ATILIM UNIVERSITY

GRADUATE SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
ENGLISH CULTURE AND LITERATURE DOCTORAL PROGRAMME

A GYNOCRITICAL STUDY OF GENDER IN THE SUB-GENRES OF THE

VICTORIAN NOVEL: CHARLOTTE BRONTE’S JANE EYRE, ELIZABETH
GASKELL’S NORTH AND SOUTH AND MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON’S
LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET.

Dissertation

Ziead AL-KHAFAF

Ankara-2022
 ATILIM UNIVERSITY
GRADUATE SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
ENGLISH CULTURE AND LITERATURE DOCTORAL PROGRAM

A GYNOCRITICAL STUDY OF GENDER IN THE SUB-GENRES

OF THE VICTORIAN NOVEL: CHARLOTTE BRONTE’S JANE
EYRE, ELIZABETH GASKELL’S NORTH AND SOUTH AND
MARY ELIZABETH BRADDON’S LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET.

Dissertation

Ziead AL-KHAFAF

Supervisor
Prof. Dr. N. Belgin ELBIR

Ankara-2022
 ACCEPTANCE AND APPROVAL

This is to certify that this dissertation titled “A Gynocritical Study of Gender

in the Sub-genres of the Victorian novel: Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Elizabeth
Gaskell’s North and South and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret.”
and prepared by Ziead Al-Khafaf meets with the committee’s approval
unanimously/by a majority vote as dissertation in the field of English Language and
Literature following the successful defense of the thesis conducted on 17/1/2022

Prof. Dr. Nüzhet Berrin AKSOY (Jury Chair)

Prof. Dr. N. Belgin Elbir (Supervisor)

Prof. Dr. Nazan Tutaş (Jury Member)

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Zeynep Atayurt Fenge (Jury Member)

Assist. Prof. Dr. Kuğu Tekin (Jury Member)

Prof. Dr. Dilaver Tengilimoğlu (Director)

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 ETHICS DECLARATION

I hereby declare that;

• I prepared this thesis in accordance with Atılım University Graduate School

of Social Sciences Thesis Writing Directive,

• I prepared this thesis within the framework of academic and ethics rules,

• I presented all information, documents, evaluations and findings in

accordance with scientific ethical and moral principles,

• I cited all sources to which I made reference in my thesis,

• The work of art in this thesis is original,

I hereby acknowledge all possible loss of rights in case of a contrary

circumstance. (in case of any circumstance contradicting with my declaration)

[Date and Signature]

Ziead Al-Khafaf

ii
 ÖZ

AL-KHAFAF, Ziead. “Viktorya Dönemi Romanı Alt Türlerinde Toplumsal

Cinsiyet Konusunun Jinoeleştirel Yaklaşımla İncelenmesi: Charlotte Bronte’nin Jane
Eyre, Elizabeth Gaskell’ın North and South, Mary E. Braddon’ın Lady Audley’s
Secret Adlı Romanları”, Doktora Tezi, Ankara, 2021.

İngiliz kadın roman yazarları, özellikle on dokuzuncu yüzyılın başından

itibaren, kadınların özel yaşam ile toplumsal yaşam alanları arasındaki karşıtlığı
aşmak için verdikleri mücadeleyi ve çabalarını betimleyen, edebi niteliği yüksek, çok
sayıda eser yayımlamışlardır. Bu tezin kuramsal çerçevesini oluşturan “jinoeleştiri”
kuramının sahibi Amerikalı kuramcı ve eleştirmen Elaine Showalter’a göre,
kadınların deneyimleri tarih anlatılarının çoğunda önemsizleştirildiği, hatta kimi
zaman tamamen göz ardı edildiği için, kadın yazarların eserleri kadınların yaşamları
ve deneyimleri konusunda bilgi edinmek açısından son derece değerli birer kaynak
olabilir. Bu görüşten hareketle bu tezde, on dokuzuncu yüzyıldan üç kadın yazarın,
söz konusu dönemde gelişen farklı roman türlerinde yazılmış birer eseri
incelenmektedir. Bu eserler, Charlotte Bronte’nin Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Gaskell’ın
North and South, Mary E. Braddon’ın Lady Audley’s Secret adlı romanlarıdır. Tezin
amacı, romanlarda kadın karakterlerin nasıl temsil edildiğini incelemek; aynı
zamanda, farklı türlerin biçim ve içerik özelliklerinin yazarlara ne gibi olanaklar
sağladığını araştırmaktır. Showalter’ın kuramından, kendisinin önerdiği kültürel
model bağlamında yararlanılarak yapılan inceleme sonucunda, kadın yazarların
“yumuşatılmış” olarak tanımlanabilecek bir söylem tercih ettikleri saptanmıştır.
Elizabeth Gaskell’ın North and South, bir “sanayi romanı” olarak, kadın ve erkek
işçilerin çalışma koşullarına odaklanmakta, böylece kadın karakterlere toplumsal
yaşam içinde daha geniş bir alan açmaktadır. Charlotte Bronte’nin Jane Eyre,
“bildungsroman” türünde bir roman olarak, kahramanı Jane’in kişisel gelişimine ve
olgunlaşma sürecine vurgu yapmakta ve böylece, kadınlara biçilmiş geleneksel
rollerin dışına çıkabileceğini göstermektedir. Mary E. Braddon’ın Lady Audley’s
Secret adlı romanı ise, “sansasyon romanı” özelliği ile, fiziksel güzellik gibi geçici
değerlere önem vermenin yanlışlığını ortaya koyarak kadın karakterlerinin insan
yönlerini öne çıkarmaktadır.

i
 Anahtar Sözcükler: jinoeleştiri, toplumsal ve özel yaşam, gelişim romanı,
sansasyon romanı, sanayi romanı.

ii
 ABSTRACT

{Al-Khafaf Ziead}. {A Gynocritical Study of Gender in the Sub-genres of the

Victorian novel: Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South
and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret.}. {Ph.D. Thesis, Ankara
{2021}.

British women writers from the first half of the nineteenth century wrote not
only prolifically but also managed to document and represent the ways in which the
women of that time negotiated the dichotomies of the public and private spheres.
According to Elaine Showalter, whose theory of gynocriticism informs the research
methodology adopted in this thesis, since women’s experiences were either
undermined in the annals of history or completely ignored, the works of women
writers can be a valuable source to learn about their exclusive experiences. For this
purpose, the novels North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, Jane Eyre by Charlotte
Bronte and Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, each belonging to a
different genre, were chosen as the subjects of analysis. Along with the need to
dissect representations of women, the study also explored whether the three different
genres helped these writers to authenticate these representations and experiment with
it. Using Showalter’s theory of gynocriticism from a cultural perspective, it was
found that women writers often chose to narrate their stories in what could be
described as a muted discourse. This was a discourse which, despite complying
covertly with the expected Victorian norms, perpetuated more nuanced and
groundbreaking ideas in overt tones. Furthermore the different genres provided these
women writers with more space to reinvent their heroines. North and South, an
industrial novel perpetuated the idea of greater female autonomy in the public space
with its emphasis on improved working conditions for both men and women. Jane
Eyre, a bildungsroman novel with its inherent focus on the ability of self-help and
self-education, allowed Jane to overcome most obstacles despite a lack of resources
traditionally thought as compulsory for women. Finally, Lady Audley’s Secret, a
sensation novel, exposed the flaws of valuing superficial beauty thereby humanizing
all women.

Keywords: gynocriticism, public and private spheres, bildungsroman,

sensation, industrial novel

iii
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor Prof. Dr. N.

Belgin Elbir for her endless and devoted supervision, for her kind patience, strong
motivation and ample experience. Prof. Dr. N. Belgin Elbir enlightened me
throughout the years of my study for my Ph.D. Besides my supervisor, I would like
to thank Assoc. Prof. Dr. Zeynep Atayurt Fenge and Assist. Prof. Dr. Kugu Tekin for
their informative and helpful comments and contributions in accomplishing this
thesis. Last but not least, I would like to thank my dearest family (my father, Dr.
Dhirgham and my mother, Ahlam) for their continues support and motivation. I
would like to dedicate this work to my mother because the day she got a breast
cancer, she went through a depression state and she told me that “I would like to see
you the best person in this world because you are my only son, so please grant me
my last wish which is, this Ph.D”. This is all for you my mother, may Allah help you
in your sickness, please get well soon. I could never forget my lovely wife, Dr Zena
who supported me, not only throughout my Ph.D, but throughout my whole marital
life. My two dear angels, Danie and Ranie, they brought me so many coffee mugs
and fruits to motivate me to do the best in my study. They took care of the house
while I was away, they helped their mom, my deepest thanks to you dears. My lovely
‘king’, my son, Abdullah, is the one who gives me the inspiration with his angelic
and pure smile to continue my work with ease. My dear friend Rasool, who
supported me and tolerated me when I was angry, thank you from the bottom of my
heart.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

ÖZ ................................................................................................................................. i

ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................... iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...................................................................................... iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS ........................................................................................... v

INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................... 1

CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL AND HISTORICAL FRAMEWORK ............ 14

1.1. Gynocriticism: Elaine Showalter ................................................................. 14

1.2. The Cultural Model of Gynocriticism ......................................................... 23

1.3. Culture, the Double Voiced Discourse, and Gynocriticism ....................... 28

CHAPTER 2: NORTH AND SOUTH ................................................................... 40

2.1. North and South as an Industrial Novel ..................................................... 40

2.2. North and South and the Female Culture ................................................... 50

2.3. Shifting Ambitions in the Female Culture .................................................. 69

CHAPTER 3: JANE EYRE .................................................................................... 75

3.1. Jane Eyre as a Bildungsroman ..................................................................... 78

3.2. The Victorian Evangelical Culture and Jane Eyre’s Virtual

Dissension ............................................................................................................ 104

CHAPTER 4: LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET ....................................................... 116

4.1. Lady Audley’s Secret as a Sensation Novel ................................................ 116

4.2. Lady Audley as a Perpetrator and a Victim ............................................. 137

4.3. Female Sexuality and Male Exploits in the Sensation Novel .................. 146

CONCLUSION....................................................................................................... 155

WORKS CITED ..................................................................................................... 168

TURNITIN REPORT ............................................................................................ 184

RÉSUMÉ................................................................................................................. 203

v
 INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this research study is to analyse three selected Victorian

novels in the light of the theory of gynocriticism coined by Elaine Showalter in her
article “Towards a Feminist poetics” (Showalter 1979: 216). The research will
conduct a gynocritical feminist study of the representation of women and their
changing roles in Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Bronte, North and South (1854) by
Elizabeth Gaskell and Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. The
three novels represent conventions of different subgenres, namely bildungsroman,
industrial and sensation novels of the early and mid-Victorian era.

The study will analyse three sub-genres of the Victorian novels from
Showalter’s gynocritical lens in order to show how different genres enable writers to
voice their female characters’ suppressed emotions and highlight the dominance
between the debates in the Victorian period around the conditions of women and the
sub-genres of the Victorian novel. The novels have been taken from the feminine
phase of Victorian novels when novels were becoming very popular and women
writers contributed a fair share in this period. These women writers not only
highlighted the problems faced by women, but also the dominant issues of the
period. Showalter identifies the feminine phase “as the period from the appearance of
the male pseudonym in the 1840s to the death of George Eliot in the 1880”
(Showalter 1977: 14). According to Showalter, many women emerged in this period
who entered the professional zones from which they were previously barred. Many
of the activities of the Victorian women “as social reformers, nurses, governesses,
and novelists, either were based in the home or were extensions of the feminine role
as teacher, helper, and mother of mankind” (Showalter 1977: 14).

This study assumes a very close relationship between the representation of

female characters and their experiences, and the forms and plots of different sub-
genres. This is in fact a two-way relationship and this will be analyzed with the help
of gynocritical theory. It will also be assessed if the difference of genre and
conventions enable the women writers to describe the different kinds of problems in
a variety of ways. Moreover, the study will also focus on the ways the three different
sub-genres of Victorian era are compared and contrasted in terms of the
representation of female characters.

1
 All the novels selected for the study have been taken from early and mid-
Victorian period. This was a period when novel began to prosper and a contribution
was made by women novelists such as Bronte, Brandon, Gaskell, Trollope, etc. This
was also an important period for women because the debates of the woman question
had ensued. The Victorian society was filled with debates about a woman’s social
roles and nature.

Each of the novels selected focuses on female protagonists who act as a

mirror of the lives of women in Victorian society of this period. As this was the
initial phase of feminism, the debates and ideologies of women also differed about
the roles of women in the society. According to Nicola Thompson and Gillian Beer
in Victorian Women Writers and the Women Question, “radical writers were as likely
as conservatives to write boomerang plots that either catapult their rebellious
heroines back into conventionality or show the next generation’s backlash against
their mothers’ feminism” (190).

