In a new book, the literary scholar Sharon Marcus maps out the complex geography of Victorian womanhood
For Victorian novelists — and Victorian society in general — women existed in relation to men, who defined their desires and their place in the world. That has been the prevailing critical line for two or three decades now, as scholars have plowed through the 19th-century canon, digging up evidence of heterosexual hegemony and resistance to it.
But do we understand Victorian lives and relationships as well as we think we do? A new book, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton University Press) by Sharon Marcus, an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, makes the case that Victorian novels describe a world of female friendship and desire that is far more essential, and far less repressed, than scholars have been willing or able to see. She backs up her readings with a close examination of the record of real women’s lives, preserved in letters, diaries, and other everyday writings.
Between Women assembles what Ms. Marcus calls an “atlas” of “the female world of Victorian England.” And it may signal the rising influence of a generation of scholars able to see Victorian culture with fresh eyes.
At the heart of Ms. Marcus’s book is what she calls “the remarkably overlooked fact that almost every Victorian novel that ends in marriage has first supplied its heroine with an intimate female friend.”
Female friendship is, she argues, the “narrative matrix” of 19th-century fiction, even as it drives toward uniting heroines and heroes in marriage. Similarly, it played a key role in sustaining Victorian families, both in literature and in life.
“Friendships and marriages were both about sympathy, which is an incredibly Important concept for the Victorians,” Ms. Marcus says in an interview. “In some ways, these friendships are the sinews of these novels.”
Challenging Conventions
The last big moment in Victorian studies came 20-plus years ago, when critics like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg brought feminism, gender studies, and queer studies to bear on texts like George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch. (Ms. Sedgwick is an English professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center, Ms. Butler is a rhetoric and comparative-literature professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and Ms. Smith-Rosenberg is a history professor at the University of Michigan.)
“Victorian studies was really galvanized and energized in the late 80s,” says Ivan Kreilkamp, an associate professor of English at Indiana University at Bloomington and co-editor, with Andrew H. Miller, of the journal Victorian Studies. “Some of the most transformative scholarship in literary studies generally emerged out of Victorian studies in that moment.”
Since then, Mr. Kreilkamp continues, “It feels like we haven’t had anything truly new to replace those arguments.”
As a challenge to both queer studies and to heterosexual orthodoxies, Between Women could be that something new. Mr. Kreilkamp’s journal will be doing a special forum on the book this year. “It definitely stood out to us as consequential,” he says of Between Women. “My guess is that some people aren’t going to like it. It’s pretty polemical.”
Ms. Marcus’s treatment of “canonical Victorian fiction,” says Mr. Kreilkamp, “shows over and over that female friendship generates a marriage outcome. People have not been able to see this because they’ve only seen it as a betrayal, or as a lesbian possibility that has been foreclosed.”
But Between Women goes well beyond fresh readings of novels. Ms. Marcus also pored over Victorian women’s letters, diaries, biographies, and autobiographies to assemble “an atlas of Victorian England’s multiple female relations.” Among other discoveries, the author retrieved the passionate vocabulary of words and gestures that female friends who were not lovers regularly used with each other.
As Ms. Marcus delved deeper into that era’s culture, she found other evidence that the Victorians actively encouraged women to cultivate desire in certain forms, and viewed it as a normal part of feminine nature. For instance, illustrated fashion magazines and domestic periodicals boomed during the period; after close study of their contents, Ms. Marcus concluded that those publications thought of their readers — mostly mainstream, middle-class women — as active consumers of female beauty. “Victorian fashion iconography,” she writes, “disproves the still-influential claims that men look and women are looked at.”
She found parallels between Victorian doll literature — stories intended mostly for girls — and Victorian pornography, with its emphasis on subjugation, whipping, and other submission and domination narratives. Those themes regularly appeared in women’s domestic magazines, too, mostly whenever the subject of disciplining children came up.
Repression and Desire
Between Women is Ms. Marcus’s second book. Her first monograph, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London, came out in 1999 from the University of California Press.
The title of her new book invokes Ms. Sedgwick’s influential 1985 study, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. A classic 1975 essay by Ms. Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual” (although it focuses on 19th-century America rather than Victorian England), helped inspire Ms. Marcus to take a closer look at female relations. Another point of departure is Ms. Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990).
Like many undergraduates, Ms. Marcus fell in love with 19th-century literature in college. She graduated from Brown University in 1986 and received a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Johns Hopkins in 1995; she belongs to the generation of scholars who came of intellectual age steeped in the work of Ms. Sedgwick, Ms. Butler, et al.
In Between Women, Ms. Marcus observes that the big theoretical moment of 20 years ago compelled scholars interested in gender and sexuality to dig up what mainstream culture “excludes, represses, or pathologizes” — gay and lesbian desire, for instance, or the idea of women as sexual creatures independent of men. Even queer readings have obeyed a sort of inverse heterosexual template: Desires had to be either hetero or homo. There was no middle ground.
