference’ not only in sexual but

also in moral ‘knowledge and competence between the Victorians – “them” –and us’.180

Yet, the critical eye with which these narratives approach nineteenth-century culture and

179
Christian Gutleben, Nostalgic Postmodernism: The Victorian Tradition and the Contemporary
British Novel (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), p.7.
180
Marie-Luise Kohlke, ‘The Neo-Victorian Sexsation: Literary Excursions into the Nineteenth
Century Erotic’, Probing the Problematics: Sex and Sexuality, ed. by Marie-Luise Kohlke and Luisa Orza
(Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2008), pp.345-356 (p.350).
 253

convention is not turned upon the politics at work in their own construction of their

historical subjects. Rather than subverting the historical discourses and practices they

critique, these novels create contemporary reinscriptions of them, be it in the form of

Faulks’ overwriting of his madwoman protagonist, Holeman’s reinstatement of Western

(feminist) superiority or Elsna’s repetition of the victimisation and marginalisation of

Catherine Dickens. In cases such as these, the fictional evocation of ‘the voices of

ethnically, socially or sexually underprivileged characters’ becomes indeed a form of

Gutleben’s inherently conservative ‘nostalgic postmodernism’, a shallow trope rather

than a subversive strategy. Neo-Victorian fiction’s attempts to illustrate the distance

between the nineteenth and late-twentieth or twenty-first centuries can, then,

inadvertently and paradoxically draw attention to the very proximity between past and

present literary and feminist practices.

Other texts, however, purposely suggest similarities and parallels between Victorian

and contemporary periods and explicitly challenge positivist notions of the past. It is in

these self-conscious and metafictional examples of the genre that we find not only a

questioning of the relationship between past and present but also comments on neo-

Victorian fiction’s and feminism’s own politics. As Heilmann and Llewellyn have

noted,

as a form of historical fiction, the neo-Victorian is partly driven by illusion and

fabrication, but when working at the highest levels of sophistication, it also
serves a self-conscious purpose of highlighting the nature of the ‘trick’ or game
being played with readers, viewers, and critics.181

Accordingly, works such as Walbert’s A Short History of Women and Waters’

Fingersmith, through their focus on matrilineal narratives, highlight both the

inescapability of history, be it feminist, literary or both, and the performative nature of

generational and historical acts of identification and rejection. In their hands, the past

becomes something which should neither be denied nor unquestioningly emulated;

181
Heilmann and Llewellyn, Neo-Victorianism, p.31.
 254

rather, progress – personal as well as social – can only be achieved through a productive

union between history and the present which remains conscious and critical of its own

complexities and flaws. At the same time, these texts emphasise the restrictions of and

attempt to destabilise generational conceptualisations of that relationship; nevertheless,

they also acknowledge that their own narratives, and, indeed, third-wave feminism and

neo-Victorianism, are, however involuntarily, caught up within a problematic (and often

artificially linear) genealogical paradigm.

A third category of novels, such as Chance’s Inconvenient Wife, Faber’s The

Crimson Petal or Arnold’s Girl in a Blue Dress take issue with contemporary

constructions of particular Victorian figures, including the madwoman, the prostitute

and the wife. These texts introduce characters who challenge the doubly victimising

stereotypes of the mentally unstable and powerless female patient perpetually at the

mercy of her doctor, the poverty-stricken fallen woman who involuntarily succumbs to

walking the streets, and the mistreated, clueless and hopeless wife of a publicly beloved

but privately cruel and irrational husband. All of these texts highlight the unknowability

of the past and the paradoxical effects of certain feminist conceptualisations of its

female figures, issues which are perhaps most prominently addressed in Forster’s

Keeping the World Away through the novel’s challenge of conventional biographical

modes and its emphasis on the processes of historical translation and interpretation at

work in life writing.

Yet, while Forster’s fictional biography both highlights and successfully

circumnavigates some of the traps of the historical imagination, its refusal to engage

with its subject’s religious beliefs and experiences is demonstrative of an absence which

is prevalent in much, if not most, neo-Victorian fiction and, indeed, third-wave feminist

theory. This absence is perhaps not surprising since, ‘grounded as they are in a post-

religious age, many contemporary novels pay little attention to the dominance of
 255

religious modes in the nineteenth century and instead focus on the more spiritualist

concerns of the later Victorian period’.182 Faber’s The Crimson Petal is arguably an

exception here, but no serious intentions are palpable in its portrayal of Agnes as a

religious fanatic and of Henry as a sexually and spiritually confused man who

eventually dies from the suppression of his feelings for Emmeline Fox, the only

religious figure in the novel who does not pass away or disappear, a fate that may result

from her practicing a very rational and worldly version of Christianity. As Burstein

notes in her ‘Rules for Writing Neo-Victorian Novels’, other authors frequently resort to

illustrating Christians as ‘good, as long as they are not evangelicals’ and evangelicals as

‘bad, and frequently hypocritical’,183 rather than engaging in any significant depth with

faith questions in either their Victorian or contemporary contexts.