As stated earlier, a gynocritical approach will be the main theoretical

framework in examining the various depictions of the female characters in the novels
written in the modes discussed above. Gynocriticism is concerned with the
assessment of the ways in which women not only read texts as women, but also write
them as women. In other words, it focuses on how women use their own
individuality as females and write literary pieces without being influenced by the
patriarchal norms and traditions of writing. In “Towards a Feminist Poetics,” Elaine
Showalter maintains that there are two kinds of female-centred literary critical
works— “The first type is concerned with woman as reader - with woman as the
consumer of male-produced literature… The second type of feminist criticism is
concerned with woman as writer - with woman as the producer of textual meaning,
with the history, themes, genres and structures of literature by women” (Showalter
1979: 216). The central aim of gynocriticism is to locate the literary works of women
in which the female-centric works are brought to the limelight and are not side-lined
by other literary theories. The aim of gynocriticism has been defined by Elaine
Showalter as a program “ to construct a female framework for the analysis of
women’s literature, [and] to develop new models based on the study of female
experience, rather than to adapt male models and theories” (1979: 202). In other
words, gynocriticism wants feminist or gynocritical theory as well as the literary

2
works of female writers to gain the same status as other male-oriented works or
theories.

In her essay “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness”, Elaine Showalter has

presented four such models to use when investigating novels written by women.
These models are based on the differences of female body, language, psychology and
culture. In her models, Showalter has not specifically included the discussion of any
novel to describe the model. She simply delineates her framework “to define and
differentiate the qualities of the woman writer and the woman's text; each model also
represents a school of gynocentric feminist criticism with its own favorite texts,
styles, and methods” (Showalter 187: 1981).

The bodily, psychoanalytic and language models focus on the difference

between men and women. As this dissertation will focus more on the representation
of women in the selected novels and in analyzing how the women novelists perceive
and portray their female characters in the Victorian cultural setup, the analysis will
be based on the cultural model. The cultural analysis would provide a wider
perspective about the lives of the Victorian women. This would enable us to see what
kind of life were the Victorian women living—what were they allowed to do and
what were they forbidden to do. These will also help in shedding light on how the
question of morality and moral values are represented in these novels. Locating these
novels within their cultural context will also aid a better understanding of the
significance of the particular ways in which these female characters have been
presented.

In “Towards a Feminist Poetics”, Elaine Showalter argues that the literary

tradition of women should be acknowledged and recognized. Showalter maintains
that feminist criticism is divided in two varieties. The first type is concerned with
“women as reader” in which women criticize and challenge the patriarchal mindset
in literary works. The second type is gynocriticism which is concerned with the
contribution of “women as writers.” This thesis is also concerned with the second
phase of women as writers and aims to assess in what way did women contribute to
literary tradition in feminine phase of literature in the form of different sub-genres.
The thesis will also contribute to the body of critical writings that highlight the works
of women writers at a time when women’s role was largely marginalized due to
conversations around the public and private spheres.

3
“The woman question” in the victorian period and the public and private spheres

Many legal and political rights were given to the common people in the
Victorian era, but these reforms completely excluded women. Middle class men were
given voting rights after the Reform Bill 1832 but this right did not extend to women
(Nassar 92). They did not have the right to vote or access to any political position.
Women were greatly exploited in the Victorian era. Petitions were made in
Parliament about the rights of women by 1840s, but women did not manage to get
their rights so soon and could not vote till 1918. Many political rights were given to
common men when the Second and Third Reform Acts were introduced in 1867 and
1884 respectively; however, women were not included and they had no right to vote
for decades. It was ironical that women could not get legal political rights despite the
presence of a queen on the throne of Britain. Even when the Representation of the
People Act of 1918 was introduced for women, “it remained subject to a number of
qualifications such as age and marital status” (Reed 156)

Women’s transition towards a more expansive role in the public domain did
not come until significant achievements in the form of endorsing women’s rights
which took place with the passing of important bills. Till 1908 when the Married
Women’s Property Acts (1870-1908) was introduced, women could not divorce their
husbands. “While men could divorce their wives for adultery, wives could divorce
their husbands only if adultery were combined with cruelty, bigamy, incest, or
bestiality” (Greenblatt 990). Even when the Married Women’s Property Bill and
Marriage and Divorce Bill were introduced, both bills were seen as “an absolute
challenge to the sanctity, privacy, and order provided by marital and family
relations” (Miller 174). The New Woman argument began when the demand for
educational and employment opportunities were offered.

The women following the ideology of New Woman were considered mannish
because the New Woman rejected her role of motherhood and it was believed that
women were crossing the existing gender boundaries. Such women were often
represented as “simultaneously non-female, unfeminine and ultra-feminine” (Pykett
140). However, with the emergence of the New Woman, came the shifting
boundaries of the private sphere originally ascribed to women and the public sphere
held exclusively by men. The second quarter of the Victorian century began seeing a

4
lengthy process of change, shifting ideologies, political debates and reformist
literature.

In the book titled The Women of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic
Habits (1839) (a best seller of its time), the author Sarah Ellis delineated some
attributes which are now also known as “domestic ideology” (Harrison 31). The
ideology of the book explained the social roles of men and women and the idea that
men and women should remain in their separate spheres. Ellis maintained that the
social sphere belongs to men where they should work in the business sphere,
government or political organizations and so on. They are the ones who should strive
to give a better material life to their families. It was also upheld that this social world
is full of selfishness, evilness and temptation. On the other hand, women should
remain in their homes. They should be unselfish, pure and passive and should
struggle to bring morality to the society (Ellis 1582). “The long-established customs
of their country have placed in their hands the high and holy duty of cherishing and
protecting the minor morals of life, from whence springs all that is elevated in
purpose, and glorious in action” (Ellis 1582). Ellis and many other similar critics
maintained that it is the moral duty of a woman to get married and bear children.
Ellis even went on to say that the greatest achievement of the men of her society was
the maintenance of the great morality of women (Harrison 31).

Such ideal is presented in the famous poem by Coventry Patmore known as

“The Angel in the House” (Harrison 30). It is based on the theme of marriage and
courtship. The poem describes womanhood in an elevated style and represents
women as godly. However, feminist critics like Virginia Woolf criticized it “both for
the sentimentality of its ideal of woman and for the oppressive effect of this ideal on
women's lives” (Greenblatt 1839).

By the 1840s, reactions against women’s limited rights and public

participation came in the form of literary pieces penned by writers such as Tennyson,
Bronte, Gaskell and others. In Tennyson’s poem “The Princess” for example,
Princess Ida is a revolutionary woman who renounces the world of women and
founds a women university. She is a strong woman who believes in equality. For her,
marriage is not an ultimate aim. Instead, she is more interested in educating women.
No men are allowed in her all-girls university. In order to woo her, her fiancé (a
prince) disguises as a woman and gets admission in the university. He tries to

5
convince Princess Ida to move back to the castle and marry her fiancé but she
refuses. By the end of the poem, she eventually falls in love with the man and
marries him. However, her purpose of educating women is never forgotten.

This was the first time that women were described as subjects having rights
because till then women were represented as objects of beauty and morality only. Till
this period, a man was considered the rightful owner of his wife who controlled her
property. By mid-century, however, a number of Victorian men and women had
begun the effort to “remove obstacles to women’s equality and advancement”
(Harrison 31). John Stuart Mill was also one of the initial writers who wrote for the
rights of women (qtd in Nassaar 96). In his The Subjection of Women (1869), Mill
upheld that men and women are equal in every aspect and should have equal rights
as well as opportunities in life. He rejected the popular idea that women were
different from men. He was of the view that the difference was imposed over women
by the patriarchal society itself. Mill maintained that women should be given due
rights in property and they should be allowed to handle their lives and properties.
Laws emerged between the years 1870 and 1908 that allowed women such privileges
(Nassaar 96).

Eventually, around the mid-nineteenth century, women’s role underwent

shifting modalities and this was largely due to the advent of newer identities and
opportunities that brought themselves at the doorstep of ‘respectable middle class
women’ in the wake of the reform Act of 1832 and the feminist political movement
that picked great momentum during 1850s. Because of this shift in women’s
activities the concept of the progressive middle class itself began to modify and
revolve around voluntary social association, the rising burgeoning pride and
governmental offices. This was also the time for heated discourses around the
separate spheres for men and women. This was one of the most pervasive ideologies
that shaped the roles that men and women took upon in the English society for
centuries. According to literary critic Simon Morgan, the primary tenet of this
ideology of separate spheres was that women’s ideal place of activity was the
confined and private premises of their homes while men negotiated the public and
economic spheres (Morgan 1-2).

While until the 1970’s female domesticity was regarded as the primary
feature of British and American middle-class lifestyles, studies by Davidoff and Hall

6
have contested this common assumption. The researchers declared that not only the
public success of men was buttressed by a cabal of female supporters but women’s
confinement to the domestic sphere somewhat over-documented since women had
found ingenious ways to negotiate their private spheres for public participation
(Morgan 2-4).

A crucial piece of literature that comments on the merging boundaries of the

private and public sphere was the book Family Fortunes by L. Davidoff and
Catherine Hall. It portrays the separation of the public and private spheres as the
most basic tenet of the middle class mode of existence, but it also brings light to the
various opportunities of reformulating these spheres that women’s heightened
participation in the economy through industrialization, and the bouts of philanthropy
brought them.

For example, Simon Morgan claims that with the criticism that Family
Fortunes garnered for overstressing the existence of the two spheres prompted some
writers towards the until-now-undocumented existence of a third sphere: the ‘social
sphere’. This was the sphere where “women of the middle and lower classes were
able to utilize their domestic skills outside the home in charitable or educational
work and so blur the public-private distinction” (Morgan 2-4), and they were able to
adapt the “language of domesticity” (Morgan 4) to justify their participation in the
public sphere-a venture that Gaskell successfully masters on behalf of Margaret in
her novel North and South-one of the subjects of this study.

The shift in the Victorian middle class organization of the public and private
spheres came with the realization that the kind of education dispensed to women was
insufficient for their sustenance in any practical way and this not only negatively
affected the women but their future families that involved their husbands, sons,
daughters and the nation at large (Milne 332-333).

This could be seen as a major tactical reflection on women’s plight. On one

hand this reemphasized women’s duties at home, but on the other, it paved way for
their increasing participation in public matters. Writers such as Thomas Broadhurst
were adamant that education of a more serious order would not in any way hinder
women from performing their domestic obligations since these came instinctively to
women. Their primary argument rested on the belief that cultivation of intellect,
instead of brewing vanity, would enable women to observe and execute their duties
7
in a better way. Ultimately it would come to benefit the men because knowing the
demands of the public sphere would result in the women preparing their off springs
to meet these challenges and accommodate their husbands emotionally (Broadhurst
2-8).

Men’s participation in the public sphere was surrounded with temptations and
conflicts that were inextricably tied to economic and political ventures. Writers used
this fact to proclaim women’s higher moral ground and the need for women to be
given the chance to understand the mental turmoil that haunted their men (Ellis 39,
Grey and Sherriff 3-4). It was believed that women should develop a firm
understanding of science, in order to prevent the misdirection of their energies and to
maximize their usefulness.

Writers began to draw on this thought to give momentum to the now

surfacing image of the “enlightened and educated women as the spiritual guardians”
of men without whose constant guidance they could be derailed from the path of
morality and justice. Ruskin’s Of Queen’s Gardens emphasizes the difference
between the public and private spheres in a way that poses both in a complementarity
of sorts as opposed to a contrasting dialectic. The woman’s power is for ‘rule, not for
battle;’ while the man’s aptitude is for invention, adventure, speculation, war and
conquest. Even for all of Ruskin’s progressive thinking, however, women’s primary
role still hinged on their domestic spheres (Ruskin 121-122). But at least now there
perpetuated a discourse on the importance of cultivating sound intellect via serious
education for women so that they could assist their husbands and nurture their
families in the best way, in accordance with the changing economic, cultural and
social demands of the time.

Women’s contribution in the public sphere through the training and assistance
of the men in their family is one instance of their indirect participation in the public
sphere. But there were areas in the public sphere where they were allowed a more
active role. This was the role of the reformer that came to be ascribed to women who
ensured that the middle and upper class English values were transmitted to the poor
of their society. Women’s philanthropic duties of such kind, although prevalent
traditionally, met a certain degree of revival on account of the evangelical resurgence
(Morgan 41-42).

8
 This led to the increased participation of women in the public domain and
allowed writers like Gaskell and Bronte to experiment with the roles assigned to their
female protagonists in the social order of the Victorian times. It is these very
portrayals in the works of Gaskell, Bronte, and Braddon that the study will explore in
the upcoming chapters. The novels written by the three novelists broadly fall in three
distinctive categories, and the study will give a brief account of the three genres
before exploring the contents of the novel itself.

The victorian novels: bildungsroman, the industrial novel and the sensation novel

In this dissertation, novels of three sub-genres have been selected in order to

determine the ways in which the difference of sub-genres help the women writers
define the experience of women in the Victorian era.

This chapter will shed a cursory glance on the different sub-genres while the
next chapter of theoretical framework will elucidate more intensively the correlation
between the theory of Gynocriticism and the genres of bildungsroman, industrial
novels and sensation novels.