Victorians made no such distinction, she argues. “Our contemporary opposition between hetero- and homosexuality did not exist for Victorians,” writes Ms. Marcus. “Victorians were thus able to see relationships between women as central to lives also organized around men.”
Ms. Marcus has concluded that, when applied to Victorian literature, critics’ approaches have produced too many anachronistic readings that describe not the 19th century but the 20th, with its need to “define gay and lesbian existence through repression and the resistance to it.”
For instance, she marshalls evidence that lesbians and same-sex couples were more part of the 19th-century mainstream than has commonly been assumed. They figure prominently, for instance, in her attempt to trace “the genealogy of marriage” — how the institution evolved in the 19th century from sacrament to contract. She argues that a number of well-known and socially accepted lesbian figures and couples contributed to Victorian debates over what form marriage could and should take.
“I do not claim to plumb hidden depths,” she writes, “but to account more fully for what texts present on their surface but critics have failed to notice.”
Friends and Lovers
In Between Women, Ms. Marcus tries out her readings on some of the staples of Victorian-lit courses, including George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield and Great Expectations (in which she reads the relationship between Miss Havisham and Estella as a sort of marriage and Pip, the lower-class boy who is brought in as a companion for Estella, as a sort of feminine accessory, like a doll).
In Middlemarch, for instance, Ms. Marcus seizes not on a much-discussed scene, late in the novel, in which Dorothea at last gives in to “the flood of her young passion” for the dashing Will Ladislaw, but on an encounter between Dorothea and Rosamond Lydgate, the doctor’s pretty, vapid wife, which occurs a few pages earlier.
In that scene, Dorothea, having caught Will and Rosamond together and jumped to the wrong conclusion, comes to visit the doctor’s wife. The two women unburden themselves in an encounter that features as many passionate tears, embraces, and confessions as Dorothea and Will’s subsequent big moment does.
Eliot’s narration describes the fateful female clinch of reconciliation in language that, to contemporary ears, could easily describe the end of a lovers’ spat: “Rosamond, taken hold of by an emotion stronger than her own — hurried along in a new movement which gave all things some new, awful, undefined aspect — could find no words, but involuntarily she put her lips to Dorothea’s forehead which was very near her, and then for a minute the two women clasped each other as if they had been in a shipwreck. ... They moved apart, looking at each other. When you came yesterday — it was not as you thought,’ said Rosamond. ...”
In Ms. Marcus’s eyes, this moment obeys the conventions of Victorian female relations. Moreover, she makes a good case that the two heterosexual lovers cannot get together until Dorothea and Rosamond reach their own accord. The women’s heart-to-heart frees Dorothea to confess her feelings for Will.
“At the outset of this project, I’d have expected female friendship to be something that these novels would be suppressing in some way, because it’s too disruptive to the marriage system” that 19th-century novelists promoted, she says. As she read, though, she came to the conclusion that “it has been the criticism that has suppressed female friendship, rather than Victorian novels.”
Reactions and Interventions
Ms. Marcus’s book has not been out long enough to be fully digested by the slow-moving metabolism of scholarly publishing. Judith Butler wrote a blurb for it, and Hermione Lee gave it a mostly enthusiastic review in the London Review of Books, but few reviews have appeared so far on this side of the Atlantic.
The scholars who are most likely to be interested — or irritated — by Ms. Marcus’s theoretical interventions have not yet had a chance to do more than crack the cover. Ms. Sedgwick, for instance, has only just gotten a copy of the book. “On a quick glance, it looks very interesting indeed,” she says. “I do think she overstates the differences between her conceptual framework and mine, as a way of highlighting some important aspects of her project — quite understandably, of course.” But she also says that “it looks much more sustained and inclusive as a way of moving around within that broader conceptual framework than anything I’ve seen.”
Between Women arrives at a time when Victorianists appear to be having more of a collective, and inclusive, conversation than they have in years. Dino Franco Felluga, associate professor of English at Purdue University at West Lafayette and chairman of the executive council of the North American Victorian Studies Association, sees the book as part of a wave of “recent, prominent studies that employ the insights of cultural materialism in support of a reconceived history of ideas, exploring a single issue (here, female friendship) across genres, fields, and disciplinary boundaries.” Other such works include Nicholas Dames’s Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870 (Oxford University Press, 2001), and John Picker’s Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford, 2003).
In the four years since its founding, Mr. Felluga’s organization has swelled from 200 members to 750. Ms. Marcus believes that the Victorians continue to intrigue us because, in some ways, they resemble us — and because, as her book demonstrates, scholarship on the period so heavily reflects its own time.
“You can look at the last 30 or 40 years of journals and track not Victorian history but our own,” she says — with gender and sexuality studies being a prime example. Over the last decade, “there’s been an unraveling of our certainty about what Victorian’ is. ... You can keep turning to Victorian literature and ask a whole new series of questions.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 53, Issue 42, Page A14