It is also Faber’s The Crimson Petal which highlights further shortcomings of

neo-Victorian fiction as well as of literary (and) feminist scholarship. As much as

scholars have devoted time to discussing the novel’s sexual politics and its historical

practices, little work has been done on its adaptation of Victorian masculinities,

particularly in the form of William Rackham, who, while certainly a comical and

despicable character, is clearly also the pitiable product of a culturally and historically

specific set of patrilineal pressures and expectations. Despite the growing area of

masculinity studies in Victorianist scholarship as well as in other disciplinary fields, this

gap is also apparent in work on the sex industry, where the majority of attention is

focused on women’s roles within the trade.184 As O’Neill highlights, research into

men’s roles in the industry is essential to the feminist project since ‘in order to develop

a clearer understanding and analysis of the gendered organization of prostitution we

182
Heilmann and Llewellyn, p.30.
183
Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, ‘Rules for Writing Neo-Victorian Novels’, The Little Professor:
Things Victorian and Academic (15 March 2006), Accessed: 1 October 2010, http://littleprofessor.
typepad.com/the_little_professor/2006/03/rules_for_writi.html.
184
Maggie O’Neill, Prostitution and Feminism: Towards a Politics of Feeling (Oxford: Polity Press,
2001), p.154.
 256

must turn out attention to the men involved in prostitution and the organization of the

wider sex industry’.185 The apparent neglect of masculinity in historical fiction more

generally and in the area of sex work specifically are thus both palpable in neo-

Victorianist as well as wider feminist and gender scholarship.

In turn, women’s involvement in not only the sex industry but also in a wider,

sexualised consumer culture clearly presents one of the most popular stimuli for neo-

Victorian fiction. As becomes clear in Faber’s novel as well as in Waters’ and Starlings’

texts, these works are concerned as much with the gendered politics and economies of

the sex trade as they are with the ethics of their own textual and sexual appropriations.

Although these novels reflect upon the oppressive as well as emancipator aspects of

pornography and prostitution in particular, they raise much wider issues regarding the

subversive potential of the neo-Victorian sexsation and the sexual politics of third-wave

feminism. No matter how self-conscious and/or metafictional, these examples of neo-

Victorian fiction cater for and benefit from the same readerly desires for a sexualised

Victorian past as their less sophisticated and more conservative counterparts. Like third-

wave feminists, these novels participate in the sexualised consumerism which they set

out to explore and critique.

Yet, rather than discarding any of these subversive efforts as inherently flawed

or ‘unfeminist’, we should perhaps consider them as contributions to the increasing

critical inquiries into the sexualisation of culture which critics such as Brian McNair

and Feona Attwood rightly advocate.186 If third-wave feminists are to be both self-

reflective and non-judgmental about their (sexual) practices, then, like neo-Victorian

fiction, they must continue to investigate – rather than blindly accept – the sometimes

uncomfortable ambiguities and contradictions with which, according to Gamble, they

185
Ibid., p.8.
186
See: Feona Attwood (ed.) ‘Introduction: The Sexualization of Culture’, Mainstreaming Sex: The
Sexualization of Western Culture (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), pp.xiii-xxiv; Brian McNair, Mediated Sex:
Pornography and Postmodern Culture (London: Hodder Arnold, 1996) and Striptease Culture: Sex,
Media and the Democratization of Desire (London: Routledge, 2002).
 257

are so at ease.187 Neo-Victorian fiction, then, is neither innately progressive nor

inherently conservative in its reimagining of the nineteenth century and its

representations of the feminist issues discussed in this thesis. Reading the genre through

a contemporary feminist lens reveals that its illustrations of the past reflect and

interrogate current social and cultural concerns regarding women, sex and gender as

much as they exemplify and question the genre’s politics and practices. Despite as well

as because of its obsessive return to history, neo-Victorian fiction, as a contemporary

textual mirror, can therefore divulge as much, if not more, about the blind spots of the

present as about the past.

187
Sarah Gamble (ed.) ‘Postfeminism’, The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Postfeminism
(London: Routledge, 2001), pp.43-54.
 258

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