The first of these genres that the analysis will shed light on is the Industrial
novel. Industrial novels represent the problems faced by the working class. “Largely
written by middle-class writers, the novels highlight poverty, dirt, disease, and
industrial abuses such as sweated labor, child workers, and factory accidents;
however, they also exhibit anxiety of non-religious working-class and a fear of
(potentially violent) collective action, such as Chartism and trade unionism” (Carney
1).

The social reform novels represent the suppressed feelings of the working
class and act as stimuli to wake them from their oblivion and compel them to raise
their voice against the cruel stratification of the society.

Industrial novels represented the condition of the country because of the rapid
changes occurring because of industrialization. Population was increasing but the
negative influence of this phenomenon was influencing the poor class the most.
Middle class and higher class people realized that there were thousands of men,
women and children working for long hours like slaves and getting very little in
return. Different reform movements were made. For instance, Ten Hours Movement

9
was made in order to decrease the labor hours for children. The industrial novel was
popular because of its element of pathos for the men, women, and children who were
exploited in these factories. Women and children were especially exploited because
they were forced to work more on lower wages than men (Simmons 337).

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell was a popular Industrial novel. In the
words of James Richard Simmons Jr, this novel can be considered the best example
of an Industrial novel as it contains element which best describes what an Industrial
novel consists of.

“In literary terms, North and South may be the best of all industrial novels. It
is neither preachy nor didactic; the factory question is intrinsic to the action of the
novel, yet the story can stand on its own; it does not rely entirely on melodrama; and
the characters are vividly portrayed rather than stock villains or angels. Gaskell
attempts to deal with the issues surrounding the factory in an even-handed, adult
manner, and she presents both sides of the question quite well” (Simmons 349).

The second genre is the Bildungsroman in which an individual’s development

is depicted from childhood to adulthood. The variables of development may include
“self-realization, inner and outer directedness, education, career, sex roles, attitude
toward marriage, philosophical questions, religious crisis and autobiographical
elements” (Brändström 13). The term Bildungsroman was coined by Karl Von
Morgenstern in 1817. This sub-genre of literature flourished through the middle of
the nineteenth century in England.

Bildungsroman is a genre which is normally attributed to male writers;

however, there are many female writers who represent the development of their
characters in different ways through this genre. There are many similarities between
the approach of male and female writers in terms of themes of bildungsroman such
as “relationships to family and friends, formal/informal education, sexuality/love and
the overall goal of self-development” (Brändström 14). However, there is also a
strong difference between the journeys of a male or female heroine represented by
male and female writers respectively. For instance, the male heroes often have a
mentor while females have to go ahead in their journey on their own without the
presence of a mentor. Most often, the male hero accomplishes his goal at a young
age, but women seem to develop by the middle age. “Lacking proper guidance in life
by a mentor, in contrast to her male counterpart who has reached the end of his
10
journey as well as important career choices when he is but a young man, the female
protagonist’s developmental quest is both procrastinated and prolonged into middle
age” (Brändström 14). However, this probably happens because of the influence of
the patriarchal society where men are given the opportunities while women face
resistance when they want to move ahead in life.

Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is one of the first examples of bildungsroman

with a female protagonist, Jane depicting her voyage from a dependent and helpless
child to a mature and independent lady amidst her love affair with Edward Rochester
which enables her to stand on her feet firmly instead of looking for a male shelter
and caretaker to provide for her (Thamarana 4). Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre represents
the emotional turmoil experienced by Jane and how she overcomes it with the
passage of time. Jane is a sharp and intelligent girl and getting good grades is not an
issue for her. However, expressing her emotions and showing her suppressed anger is
something that unconsciously appears to bother her. Jane’s story appears to represent
a story of “emotional and psychological self-management and maturation” (Maynard
292). She is rational, but her emotional turmoil is sometimes dangerous. The
character of Bertha (the madwoman in the attic) is often seen as a symbolic
representation of her unconscious which is filled with suppressed anger and agony.

The last of the three genres chosen for this study, the sensation novel is a
literary genre that flourished in Britain during the Victorian era in 1860s highlighting
dramatic thriller events. The term ‘sensation’ is initially used in the novels such as
The Woman in White (1859) and East Lynne (1861) (Badinjki 1). The plots of these
sensation fictions revolve around dark conspiracies, crimes, murders, hidden secrets
and villainous schemes. Many popular authors of the sensation novels include Wilkie
Collins, Charles Rede, George Meredith, Caroline Norton, Susan Warner and Felicia
Skene.

Braddon’s novel Lady Audley’s Secret was a popular sensation novel which
represented sensational and criminal events not as “an accident, but it is the business
of life” (Hughes 261). The conventional sensation novels of the Victorian era, the
middle- class house was no longer an abode of peace and comfort. Like other classes
of the society, the people and homes of the middle-class society had their own fears
and heart-wrenching secrets. The focus of the novels was most often to unveil a
“menacing secret that threatened to expose the identity of a prominent individual”

11
(Thomas 178). For instance, the focus of Braddon’s novel is to uncover the criminal
minded Lady Audley, and the delay to uncover her secrets “is one of the major
sources of narrative pleasure, as the main plot of this novel persistently promises to
get at the hidden truth of its heroine/ villain, and of woman” (Pykett 89: 2004). The
middle-class was also engrained with insecurities resulting from urbanization and
industrialization. In these novels, homes were the most likely places for criminal
scenes abundant in sensation novels. “Not only had it been invaded by mystery and
violence, by impostors like Braddon’s Lady Audley, but its very foundations were
rooted in secrecy and criminality” (Hughes 261). In Braddon’s novel home appears
to be an abode of peace, comfort and love in the beginning which is being nurtured
by the apparently feminine Lady Audley, but as the novel progresses every positive
thing appears to transform into something negative.

It will be interesting to note how the three novels chosen for the analysis in
this study play out the complexities and social dichotomies faced by women during
their time. Such an examination of women’s struggles, their ways to cope with these
limitations, and a collective consciousness that must arise from common cultural and
social circumstances should definitely bring us a step closer to Showalter’s project of
examining a collective female consciousness. The four ways of assessing these
consciousness were as follows: examining the differences of female body, the female
psychology, the female language, and the female culture.

As was mentioned in the beginning of the chapter, the study has chosen just
one of these four ways and will examine the three novels exclusively through the
lens of female culture. This is because in any given day and age, culture is inclusive
of all of the three modes of expression: physiognomy, psychology, and language.
The next chapter of theoretical framework will discuss in detail Showalter’s theory
of gynocriticism, and the way the various genres help women writers manifest their
female consciousness. Chapter two will analyse the novel North and South by
Elizabeth Gaskell. Although appearing later on the publication scene than Bronte’s
Jane Eyre, the reasons for exploring the industrial novel North and South first lie in
the fact that industrialism as a movement encompassed the general Victorian culture
in the nineteenth century and in large measure determined the roles ascribed to men
and women during the era. By exploring the contents of the industrial novel, the
study will be able to retrieve some valuable insights regarding the general Victorian

12
political, social and cultural climates. These findings could be then used as a
foundation supporting the analysis of the subsequent novels selected for this study,
which, although belong to the different genres, are set in a similar culture.

Chapter three will explore the novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte in the
light of the gynocritical theory while the novel Lady Audley’s Secret will be analysed
in chapter four. A final chapter titled “Conclusion” will follow the analyses
supplementing the research’s findings.

13
 CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL AND HISTORICAL FRAMEWORK

1.1. Gynocriticism: Elaine Showalter

The term “gynocriticism” was coined by Elaine Showalter in her essay

“Towards a Feminist Poetics” written in 1979 (Showalter 1979: 216). The writer
confirms in her essay that the term has been derived from the French word “la
gynocritique” (1979: 216). “No term exists in English for such a specialized
discourse, and so I have adapted the French term la gynocritique: 'gynocritics'”
(Showalter, 1977: 216). Gynocriticism not only studies the status of a woman as a
gender, but the consciousness of a female as an individual. Gynocriticism is a form
of literary criticism which would help unveil many women authors who have been
neglected by male critics. “Its subjects include the psychodynamics of female
creativity; linguistics and the problem of a female language; the trajectory of the
individual or collective female literary career; literary history; and, of course, studies
of particular writers and works” (Showalter 1997: 216). According to Lois Tyson, a
gynocritical study asks several questions such as what does the work show about a
woman writer’s creativity and in order to answer this the biographical, cultural and
historical information about the writer and the work is taken into account. A
gynocritical work also asks “What might an examination of the author’s style
contribute to the ongoing efforts to delineate a specifically feminine form of
writing?” and in what way a particular work under consideration contribute to the
literary tradition of writing done by women (Tyson 120). Showalter is of the view
that feminist literary tradition is divided into three phases. In the first phase the
female literary tradition was based on the images and perspective of the idealized
woman—perfect, meek, dependent. This image was constructed by the patriarchal
society in which women were seen as the oppressed “others” by the men. The first
phase is the feminine phase which occurs between 1840 and 1880. According to
Showalter, in this phase “women wrote in an effort to equal the intellectual
achievements of the male culture, and internalised its assumptions about female
nature” (1977: 217). The feminist content of feminine art is typically oblique,
displaced, ironic and subversive; one has to read between the lines, in the missed
possibilities of the text. The second tradition of feminist movement was a reaction to
the traditional patriarchal norms of the olden times and the women protested for the
rights of the women. Lastly, the most contemporary development in feminism is the

14
concept of the female in which the female identity is “sought free” from the
definitions of female and feminine as defined by the patriarchs (Showalter 13).

The novels chosen for this study all belong to the feminine phase and as such
showed noticeable traits that can be examined extensively. One of these traits was
being “double bound.” They felt demeaned by the arrogant reviews of the male
critics. They did not want to get any special treatment or the acknowledgement of
their works. This was so probably because they feared the public sphere in which
they had been considered outsiders since birth. They were so scared of the reviews of
the male critics that they seemed to have been fearful of writing such content that
might appear unwomanly and in consequence result in more criticism. “Part of the
conflict came from the fact that, rather than confronting the values of their society,
these women novelists were competing for its rewards” (Showalter 1977: 21). The
only reward that they seemed to desire was of the approval of the males of the
society. This is an important point that can be studied in the novels that represent
different sub-genres that have been selected for this thesis. The analysis will show
whether the novels are feminine as the term has been defined and whether the
novelists appear to fear the backlash of the male critics. This will be revealed
through the approach of their novels and seeing certain aspects. For instance, it can
also be seen if the women in the novels seem to be looking for the appreciation of the
male characters or do they seem satisfied with who they are without judging their
lives from the perspective of the males and the Victorian society. Another point of
consideration will be to see if the different women characters digress from the path
of an ideal Victorian woman or not. If they do, do the characters then realize that
what they did was wrong or do they simply remain confident about their actions
without caring what others think about them? In addition, to what extent the various
genres help these female characters with any kind of social digression, self-
expression or formulation of a female consciousness? My claim in this research is
that the sub-genres provide the women novelists with opportunities to use strategies
by which they create a space for their heroines to undertake different roles. In a way
this space is where women manifest their exclusive feminine culture.

In her book, A Literature of their Own, Showalter maintains that English

women writers have a wide reading audience and because of that they do not need
the attention of scholars and critics. However, she says that as women we still do not

15
know what unites women as women or whether they have a “common heritage
connected to their womanhood at all” (Showalter 1977: 3). She cites John Stuart
Mill’s argument from “The Subjection of Women” As mentioned earlier, she finds
weight to her arguments in Mill’s writings where he speaks of a possible female
consciousness. Mill was of the view that if women lived in a different country which
excluded men, they would have a literature of their own. However, as they do not
live in a separate place and men dominate the literary circles, the writing style of
women would never be original because it will imitate the works of men. Hence,
they would never be innovative and would never have a literature of their own or an
important position in the literary circles. Showalter argues that Mill would never
have claimed such things if women had not already gained an important position in
the literary circles. This is a relevant point from the perspective of this study because
this supports the idea of gynocriticism that women have a literary tradition of their
own. Even if women are influenced by the works of male literary tradition but in the
same manner many male writers too have been influenced by literary works created
by other males. “To many of his contemporaries (and to many of ours), it seemed
that the nineteenth century was the Age of the Female Novelist. With such stellar
examples as Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot, the question of
women’s aptitude for fiction, at any rate, had been answered” (Showalter 1977: 3).
Many women writers contributed to literature in the nineteenth century which is
often known as the most progressive period for the genre of novel and women
writers have a fair share in it even if most male critics have not acknowledged them.
In this study, three novels have been selected which belong to three distinct sub-
genres. The existence of a variety of sub-genres reveal that women were writing a lot
in the Victorian period and contributing to the Victorian novel in various forms.
Showalter is of the view that it has been very difficult for male or rather patriarchal
critics to see the works of female writers with a theoretical perspective because they
tend to see them with their stereotypical views which do not allow them to see
beyond a limited vision. “The Victorians expected women’s novels to reflect the
feminine values they exalted, although obviously the woman novelist herself had
outgrown the constraining feminine role” (Showalter 1977: 7).

Another important point to note is that there is a difference between books

that have been written by women and the literature which is considered a female

16
literature. The latter is the type of literature “which purposefully and collectively
concerns itself with the articulation of women’s experience, and which guides itself
“by its own impulses” to autonomous self-expression” (Showalter 1977: 3).
According to Showalter, female writers have always been very conscious about
themselves, but they have not always revealed this self-awareness in their novels.
Women have always been suppressed in such a manner that they never thought that
their experiences and works can become a collective body of consciousness and art
in the history. For instance, in the feminist period from 1880 to 1910, writers from
both Britain and America often depicted Amazonian Utopian worlds which were
inhabited only by women and isolated from the male world. However, even in these
isolated and autonomous worlds, there was no “visions of primary womanhood, free
to define its own nature and culture, but flights from the male world to a culture
defined in opposition to the male tradition” (Showalter 1977: 4). All these Utopian
worlds were escapist worlds where women do a lot of social work such as creating
organic gardens, curing water pollution and building ideal child centers, but they
never consisted of women who wrote books.

As a feminist, or rather a gynocritic, Showalter wanted to represent the

female literary tradition in the English novel and to show this tradition is also
“similar to the development of any literary subculture” (1977: 11). Showalter
maintains that women have often been seen as the “sociological chameleons,” who
often imitate the ideas, lifestyle and traditional norms of the dominant culture of their
males (11). However, even if they imitate such things, these women then tend to
follow the cycle which is often followed by other oppressed classes (11). Some of
the relevant literary subcultures are the “black, Jewish, Canadian, Anglo-Indian, or
even American” that followed the three-tiered cycle of imitation, protest and self-
discovery. According to Showalter, every subculture follows a prolonged period of
imitation in which the dominant traditions of the dominant culture is internalized into
the social values and artistic forms. In the second phase, the groups then go through a
phase of protest in which they raise voice against the dominant culture’s norms and
standards and advocate the rights of the minority group. They even demand an
autonomy for the minority groups. In the last phase, there is a period of “self-
discovery, a turning inward freed from some of the dependency of opposition, a
search for identity” (13). Showalter maintains that women have faced the same three

17
stages, but in respect to them, these stages can be called feminine, feminist and
female. Showalter is of the view that from the perspective of the feminist movement,
the feminine phase is the “period from the appearance of the male pseudonym in the
1840s to the death of George Eliot in 1880; the feminist phase as 1880 to 1920, or
the winning of the vote; and the female phase as 1920 to the present, but entering a
new stage of self-awareness about 1960” (13). These stages should not be considered
rigid categories. “These are obviously not rigid categories, distinctly separable in
time, to which individual writers can be assigned with perfect assurance. The phases
overlap; there are feminist elements in feminine writing, and vice versa” (Showalter
1977: 13). These phases might overlap and sometimes one might find all of these
phases not just in the entire feminist movement, but in the career of a single female
writer.

For women in Britain, the consciousness of a female subculture seems to

have come first through “a shared and increasingly secretive and ritualized physical
experience. Puberty, menstruation, sexual initiation, pregnancy, childbirth, and
menopause—the entire female sexual life cycle—constituted a habit of living that
had to be concealed” (Showalter14). All these elements were never openly discussed,
but they were always “accompanied by elaborate rituals and lore, by external codes
of fashion and etiquette, and by intense feelings of female solidarity” (Showalter 14).
Females seem to have been united through their roles as daughters, mothers and
wives and by the internalized doctrines of the Victorian society which constrained
them economically, socially and legally. Many times, they were also united for a
political cause as well.

Women seem to have been writing novels from a very earlier period, but as
they were never critically acknowledged, people never seemed to know about them.
The bulk of novels written by women is huge and it is “impossible to say when
women began to write fiction” (1977: 16). For instance, by 1750, women seem to
have made a huge contribution to the literary marketplace through different mediums
but were not acknowledged as men were. By 1773, the Monthly Review noticed that
the literary trade seems to have been taken over completely by women. Many of the
eighteenth century novels were written by women and the Minerva Press even
published as many novels by female writers as published by male writers. It even
seems that “men were able to imitate, and even usurp, female experience” (1977:

18
17). Showalter mentions the point that the critic Oliver Goldsmith was interestingly
of the view that many men were writing sentimental novels but were using
pseudonyms so that people might not know that some man is writing about themes of
marriage, cooking, childcare, midwifery and the like.

Early female writers of the feminine phase seemed to focus mostly on writing
novels that Showalter would describe as belonging to the feminine phase while
feminist novels were hardly touched by them. Most of these writers wrote novels in
which the stereotype of a helpless female in need of a male savior was often
exploited. This was done in order to “win chivalrous protection from male reviewers
and to minimize their un-womanly self-assertion (1977: 17). Some of the female
writers even began to write by hiding their personal identity as a tribute to the
Victorian ideals and as their way of hiding from the limelight. However, many other
novelists hid their identity only to assert their patriarchal ideologies and avert the
unending criticism of both male and female patriarchs. Some of the consistent
themes of the eighteenth century Gothic novels were the “balancing of duty and self-
fulfillment in domestic fiction” (1977: 18). According to Showalter, the nineteenth
century women writers “certainly” had some familiarity with Burney, Edgeworth,
Radcliffe, and Austen, as well as with scores of lesser writers such as Inchbald and
Holland (1977: 18). However, in the writings of novelists before 1840s there seems
to be no sense of female awareness, of a desire to be different, or a yearning to
challenge the patriarchy. Women seemed to imitate simply whatever they were fed
by the males and the values of the society. Showalter mentions the critic Kathleen
Tillotson who says that many critics gave a lot of attention to Jane Austen. However,
the immense support towards Jane Austen greatly neglected the works of other
female Victorian novelists. Showalter states in her book that according to Tillotson
there wasn’t much influence of Austen on writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet
Martineau, the Bronte sisters and other minor Victorian novelists. Even the so-called
debt of George Eliot to Jane Austen seems to be exaggerated. This was a time when
the works of Austen were idealized, but the world of Mary Wollstonecraft was not
read widely because the Victorians were of the view that her works are scandalous
and immoral. The audience was also skeptic about the scandals surrounding her, so
her work was also suspected (Showalter 1977: 18).

19
 Most of the women writers began to take novels seriously as a form of female
consciousness after 1840s when they began to use pseudonyms. It seems that they
began to hide their identity because they were greatly interested in depicting such
subjects which were considered taboo in the Victorian world. “Like Eve’s fig leaf,
the male pseudonym signals the loss of innocence” (1977: 19). For Showalter, the
use of a pseudonym signifies an important historical shift for women. “In its radical
understanding of the role-playing required by women’s effort to participate in the
mainstream of literary culture, the pseudonym is a strong marker of the historical
shift” (Showalter 1977: 19). It was this hidden identity that seemed to give them the
guts to question the patriarchal norms and to write novels which were based on
female characters who were far from being feminine or who were strong enough to
challenge the social world in which they were living.

According to Elaine Showalter, there were three generations of feminine

novelists in the nineteenth century. The first generation of writers were those who
were born between 1800 and 1820 and it included all those women who are often
considered to be part of the “Golden Age of the Victorian authoress: the Brontes,
Mrs. Gaskell, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Harriet Martineau, and George Eliot”
(1977: 19). The novels selected for this study have also been taken from the same
generation of writers. The period in which these novelists were writing corresponds
to the time when the novel as a genre was progressing and it was used to address
different social issues that were eminent in the British society at the time. These were
the writers along with other professional writers like Florence Nightingale, Mary
Carpenter, Angela Burdett who were called the female role innovators (1977: 19).
They were creating new opportunities and possibilities for other women. They were
breaking the iced ground of the rigid Victorian system. The second generation of
writers are those who were born between 1820 and 1840 and this group included
writers like “Charlotte Yonge, Dinah Mulock Craik, Margaret Oliphant, and
Elizabeth Lynn Linton” (1977: 20). These were the writers who followed the
footsteps of the writers of the first generation, but they seemed less dedicated,
determined and original when compared to the previous group. The third generation
of writers are those who were born between the years 1840 and 1860 and this group
began to write sensation novels as well as children’s novels. “They seemed to cope
effortlessly with the double roles of woman and … to enjoy sexual fulfillment as

20
well as literary success” (1977: 20). These women were strong, confident,
businesslike, different, and unconventional.

Showalter maintains that when the women of the first generation began their
careers as writers, there was “already a sense of what the “feminine” novel meant in
terms of genres” (1977: 20). By the middle of the nineteenth century, women had
begun to adopt various genres and were producing novels based on the themes of a
fashionable life, religious commitments, education and the social setting of their
lives which was termed by critics as novels of domestic realism. In this study, three
sub-genres of novels by three women writers have been selected. The existence of
variety of these sub-genres by first generation of feminine writers suggests that
women writers had already begun to adopt a variety of norms to write novels.
According to Showalter, the novels by first generation feminine writers represented
women as having very influential roles when they occurred in the domestic and
social environment. It was this period when female writers began to write novels that
seemed to present their personal and social awareness as women.

The literary criticism that developed after this period seemed to have double
standards. It consisted of such critiques that viewed the writings of women with very
limited terms and perceptions. “There was a place for such fiction, but even the most
conservative and devout women novelists, such as Charlotte Yonge and Dinah Craik,
were aware that the “feminine” novel also stood for feebleness, ignorance, prudery,
refinement, propriety, and sentimentality, while the feminine novelist was portrayed
as vain, publicity-seeking, and self- assertive” (Showalter 1977: 20). This is a point
worth noting because this represents the gap of critical writings about the first
generation of feminine writers and how their works have been viewed with a biased
perspective. Showalter claims that the reviewers of these novels confessed that these
feminine writers were developing a new kind of novels, but they also complained
that these novels were trivial and likewise remarked on the narrowness of the
feminine value system that was upheld (1977: 20).

Women writers themselves developed several artistic and personal strategies

that might help them overcome these conflicts. One of the personal reactions was “a
persistent self-deprecation of themselves as women, sometimes expressed as
humility, sometimes as coy assurance-seeking, and sometimes as the purest self-
hatred” (Showalter 1977: 21). The novelists often publicly proclaimed that they were

21
against the idea of The New Woman. Such approaches can also be observed in the
novels which are under consideration for this study. It can be seen if the women
characters of the selected novels show such attributes or do they exhibit the traits of
The New Woman in an open manner without fearing the consequences of the male
characters. By proclaiming themselves as anti-feminist, working in homes, preaching
a suppressed attitude and self-sacrifice, and by criticizing the assertiveness of
females, they “worked to atone for their own will to write” (Showalter 1977: 21).
Writing was a vocation in the Victorian society, but the women could not assert
openly that their novel writing was a vocation. For them, womanhood was more of a
vocation than any other profession. “The evangelically inspired creed of work did
affect women, even though it had not been primarily directed toward them”
(Showalter 1977: 22). Like men, women were also urged by religion to contribute by
working, but in the Victorian era, work for women meant work for others. This point
is relevant to the study of the novels in the sense that it can be seen if there are any
working women in the novels. If there are, how do the society and the men perceive
the vocations of the different women characters? Are there certain vocations that are
more respected than other professions or women from any public sphere is
considered low and inferior by the Victorian society as depicted in the novels?

The Victorian women were part of a group where girls were trained in
suppression, concealment and “self-censorship” from a very young age and this was
also evident in their writings. This made their writings very inhibiting. Women
writers of the time confessed that women are better than men at concealing their
inner feelings because of the so-called moral training which made them suppress
their emotions and hide their thoughts. As a result, women were allowed a very small
range of vocabulary in which they could write their novels or else their writing was
called coarse and immoral. “It could refer to the “damns” in Jane Eyre, the dialect in
Wuthering Heights, the slang of Rhoda Broughton’s heroines, the colloquialisms in
Aurora Leigh, or more generally to the moral tone of a work, such as the “vein of
perilous voluptuousness” one alert critic detected in Adam Bede” (Showalter 1977:
25). Anything unconventional was described by the term “coarseness”. The
suppressed language did not allow them a wider range of vocabulary and expression
to write something that would be approved by the society. It is evident that in the
Victorian society, women were compelled to develop such strategies where they

22
conformed to the male literary traditions yet wrote in a way that their writing did not
appear too explicit otherwise they would have faced a lot of backlash (Armstrong
128). In a way, this seemed to become their talent as well where they wrote novels in
which they represented more than they wrote in a language that concealed their inner
feelings.

The research will also look at how the different subgenres provided women
with varied levels of cultural and theoretical conventions to express themselves and
negotiate their freedom in the public sphere. It will be given to scrutiny whether a
subgenre was more useful in helping the writers to break away from orthodox and
dated perceptions of women’s role in the society than another.

As stated earlier, the main premise of this thesis is that the different sub-
genres allow them to assert what they want, what they can achieve, what suppresses
them, what empowers them, and so on. Below the dissertation attempts to delineate
why Showalter’s gynocritical theory is perhaps the best literary lens to assess these
genres from, and why amongst the four models of analysis provided by Showalter in
her theory of Gynocriticism, the study relies on the cultural model.

The Introduction chapter delineates and justifies the choice to exclusively rely
on the cultural model to explore the novels selected for the study. Below, the study
will examine the cultural model of Gynocriticism in detail and reveal how it can help
us advance Showalter’s gynocritical project.

1.2. The Cultural Model of Gynocriticism

As stated earlier, Showalter’s first three models relate to body, language and
psyche and put forth the question of investigating whether these aspects of women
play out differently as sources of imagery. Without refuting the credibility of any of
these models, relying solely on the imagery evoked by one’s physiognomy, language
or psychology would require an extreme examination from a close-ended
perspective. On the other hand, all of the afore-mentioned aspects of female
consciousness are integrated in the dynamics of culture. Which is why the study has
chosen to gynocritically analyse the three novels using Showalter’s cultural model.

Elaine Showalter herself maintains that the theory based on the culture of
women writers can provide a more persuasive and better way “to talk about the
specificity and difference of women’s writing than theories based on biology,

23
linguistics, or psychoanalysis” (Showalter 1981: 197). Showalter suggests that this
model includes cultural and historical experiences of women. It also studies the
influence of historical and cultural events on the writings and lifestyle of women.
Culture is basically the main element which dominates and influences the other three
models above such as how women perceive themselves, what kind of language they
use according to the culture they live in and what psyche is assumed by them in
different cultural settings.

The dissertation will take some help from Raymond Williams’ analysis and
definition of culture, and use it to justify Showalter’s insistence on the use of the
cultural model to assess and interpret works of women writers.

In his essay titled “The Analysis of Culture”, Williams begins by stating three
different definitions for the term culture meeting different ends.

According to the first definition, “culture is a state or process of human

perfection, in terms of certain absolute or universal human values” (57). Williams
describes this definition as ideal and could be employed for the understanding of a
cultural setting if the objective is the tracing of a timeless order via locating those
absolute values that outperform temporal strictures. These values can be found in the
thoughts and works of lives lived.

The second definition involves the documentary “in which, culture is the
body of intellectual and imaginative work, in which human thought and experiences
are variously recorded” in detail (57). This definition is somewhat compatible for
Showalter’s cultural model in gynocriticism since both argue for the need of a
criticism that describes the “nature of thought and experience” and the “details of the
language, form and convention in which these are active” in the “best that has been
thought and written” (Williams 57). With this definition of culture, anthropologists
and critics are allowed to access and evaluate individual pieces of intellectual and
creative works and place them in some historical time-frame with the hopes of
retrieving something about the societal traditions, its essence and valuation.

Williams’ last definition of culture is what he terms as the social definition of

culture. According to this definition, culture is a description of a “particular way of
life” (57). Cultural analysis from such a lens would involve a historical criticism of
not only intellectual and creative works in historical reference but also relate these

24
elements that, according to other definitions, may not be cultural at all, for example,
the means of production, the institutional structures etc. (57-58).

According to Williams, each definition is valid and serves different purposes

but his own inclination, when it comes to defining and assessing culture, is towards
an amalgamation of the best and most valid elements in each of the three definitions.
This amalgamation is described by Williams as “the structure of feeling” (64). The
dissertation, then would draw on this concept of culture being so tangibly firm as
formulating some kind of “structure” on one hand and yet seeping into the most
delicate of societal practices and activities. This understanding of culture will prove
most fruitful in the unveiling of a female culture (inclusive of the implications of
language, body and psyche of women), which according to Showalter, is linked most
intricately with the complex social ideals and cultural forces (197). Interestingly,
here one can find a common ground between Raymond’s cultural materialism and
Showalter’s gynocriticism.

Williams’ cultural theories provide us with a way to approach history through

a cultural materialist orientation that allowed him to timelessly help leftists and
feminists carve out and sustain for themselves a sense of oracular vocation in a
period of perpetual demoralization and marginalization of progressive thinkers. Like
many feminists of today, Williams was preoccupied with visceral issues of death,
despair and disempowerment in the face of defeats, setbacks and societal constraints
and as Christopher Prendergast pointed out in his book Cultural Materialism: On
Raymond Williams, he understood that any revolutionary activity was also a matter
of “feelings as facts, imagination as organization and agency as analysis” (xi). His
preoccupations with vital communities and traditions reflected on the need to analyze
how ordinary people dealt with setbacks and defeats in their everyday life, and he
further broke down these analysis on the basis of race, colour, gender and sexual
orientation. In a way, this was also the primary agenda of feminism in general and
gynocriticism in particular. By following the visceral impulses and connectedness of
women with the prevalent traditions and neighborhood networks, gynocriticism
hopes to determine the various ways in which women were and still are empowered
and equipped to face the various obstacles that are culturally and socially planted in
their paths.

25
 The cultural element is therefore the most important part in the model of
gynocriticism. According to Elaine Showalter, this is the aspect which controls the
other three models. “Indeed, a theory of culture incorporates ideas about woman’s
body, language, and psyche but interprets them in relation to the social contexts in
which they occur. The ways in which women conceptualize their bodies and their
sexual and reproductive functions are intricately linked to their cultural
environments” (Showalter 197). Showalter is of the view that be it the language of
the writer or the biological description of different characters, or the female psyche,
or the biological identity—cultural setting plays an important role in determining
how women view themselves. If a culture is liberating, women will use culture as a
touchstone to compare themselves with. They will see themselves as liberated and
happy in an open-minded cultural setting, but if the culture is oppressive they will
feel as sinners in different social and personal settings (Showalter 197).

This model will analyse how culture plays a strong role in the lives of
different writers. It will explore whether culture helps them represent suppressive or
frank language, psyche and biological representation or whether culture prompts
them to be passive or active. The study will keep connecting the culture of Victorian
era Britain to the cultural setting of the selected novels.

According to Showalter, defining this aspect would also contribute to the

history of women. Previously, history has been primarily written by male writers
about males, but now many writers are trying to recreate the history by writing about
the life and consciousness of women in different time periods. Recent historians
often ask such questions as why women are excluded from history and what is the
history of women? “Who are the women missing from history? Who are the women
of achievement and what did they achieve?” (Lerner 5). Cultural study of females
will help in adding to the history of women in different periods.

In The Creation of Patriarchy, Gerda Lenner notes that history-making has

included an exclusive cabal of male historians for its formation until the last century
(5). Women’s contribution to history has been left ignored and un-interpreted by
these male historians. The documented ways of primarily the masculine subject are
what have come to be called history and the historian continues to beg universality
for it. Lenner believes that documentation that refuses to give value to more than half

26
of humankind is distorted, in that it tells the story from the viewpoint of the male half
of humanity only.

Where Lenner’s arguments share a common point with that of Showalter’s is

in the refusal to garb female experience under the blatant typecasting of
“victimized”. Just because women are under-represented, it does not automatically
make them into victims, since their contributions have been essential to the making
of the society as we currently see it. There is however a tension between what is
“women’s actual historical experience and their exclusion from interpreting that
experience”. Lenner calls it “the dialectic of women’s history” [6]. The project of
gynocriticism is to trace this very dialectic by reassessing the work of female literary
artists and the way they reconstruct the meaning-giving process of interpretation to
the long obscured centrality and active participation of women in the making and
shaping of history, societies and cultures.

Lenner is of the view that the failure by historical anthropologists to cater to

the experiences and exclusive history of women has resulted in giving rise to the
argument of women’s biological inability to consider abstract thoughts (such as
philosophy), having been preoccupied with nurturance and emotions. As Lenner puts
it, just as the biological difference between men and women cannot be denied,
similarly, one cannot forget that the implications and value emanating from this
biological difference are actually cultural in essence (6).

Lenner’s 10-point breakdown of the general nature of patriarchy and the

systematic neglect and dispossession of women is of some importance and relevance
to the project of gynocriticism. It could be summarized in the following way:

Subordination and appropriation of women’s sexuality occurred prior to

archaic state formation. The culture of subordination or the conquering of a nation by
another has its roots in the subordination of women and enslaving women of
conquered countries (Lenner 8).

The earliest law codes and states worked in cahoots to institutionalize the
subordination of women by expelling them from roles that could enable
independence among them. Respectability among men came to be associated with
the extent of access to the means of production while for women, it is tied to being
attached to one man (Lenner 8-9).

27
 Finally, with the introduction of Hebrew monotheism, the status ascribed to
the female goddess of the earlier times was displaced since now creativity and pro-
creativity came to be ascribed to an all-powerful God. Eventually, Lenner believes
that the “contract between God and humanity assumes as a given the subordinate
position of women and their exclusion from the metaphysical covenant and the
earthly covenant community”. This exclusion is at the heart of western civilization
and responsible for promoting patriarchy for around 25000 years [8-10].

If, for the sake of this thesis, we assume Lenner’s analysis of the
institutionalization of patriarchy to be true, it would be worth factoring how
conscious were the writings of the female novelists under consideration of this mode
of patriarchy’s institutionalization and the ways they sidestepped this
institutionalization by giving voice to the female subject and challenging the
fundamental tenets of patriarchy. These tenets, as far as Lenner’s study goes, were
grounded more in culture than in biology and retained at the helm of the religious
injunctions, women’s marital status, and their connection with means of production.

1.3. Culture, the Double Voiced Discourse, and Gynocriticism

The cultural model of Showalter’s gynocriticism is rooted in a similar

purpose of unveiling the reasons behind and the formulations of the collective female
consciousness and would serve as the perfect lens to assist in objectively facilitating
this study that confirms the existence and prevalence of a female culture propagated
in what Showalter terms as “the double-voiced discourse” (201) and its contribution
to de-institutionalizing patriarchy as it was shaped historically.

Showalter gives way to the idea of a “double voiced discourse” by borrowing

from the anthropological works of Edwin Ardener and his wife Shirley Ardener.
Edwin Ardener establishes in “Belief and the Problem of Women and the Problem
Revisited” that anthropological studies have systematically neglected the inclusion of
women. Ardener draws on Levi-Strauss’s statement that “words do not speak while
women do” (qtd. in Ardener 48). The way Ardener explains this is by declaring that
women are only allowed to speak in a male-perpetuated medium (Ardener 48). This
resounds the idea that women have to speak in a ‘muted’ discourse.

In her essay, “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness”, Showalter introduces

her own cultural model for the interpretation of women’s literary achievements in

28
which she agrees with Ardener’s analysis around the muted discourse categorizing it
as the problem of “language and of power” (Showalter 200). According to
Showalter, ideas are perpetuated by both the dominated and the muted groups but
since the social structures are under the control of the dominant group, it is only their
discourse that takes precedence. If the muted group desires to be heard, it must
mediate its opinions and beliefs via the cultural mediums imposed by the dominant
structures. Drawing on Showalter’s designated ‘wild’ zone, she argues that feminist
critics see this women-centered sphere as the space where a purely female criticism,
theory and art will manifest itself. The purpose of this criticism is to “bring into
being the symbolic weight of female consciousness” (201).

An extremely important dichotomy with regards to this analysis of a muted

group is that of an existing abstraction. Showalter recognizes this dichotomy when
she declares that the concept of “of a woman's text in the wild zone is a playful
abstraction…women's writing is a "double-voiced discourse" that always embodies
the social, literary, and cultural heritages of both the muted and the dominant” (201).
Women’s writings, therefore, can only be understood in the form of these “complex
and historically grounded cultural relations” (202). The double-voiced discourse
takes an important place in Showalter’s cultural model and will be used by this
dissertation in the exploration of the novels under discussion.

The three novels chosen for the study, North and South, Jane Eyre and Lady
Audley’s Secret, belong to the industrial, bildung and sensational traditions in novel
writing during the Victorian period. Since one of the objectives of the research is to
focus on how each of the genres help advance the gynocritical project of
documenting and expanding the female consciousness, it would be worthwhile to see
if there exists any considerable correlation between the genres and theory of
gynocriticism itself.

It must be noted that the thesis makes use of the term industrial novel as
opposed to the more generic term of ‘condition of England novel’. Richard Simmons
Jr. classifies the industrial novel as a paramount sub-genre of the conditions of
England novels (336). The condition of England novels came about with the growing
interest which the early nineteenth centuries witnessed in the ‘lives and labour of the
populace’ (Simmons, 336). The repeal of the corn laws, the chariot uprising, and the

29
public prominence of the proletariat, along with pauperism and its scattered vignettes
provided writers and journalist with a gold mine of content to excavate from.

Amid the general category of novels that depicted the conditions of England
during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the industrial novels were
particularly concerned with the ‘factory question’ (Simmons 338). For this reason,
Simmons terms industrial novel as ‘paramount’ since as much as 38% of the English
population worked in factories, 18 % of which were females (Humphries 41). The
reason, Simmons believed that the stories of workers in the factory and the explosive
urbanization proved such a lucrative and provocative business for writer of the
condition of England genre was the increasing pathos associated with the
exploitation of women and children. The condition of England novel, therefore,
became a product of a number of legal, economic and literary influences (337).

As stated earlier, chief amongst the general topics addressed in the condition
of England novel was the factory question. Up until the late eighteenth century,
children as young as three and four years old were employed in factory work. As
factory conditions drew interest from reporters and welfare workers, reports of
egregious working conditions, worker abuse, child labour, extreme working hours,
education, and lodging came to the fore (Hutchins and Harrison, 1-3). This
eventually gave prominence to those condition of England novels that were
particularly interested in the factory question, hence the name industrial novel. Since
one of the novels chosen for this study also deals primarily with the workers’
conditions in the factories, the dissertation prefers the term ‘industrial novel’ over
‘condition of England novel’.

Breakthrough for the Victorian industrial novel came about with two
important publications: a) Fleetwood: or, the New Man of Feeling (1805) by the
radical philosopher William Goldwin and b) the autobiographical account of an
illiterate factory worker who had witnessed first-hand the abuses of life in the
factories as a child by John Brown called A Memoir of Robert Blincoe in 1828
(Simmons, 339).

From here the baton was passed mostly to female authors that became
interested in documenting the miseries of the English urban proletariat. According to
Simmons, there was almost a semblance of a literary war over the conditions of
factories by the mid-eighteenth century. While writers such as Tonna, John Walker,
30
Caroline Bowles and Caroline Norton came around with highly sensitised novels
about the misery and abomination that the factory life had become for workers,
writings by journalists such as Edward Baines and Andrew Ure painted an almost
idealized portrait of the conditions for workers in the factories. These journalists
dismissed the writings of the aforementioned novelists as highly melodramatic and
propagandist (340-341).

Most of this changed with the publication of Frances Trollope’s The Life and
Adventures of Michael Armstrong, The Factory Boy, when the mainstream Victorian
audience was aroused into a state of agitation over the conditions of children, men
and women in the factories of the increasingly urbanizing and industrialising cities of
the English city sides. One of the reasons why Trollope’s account of the malign
factory owner, the manhandled Michael and his naïve mother became more than a
figment of hyper imagination was the almost journalistic research that Trollope put
into the construction of her characters and events. Trollope scampered across the
dingy streets of several factories in Manchester to personally interview workers and
get a first-hand account of their circumstances. This brought a measure of credibility
and ‘verisimilitude’ to Trollope’s . In fact, it is taken as the first ever industrial novel
to be widely read by the Victorian audience (Simmons 342).

While Trollope’s novel is taken as the first ever industrial novel to address
the factory question in general, Tonna’s Helen Fleetwood, surfaced as the first novel
ever to explore the working conditions in the factories with regards to women. Tonna
was, therefore, the first social-problem novelist to document the plight and
exploitation of women in the expanding industrial settings (Wheeler 19).

With improvement in the lot of the children after the passing of factory laws
that prohibited maltreatment via overworking children, there came a shift in the
focus of the primary subject of these novels from children to adults. According to
Simmons, the shift from a street-driven, haggard-looking child to a street-driven and
ambling adult brought with it the problem of evoking the kind of pathos that would
lead the audiences to invest their time and sympathies in their stories (344).

There, hence, appears to be some connection between the growing number of

female characters associated directly or indirectly with factories in the industrial
novels that were also mostly being penned by female writers and the increasing

31
popularity of the industrial novel during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries.

According to Simmons, more women than men were employed in the

factories during the industrial boom of the nineteenth century and their participation
in the factories has been under-documented (337). Women were thought to be more
manageable and warranted lesser wages for the owners. But this also brought them a
degree of independence that was denied to them through domestic chores, although
not to the point where they could mostly survive without marriage. In most cases
they were contributing to the family income but their increased participation in the
public sphere was a stark contrast with the neatly demarcated public and private
sphere on which the entire edifice of the Victorian cultural constitution rested. It is
obvious that writers such as Gaskell and Trollope who were keen in bringing a
degree of veracity to their writings and thus drawing on real life examples and scenes
were inspired to make use of several female characters such as Helen, Peggy Higgins
and Mary Barton in close association with the factory question in their novel.

Eventually, Simmons believes that the condition of England novel became a

‘victim of its own success’ (350). With more laws having passed advocating better
treatment of men, women and children, the situation did in fact improve and the
public began to lose the incentive to invest their time and money in the industrial
novel. Although abuse still existed, it was neither as egregious as before, nor worse
than what the lower order, employed outside of the factories, suffered. Moreover, the
changing dynamics around the role and place of women in the society emerged as
perhaps the greatest natural consequence of both industrialization and its very
rampant documentation by the female writers (350-351).

Simmons quotes a passage from the Edinburgh Review that depicts just the
kind of change in thought that would lead to the feminist concern with ‘the new
women’.

Servant-girls and foot-boys cannot dress as the factory lads and lasses may –
[they have] not the daily stimulus and amusement of society of their own order... The
maidservant must have “no followers,” while the factory-worker can flirt to any
extent. Servant-girls rarely may marry, while factory-girls probably always may,
whether they do or not . . . Public opinion among the class is in favour of the

32
independence of factory and other day-work . . . In one word, it is independence
against dependence. (Anon. 1862: 414).

The industrial novel, therefore, was the name of a project concerned with
documenting the realities of the factories and industries in which more than a quarter
of the English population laboured away its days and nights. But if reality and
experiences are subjective and grounded in one’s entire personhood, which in turn is
the product of one’s gender and cultural experiences that differ on the basis of that
gender (Showalter 102), then it stands to reason that the application of the
gynocritical theory can perhaps best aid readers in understanding the Victorian
industrial culture and women’s place in this culture.

Assessing the works of those female writers that depicted a female

protagonist at the helm of the changing Victorian industrial culture by means of a
gynocritical analysis is perhaps the easiest way to understand the role of women and
the changing societal expectations and perceptions of them.

It will also aid in understanding the contribution of industrialism and its

related literary influences, in the form of the condition of England novel in general
and the industrial novel in particular, in paving way for a distinctive female literary
trajectory and the role this trajectory performed in granting women the new kind of
independence that the Edinburg review spoke about.

In a similar way, the Bildungsroman became a viable medium for women

writers that helped them experiment with their female character’s autonomy.
Bildungsroman is a form of novel whose original purpose was to allow novelists to
explore issues of representation, an individual’s place in society and their
relationships with societal tenets and other individuals. Paramount among these is
also the question of subjectivity and its relationship with society and aesthetics.

For this reason, the genre was popularized amongst female novelists to carve
their own historical trajectories that were often ignored outside of fiction. Carol
Weiss in “The Female Bildungsroman: Calling it into Question” almost sees
Bildungsroman as a ‘literary tool’ (17) that allows women to propagate a dominantly
female literary canon. The term ‘female Bildungsroman’ has been adopted amongst
ranks of front-tier feminists in the 1970s. Like gynocriticism, the genre provided
female critics a medium to comprehend, historicize and analyse works of eighteenth

33
and nineteenth century female writers. For the most part, the novels by female
writers focused on documenting the ‘suppression of female autonomy, creativity and
maturity by patriarchal gender norms’ (Weis 17). And as with most literature
produced by women during the time, it was not long before critics of female
bildungsroman began to witness the strain of that “anxiety of authorship” that Sara
Gilbert and Sandra Gubert speak of in their seminal work The Mad Woman in the
Attic: The Women Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. As Carol
Lazzaro- Weis states, this anxiety occurred because both the female novelists and the
female critics were (and are) subjected to the pressures of ‘male judgements,
expectations, criteria, and prejudices that generic categories harbour’ (16).

Historically prevalent generic categories commit the malpractice of indulging

in those generalisations that is grounded in some kind of ‘universal sensibility’ (Weis
16). The problem with such sensibilities is that they blatantly ignore traditional
gendered issues that has been the primary tenet of the feminist movement and which
they have striven so hard to fight for and highlight. This is a blight against the
practice of harbouring generic categories of which Frederic Jameson is equally
suspicious. In his book The Political Unconscious, Frederic Jameson declares how
‘any attempt to temporalize and historicise generic categories’… have never felt the
need to incorporate, acknowledge and give tribute to Women’s writing (105)’. The
only time when women’s writings are taken into account is under the ‘rubric of
flawed imitation’(Weis 16). This has also been the integral concern of gynocriticism.

The problem with Bildungsroman that feminist critics began to note early on
is that the genre appears to serve separate purpose for male and female writers. As
opposed to male writers, female Bildungsroman seems to only provide women
(especially of the eighteenth and nineteenth century) with ‘models of growing down’
(Pratt 14). To this end Weiss cites the work of Marianne Hirsch, Elizabeth Langland,
and Elizabeth Abel who patronized Woolf’s ‘The Voyage Out’ as the ‘earlier
manifestations of the genre’ in which the female body can hardly do more than
frustrating her spiritual and artistic cravings (17).

On the other hand, Hirsch, Langland and Abel analyse Bildungsroman in

opposition to Pratt’s devaluation of the female model. According to Hirsch et. Al,
writers use the female Bildungsroman to expand and flaunt the inherent limitations
of the genre with the end result of emerging triumphant (Weis 17). Hirsch et al.

34
believe that an important tenet of the female Bildungsroman is the ‘formation of a
coherent self’ (14). This coherent self is not necessarily autonomous or freed from
the suppressing patriarchal structures, but autonomy is not the main thematic disquiet
of the Bildungsroman for Hirsch et al, it is the main subject’s personal development.

Frye’s analysis of the Bildungsroman is along similar lines. He believes that

the purpose of the Bildungsroman is to flaunt the possibility of developing a
‘coherent self’ (79-80). While critics such as Annis Pratt suspected the female
bildungsroman as working in cahoots with patriarchal structures in strengthening the
oppression levied by the latter and which prevents women from attaining a complete
personal development, Frye presents a somewhat different definition of what
formulates a ‘coherent self’ (79). Frye believes that women in the bildungsroman are
engaged in multiple realities. This engagement in more than one reality allows
women to subvert the self that patriarchy imposes upon them and move toward their
own autonomy (79).

The concept of multiple realities and subjective experiences that are

exclusively comprehensible and matter to the person who experiences those is not
new but is steeped in the humanist tradition, where the subject is the source of self-
knowledge. The concept of experience grounded in one’s personhood and gender is
also the edifice on which the entire gynocritical criticism is erected, since it aims to
generate a female literary tradition that is purely the creation of women’s literary
genius and experience. Frye’s term of ‘protective coloration’ is used for the kind of
camouflage under which women move towards the attainment of this autonomous
self (Frye 79-80).

Although Weis is suspicious of the validity of the theory of multiple realities

and a criticism that is based on gender, Showalter, the founder of gyno-criticism
claims that since writing is an activity that involves one’s entire personhood, it is not
unlikely that Women’s experiences and creative imagination may deflect from men’s
in certain respects being products of the ‘unconscious strictures and strictures of
gender identity’ (102) and bildungsroman as a genre captures exactly that kind of
deflect and subjective experience.

For this reason, Frye believes that the bildungsroman has a privileged place
amongst the leading ranks of feminists for offering this ‘experiential base of feminist

35
criticism’ (79) and presenting critics and novelists with an urgency of creating a
formal self-definition.

Bildungsroman is seen by feminists as the final resort to perpetuate

experientially based feminist critique. This criticism believes in the possibility of
representing in women’s writing a subjective and exclusive female criticism, and
locating a female identity which is only a step away from the project of
gynocriticism.

Martin Swales in The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Herse (98-

102) discusses how the purpose of the Bildungsroman is fulfilled with the
‘questioning of the narrator’s and ultimately the readers’ capacity for reflexivity and
its concern to articulate the values and assumptions upon which human experience
rests’ (98-102). This is also something that Bronte and other women writers appear
to be striving after in such works of Bildungsroman as Jane Eyre and Shirley.

Both the German bildungsroman and the female bildungsroman have the
tendency to ‘substitute inner concentration for active accommodation, rebellion and
withdrawal-something that Eyre also does at various points (Weiss 20). The subjects
of these twin variants of the bildungsroman genre are typically an ostracised social
outcast, whose constantly debilitating relationship with religion and nature creates a
great threat of self-destruction and implosion. This crippling relationship also
manifests itself in Jane Eyre, a classic bildungsroman that is chosen for the
gynocritical analysis (Weiss 20-21).

Bildungsroman was originated in order to assess the questions of

representation, the relationships of an individual with a group and the essence of the
subjective experience. This experience is documented in the bildungsroman in social
and aesthetic terms. Not long after, women writers set their eyes on the genre to
flaunt its embedded contradictions and thematic disquiets to document their
subjective culture and literary history instead of subverting the patriarchal structures
that are associated with generic historical categories. In describing one’s experience
and respective reality, writers of the bildungsroman take an epistemological stance
instead a teleological one. Unsurprisingly, the 1970s saw the recruitment of this
genre amongst feminist ranks for the purpose of defending their right to describe a
subjective reality exclusive to women, legitimise this reality and highlight the ways
this contrasted with the reality of their male counterparts. Since this is exactly the
36
project of gynocriticism, it appears as the most pertinent literary lens to analyse and
interpret the female bildungsroman.

Like the bildungsroman, the sensation novel was a ‘literary and cultural
phenomenon’ that soon became a public rage in the 1860s. According to a review in
the Fraser’s Magazine (1863), ‘A book without a murder, a divorce, a seduction, or a
bigamy, is not apparently considered worth either writing or reading (qtd in Hughes
260).’ Brandon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, the quintessential sensation novel chosen for
a gynocritical analysis, exhibits all of the aforementioned sensation features.

Titillating scenes of crime and seduction are as much part of the sensation
novel as its unequivocal heroines. The sensation novels evoked extreme emotions
amongst the public and in most cases had palpable designs on their physiology
causing them to feel actual emotions of nervousness, terror, and even sexual arousal.
(Hughes 261). These emotions became all the more intriguing because now, instead
of unfolding in the exotic locales of the Apennines, the plot of murder and illicit
relationships began to take place in the ‘cheerful country house and the busy London
lodgings’ (James 10).

In a way the sensation novel displaced the sanctity that had come to be
associated with the middle-class home and which had occupied such a central spot in
the Victorian culture. It was no longer capable of providing a safe haven against the
brutalities of expanding industrialization and urbanization, but instead had begun to
virtually give shelter to blood churning mysteries of murders and disloyalties. The
sensation novel thereby exposed the middle class existence for being rooted in crime,
secrecy and deception (Hughes 261).

What is of special interest to this study is the way in which the sensation
novel contributed to toppling and then reconstructing the image, perceptions, and
expectations of women in the society. In almost every other sensation novel, the
central role belonged to a woman dabbling simultaneously in crime heinous in nature
on one hand, and playing the angel of the house on the other. With the rise of the
sensation novel the ‘angel in the house’ morphed into a relentless adventuress
(Hughes 261).

The more this ‘angel’ aligned with the Victorian feminine ideal, the greater
was the implication of a tacit perversion and false pretentiousness. In all instances,

37
however, the novel came as providing a relief from the overused image of the damsel
in distress. The damsel now took the matters in her own hands and did not rely on
any kind of assistance from the men; although it is very telling that the shift from the
image of the passive protectress of her purity to an active participant of the plot came
for the females at the cost of such perverted implications as those of being a
murderess, a bigamist, or an adulteress (Hughes 262). Female activities had now
come to be feared by mid-century Victorian novelists and readers as posing a very
tangible threat to the entire institutions of the middle--class household and family. As
Hughes puts it, ‘in literary terms, the sensationalists were engaged in picking at the
apparent seamlessness of the mainstream realist novel as well as that of the Victorian
culture and society it purported to represent (263).

Many of the fantasies of feminine novels in general and sensation novels

seem to be related to materialistic gains, social mobility and power in life. Although
there were many feminine novels in which the assertive heroines were punished for
their ambitious natures, many writers often represented women as the reasons behind
the success of many men. “The woman’s man… was often a more effective outlet for
the “deviant” aspects of the author’s personality than were her heroines, and thus
male role-playing extended beyond the pseudonym to imaginative content”
(Showalter 1977: 27). The male characters often reflected the inner turmoil and
desires of the writer who was writing these novels. The sensation novels increasingly
came to be seen as providing women writers with that outlet.

The women were gradually pushing back the boundaries of their language
and were starting to openly demand their rights. The women novelists especially
presented the ideas that their profession not only required excessive freedom of
language, but also movement and action. Writers of sensation novels such as Mary
Braddon, Rhoda Broughton, and Florence Marryat especially exhibited this need.
The women clearly developed a transitional phase which included themes of protest
against marriage and a strong retaliation against the economic repression of women.
These novels were still in the “framework of feminine conventions that demanded
the erring heroine’s destruction” but overall they served as transitional novels
(Showalter 1977: 29).

With the groundwork laid, the upcoming chapters will render a critical
analysis of the three novels from the cultural gynocritic lens and assess the ways in

38
which these novels proved transitional bridging the limited expected roles of women
in the feminine literary phase and the more active and rebellious consciousness of
women in the feminist one.

39
 CHAPTER 2: NORTH AND SOUTH

The study will begin its analysis with the novel North and South penned by
Elizabeth Gaskell in 1854. The choice to begin the gynocritical examination of the
three nineteenth century publications with an industrial novel is steeped in the great
impact that industrialism had over the shifting cultural, social, and religious practices
in England during this time. The previous chapter of theoretical framework has
already shed some light on the close connection between the rise of industrialization
and women’s increased participation in the public field. Since the analysis concerns
itself with the collective consciousness of women during this time, it is befitting that
a context is established beforehand for what the cultural, social and religious
expectations were like for women and how it manifested in the different genres,
starting with the idea of the “New Woman.”

The debates of New Woman flourished greatly when industrialization grew

and women who were previously limited to the domestic sphere came out in the
public sphere. “The "New Woman" of the last two decades of the nineteenth-century
is clearly a product of the industrial culture in as much as its economic and
educational effects created opportunities for women outside the domestic sphere and
the outworn marriage plot of middle-class respectability” (Childers 94). More
women entered the industrial sphere and contributed to the economy of the country.
As more women came out to work in factories, the demand for better education and
financial independence for women also increased. In this period, “the issues
informing the "Woman Question" of the last third of the century closely resembled
many of the "Condition of England" issues of the 1840s” (Childers 94). Debates
about voting rights, better education and morality came to the surface again but this
time the debates were gendered and focused on the rights of women. Women even
demanded that instead of pressurizing women, the sexuality of men instead of
women should be policed.

2.1. North and South as an Industrial Novel

Women’s heightened activity in the public sphere, although initially exclusive

to the working class, was in direct contrast to the prevalent discourses on women’s
biological and cultural spheres. In The Victorian Period: The Intellectual and
Cultural Context of English Literature (1993) Gilmore declares how, for the

40
Victorians, conflation of science, literature and theology was of little consequence
and there was little attempt to separate one from the other (Gilmour 2014).
Biological revelations too, instead of contradicting thelogical and intellectual
commetary on women’s natural inferiority, seemed to promote them.

Paul Brice, for example, quotes how Women’s intellectual inferiority

stemmed from their physical and mental inferiority, making them, on average, “a
little less intelligent than men” (qtd in King 28). Similarly, Professor Hubbard went
so far as culturally limiting Women’s role to the domestic and maternal sphere by
pronouncing that the “Almighty” seems to have designed the entire female anatomy
around the uterus. (qtd in King 28-29). In Hubbard’s comments therefore, we see the
cultural practice of narrowing down Women’s intellectual faculties to matters of
biology, that is simultaneously using theology and religion as its basis. Again,
Jeannette King, in The Victorian Women Question in the Contemporary Feminist
Fiction quotes the first definition of gynaecology published in 1849 which spoke of
the physiology and ontology of the female reproductive system as key to
understanding the “mental, psychological and moral nature” of women (28). There
was then a general tendency among the Victorian culture to limit a female’s
intellectual, spiritual and social spheres to matters of biology. With the industrial
revolution and the consequential rise of the industrial novel, this cultural practice of
limiting females’ physical and mental capabilities to her biological and domestic
sphere was displacing. The industrial novel and its popularity was both the product
of this cultural shift and the agent behind it.

A dominant and almost integral pattern found in the industrial fiction

produced by both men and women, at the time was the use of feminine discretion,
compassion, benevolence and empathy as the antidote to the ills of a largely
masculinized industrial economy harboured around the principles of utilitarianism
and individualism. Gaskell it appears had been writing both in tow and against this
current. Surely, Gaskell has, more than once, been credited for ascribing women
spheres and roles that well contrasted with conventions of the time. The thesis
would first ascertain the ways in which North and South conforms to this literary
tradition of carving out women as the saving grace of the society through the
machinations of self-sacrifice. Thornton’s humanisation through Margaret’s feminine
influence is vastly in alignment with the reformist literature popular during the

41
industrial revolution, but such an appraisal of Margaret’s philanthropy would be
blatantly shortsighted. The primary aim of the industrial novel was to give ‘a human
face’ to the suffering and injustice of the capitalist and laissez faire economy of the
industrial revolution (Womack 107).

The study begins its analysis by elaborating how Gaskell inverts many of the
cultural stereotypes for women, which the earlier chapters shed light on, in her novel
North and South. Margaret Hale is ordinary looking and this idea has even been
endorsed by her suitors. In the opening of the novel Margaret stands charmed at the
‘lovely posture of Edith that could rival that of ‘Tatiana’ herself. (Gaskell 3)
wondering as to how could her beauty amount to anything other than a life filled
with love and admiration. The solemn dwelling on Edith’s beauty would almost lead
one to believe that it is Edith and not Margaret whose life chapters are about to
unfold.

In carving the female protagonist out of plainer features, and making a point
of informing her readers of this defect of her female hero, Gaskell begins to debunk
some of the cultural myths of the Victorians who readily equated beauty with inner
goodness. Her second act of resistance was embedded in the need for Margaret to
leave the confines of the private sphere more often than would be deemed proper for
a woman of her stature.

However, there would hardly be an industrial novel that is devoid of a female

character acting as a moral resuscitate, a spiritual guide, the mediator between
different classes and the saviour of the debilitating industrial society. When Rebecca
Davis deviated from the dominant discourse by drawing out Margret Howth, a
female worker of an American textile industry, who refuses to take on this role of
savoir, the publisher refused to accept the work until the novelist revised the plot by
introducing the somewhat ill-fitting conventions of marriage and general reform
(Womack 106). Margret Howth, the American foil of Margaret Hale, some have
argued, is a more realistic depiction of the kind of role women were playing during
the economic revolution. Both suffer from a fall in the social status resulting from
paternal ineptitude. But where Margret Howth employs herself in actual labour to
prevent the family from falling into a state of pecuniary, Margaret Hale retains her
aristocratic demeanour and high principles. This was important to grant Margaret the

42
voice and agency needed for the character to play the reformist that by now has
become a norm.

Margaret’s sombre carriage and bearing of manner, despite the depreciating

family economics, do not only appear misplaced to the readers and critics but also to
the very characters populating the novel. One reason why Mrs. Thornton takes a
great dislike to Margaret is because of the mismatch between Margaret’s ways of
polished social decorum and the family’s debilitating economic status. She is what
Mrs. Thornton describes as the ‘penniless girl’ (Gaskell 130) for whom her son Mr.
Thornton must have no business pining after.

Margaret’s demeaner, however misplaced, could not be helped either by the

character or by the creator herself. Gaskell seems to have modelled Margaret after
herself. As a missionary’s wife, Gaskell came into direct contact with the destitution
which was the by-product of the industrial shift as opposed to writers who only learnt
of these from reports or second-hand sources. She was the observer of the poor
working class’s minute but everyday struggles. While in Mary Barton, Gaskell
endeavours to narrativize this struggle from inside the afflicted community, in her
novel North and South, her position is that of a journalist decoding the aftereffects of
the revolution on the poverty-stricken masses.

The economic fall of the Hales was a necessary mechanism to bring Margaret
into direct contact with the working-class poor, and through her, the vastly middle-
class readership. On the other hand, retaining Margaret’s social privilege on account
of her greater education, was customary to keep intact the deus ex machina of a
female mediator who would bring respite to the hopeless situation between the
masters and the workers.

There was a visible tendency amongst middle class novelists to

instrumentalise women’s role, especially educated middle class women, as a diffuser
of the impending threat of a revolution or an outbreak of violence at the very least,
owing to the working-class’ egregious social conditions. Women did this by
peacefully resolving what seemed like social cul-de-sacs potentially threatening the
entire societal constitution. This threat of a violent outbreak was extremely tangible
during the Chartist period of 1840-1860, the period that simultaneously produced the
most impressionable works of the industrial novel genre.

43
 And it was through such an instrumentalization that feminist critics such as
Catharine Gallagher, Constance Harsh, and Rosemarie Bodenheimer began
advocating a rereading of the genre to decipher the endless possibilities contained in
the depiction of radical females and the troubled ideology of the “separate spheres”
(Womack 108). Such criticism as opposed to the general analysis to which the
reform novels of this era are submitted, allow critics to look past what appears their
overtly didactic narrativization of the poor man’s suffering.

Likewise, the embeddedness of a romance plot involving the unification of

people representing contrasting ideological beliefs was a leitmotif in many industrial
novels. This unification was often a metaphorical announcement of the unification
between masters and the workmen to boot. This romance plot, along with the quite
simplistic notions and arguments were presented as holding the key to the resolution
of the prevalent social turmoil which were, it is true, quite complex and reforming
which would require more than the benevolent hand of one master pacified under the
gentler impulses of a woman.

Margaret’s marriage to Mr. Thornton is merely what Lyde Cullen Sizer

describes as the rhetoric of unity: a narrative tendency amongst the writings of the
American civil war’s women authors (Sizer 75-77). The matrimony between
Margaret and Thornton on one hand represents the unification of various kinds of
opposites: north and south, public and private spheres, masculine stringency and
feminine compassion etc., on the other hand this unity, bringing together opposing
ideologies, also serves to defuse the growing surge of revolt amongst people at the
time of the industrial revolution. According to Ruth Bernard Yeazell, the ability to
employ the sentimental convention of introducing a final marriage plot helps to curb
‘social and political anxieties (127). This was important to drive the readers’
attention away from the exigencies of the working-class poor in times when there
seemed no apparent or immediate solution. Women and the roles played by them, it
appears, could easily lend that distraction. After the riot for example, the focus of the
narration shifts abruptly to Mr. Thornton’s proposal to Margaret and the complexity
of their love with the latter’s refusal. By the time the readers are taken back to the
rioters, their fury is largely transformed into bitter disappointment. Then it becomes
easier for Margaret to slip back into her role of the pacifier. Through this occasional
slippage, industrial novelists, and definitely Gaskell, keeps the machinery of her plot

44
for the industrial novel running which, as this dissertation ascertained earlier, is best
sustained by institutionalising the domestic values of the female realm in the public
sphere. According to Raymond Williams, this collation of the southern girl’s
sentimentalities with the practicalities of the northern manufacturer was the targeted
end of the novel and is stated in noticeable terms (Williams 94) when Mr. Thornton
is described as moving back to Milton “to have the opportunity of cultivating some
intercourse with the hands beyond the mere cash nexus” (Gaskell 525).

As far as the novel North and South is concerned, Margaret’s female essence
makes her the perfect symbol of the southern values of compassion and greater good
of humanity and this symbolism justifies Margaret’s presence for a possible
reformation in the north. The south symbolizes tranquility and serenity which mirrors
the calm of a domestic household. The north is riddled with the jarring noise of the
machinery which is representative of the male dominated public sphere. People of
south are characterized by the genteel notions of aristocratic complacency,
northerners are restless with their plight. The south tries to stifle any ideas of
ambition, while ambition is the driving force behind the lives of both the workmen
and traders whose shift to the industrial side of the country was marked by a desire to
improve their financial status. The southern workmen, despite surviving on
starvation wages, choose to make peace with their suffering, while the north is
rampant with threats of violent strikers whose pulsating self-esteem exhorts them to
take practical action against anyone who threatened to diminish their wages.

The south’s passive admittance of its ascribed status, its apparent inability to
release itself from the shackles of traditional ideas of aristocratic immobility, country
clergy and Hampshire squires (Gaskell 199) and its insistence of replacing ambition
with greater values of societal compassion and humanity, even as it invokes a case of
social dependence of one class over another, makes the place a somewhat feminine
subject.

On the other hand, the northern Milton is where people strive to take matters
in their own hands. There is not a single place in Milton that offers the peace and
quite similar to that which the south offers. All around are cries of impatience,
change, ambitious gratification and individual accession that is both “unchristian and
isolated” (Gaskell 214). In its everyday mode of aggression, the north forms a
masculine subject of study. It makes sense for Gaskell to have chosen a female figure

45
as representative of the southern values and a male spokesperson to sympathise with
those of the north. The female figure is that of Margaret, whose bold defiance of
admitting Mr. Thornton as a man worthy of the epithet of a gentleman on account of
him being a manufacturer resonates with the southern notions of prepossessed
gentility. One can see the traces of the feminine streak in Margaret’s
characterization. Mr. Thornton, on the other hand, is the male spokesperson-a
sympathiser of the industrial revolution that has initiated the culture of individualism
and societal competition, “which makes us victorious over material resistance, and
over greater difficulties still” (Gaskell 606). Mr. Hale’s drawing room is where these
two characteristic forces of south and north come into contact, not necessarily to
prevail upon one another but to complement and complete where the other is lacking.

As Margaret loses her social status, she forgoes most of her dreams that a
woman living in the charmed and sentimental household in the fashionable London
society, such as the one Margaret lived in, would cherish. And she forgoes it to
negotiate the public sphere of which she has had no practical experience and against
which she possessed only a set of prejudice. While the yearning of writers like
Benjamin Disraeli and members of the Young England Movement was after the
regeneration of the chivalrous and feudal times of the former England, writers like
Gaskell somehow yearned to make peace with the increasing industrialisation in a
way that would benefit the majority masses. There is a great chance that this
advocacy of making peace with the process of industrialisation resulted more from a
growing sense of independence that it seemed industrialisation would somehow
bring to women than the inevitability of this capitalist economy overrunning
feudalism.

In the novel North and South The social plummeting of the Hales bring them
to the point where they can only afford one servant. Without the services of a male
servant who could render chores that take one outside of the house, Margaret had no
choice but to perform these excursions herself. At one point, she even likens herself
more to “Peggy the laundress” than “Margaret the lady” (Gaskell 115). Nevertheless,
Margaret was successfully able to retain this title, and it was an unstated attachment
of this epithet to her bearing that kept Mr. Thornton, a potential suitor, friends with
Mr. Hale, from hoping to court her, to the great agony of his mother who had her
own definition of what constituted a ‘lady’.

46
 The cultural setup of Milton North differed drastically from that of
Hampshire South. Margaret came from the land of the gentry, where ‘ladies’ did not
speak garrulously in the streets and men did not take the liberty to make pointing
remarks toward ladies, especially those with whom they were narrowly acquainted.

Describing the stream of men inundating the streets of Milton from various
mills around evening hours, Gaskell writes:

They came rushing along, with bold, fearless faces, and loud laughs and jests,
particularly aimed at all those who appeared to be above them in rank or station. The
tones of their unrestrained voices, and their carelessness of all common rules of street
politeness, frightened Margaret a little at first. The girls, with their rough, but not
unfriendly freedom, would comment on her dress, even touch her shawl or gown to
ascertain the exact material (119).

These were cultural oddities that baffled Margaret. However, it was the
behaviour of the workmen that caused her greater perplexity. More than once
Margaret was in a position to take offense at the audacity of these workmen who
ventured to make bold remarks not just on her appearance, but on her looks. Shocked
at first, Margaret refrains from being thoroughly repulsed. Gaskell comments that the
very freedom with which these remarks were directed in Margaret’s way indicated a
purpose devoid of any sinister intention but an innocent bemusement arising from the
fine and friendly spectacle of a lady. Milton’s industrial culture that required women
and children to work alongside, albeit for fewer wages, paved way for what was to
be one of the most important revolutionary waves in the history of women’s rights.
In Margaret’s endorsement of the cultural difference of the north, it is clear that
Gaskell was advocating, in shrouded tones, the need to review the changing cultures
and ways “women were negotiating barriers to entry in the public sphere” (qtd in
King 21).

Margaret Hale surfaces as the strong reformist female heroine who is eager to
make a change with her benevolence and enthusiasm for social welfare. Although
she rarely comes out of her domestic sphere. It is interesting to note how Margaret,
despite paying only a few calculable visits into the dingy Milton streets is able to
leave a tangible impact on the lives of many Miltoners.

47
 Owing to her better upbringing and possessing the sentimentality of a
woman, Margaret not only feels entitled but also responsible to perform such works
of charity that ease the strain between the masters, represented in the character of Mr.
Thornton and the ‘hands’ characterised in the person of Mr. Higgins.

For the greater part of the novel, Mr. Thornton, the emerging factory owner,
shows a bleak indifference to the miseries of his workers in the factory. Margaret, for
reasons explained later in the study, comes to keenly sympathise with the plight of
the factory workers and sets about to reform the growing anguish and hostility
between the masters and the workers in her own way. Just as how Austen’s Elizabeth
Bennet could not have moulded out the uncompromising and brittle Mr. Darcy for
the better, had she not been the owner of her own set of uncompromised principles,
so does Gaskell’s Margaret merit applause for battling Mr. Thornton’s unwarranted
principles of disregarding personal connection within the cash nexus by her own
equally tenacious principles of compassion and benevolence. Mr. Thornton’s
arguments were embedded in a heavily masculine culture of trade and economy that
made people into automatons and the questions of human compassion and suffering
were thrown out of the window. On the other hand, Margaret’s own female culture
populated with the everyday interactions between female accomplices from different
class societies germinate her criteria of a relationship balanced upon a mutual
dispensation of compassion, understanding and work ethics.

Through the agency of Margaret, the masters and the workmen come to
understand that it is indeed the lack of communication and man-to-man dialogue that
is responsible for the seemingly unbridgeable rift between the two classes. What
Margaret has been able to achieve within the dynamics of the female culture, through
her unification with Mr. Thornton, she is able to pass it to her husband: the ability to
see through the “mere cash nexus” (Gaskell 525). Also, of importance is the
understanding that this unification is achieved by Margaret on her own terms. It is
unlikely that Margaret would have been able to exert such an influence over Mr.
Thornton had she chosen to compromise on her own beliefs and judgements.
Although for much of the later section Margaret mulls over her misjudgment of Mr.
Thornton’s character with due compunction, she never wishes to revisit the episode
where Mr. Thornton asked for her hand in marriage. Margaret’s refusal to court Mr.
Thornton is hinged more upon the ideological differences between the two than

48
anything else. And although towards the end of the novel she completely overturns
her prejudices against the manufacturing community, she still does not wish for any
revision of her original stance regarding marriage. What she feels for Mr. Thornton
is a keen sense of respect for his decision to alleviate her case despite her former
transgressions against his feelings. She is not inclined to marry Mr. Thornton until it
becomes apparent that through her patronage and unification with Mr. Thornton,
Margaret would be able to better employ her agency and do the greater good that she
hitherto could not help. And here lies another latent message, that of the nobility and
final reward of uncompromised principles. Even before marrying Margaret, her
influence has been enough to force him into arranging an occasional communal
dinner where he shares the delicacies of the “hot pot” with his workmen (Gaskell
554), an arrangement which was high unlikely before.

Only through displaying a characteristic and almost masculine refusal to

admit ideological fluctuations in matters of stout principle, it appears, women can
use their agency to produce tangible results, although they might still employ the
services of a male intermediation. This is the act of instituting of ‘women’s domestic
values into the public sphere’ (Womack 122) whereby they occasionally overwhelm
the general culture by bringing into the very open the dynamics of their domestic
female culture. By doing so, they allow themselves and the men whom they put into
action on their behalf, to treat the gaping wounds of the poor working class with
some kind of balm.

And once again Margaret feels ameliorated by indulging her urge for voice
and agency. Her reform work, that never discontinues, even as she moves back to
London comes into full force once she decides to purchase the Marlborough mills by
now pressed under severe economic distress. Through becoming Mr. Thornton’s
landlord and later his wife, she gains an undeniable access to the mainstream public
sphere that makes her not the first female character of Gaskell who is able to
negotiate her way into the public realm. Nevertheless, one must not forget that it is
not simply her slipping into fortune and possessing the mills that changes the plight
of the poor, but the long contending arguments that pass between Margaret and Mr.
Thornton over her sewing desk and her ability to salvage from abstractions the most
important elements of the female culture while instituting it in the public sphere that

49
culminate into the ideological regeneration responsible for the peace of the general
public.

Uncovering the presence of this female culture is the primary task of

gynocriticism and it is also what the later half of the analysis chapter will be
dedicated to.

The unveiling of the existence and essentialism of a female culture tasks the
dissertation with unravelling what Showalter call the double-voiced discourse, that
is, a corpus where the dominant and the muted discourse flow side-by-side. It is the
argument of this thesis that Gaskell’s use of the double-voiced discourse becomes a
great narrative technique that allows her to question and regale her readers on the
role and perceptions of women and modify these in the wake of a complimentary
female culture which, at least at the time of the novel’s creation, was making itself
known in subtle and muted tones.

2.2. North and South and the Female Culture

In the instance where one looks for the double-voiced discourse that
Showalter speaks of in texts scribed by women, Elizabeth Gaskell’s industrial novel,
North and South, surfaces as a valuable resource. The essence of the double-voiced
discourse is embedded in the underlying theme of a social, cultural and historical
female perspective “muted” under the sheer weight of the dominant social and
cultural discourse (Showalter 201), and what better way to expound it than in the
culturally elusive times of the Industrial Revolution, whose documentation by the
novelists of the time became a precedence of change both within the social as well as
gendered spheres.

The common tendency of subjecting the industrial novel to the exclusive

critical lens of the Marxist school has resulted in asking primary questions
pertaining, almost exclusively, to economy and its impact (Donovan 441). The most
that such a criticism does for the female experience includes a discourse on how
conditions of women became more egregious than their male counterpart. If
anything, a Marxist, deconstructionist or some other perspective of literary criticism
of the industrial novel genre only reinforces the narrative of female victimization.
Even a feminist analysis would only give a feminist account of the rights denied to
women, a criticism based on two forms of dependency that Showalter abhorred:

50
protest and approval from the male counterparts (217). It completely undermines the
prevalence of a “muted” (199) discourse that, according to Showalter, is commonly
undercut by the dominant discourse. It is therefore the project of gynocritics to
demystify the ‘muted discourse’ and look at the novel and the genre’s contribution in
displacing cultural myths about the female consciousness during a time which
inadvertently became conducive to such a displacement.

The methodology section prevails upon the use of two kinds of discourses
when documenting the culture of the female. In her essay, “Feminist Criticism in the
Wilderness” Showalter draws on the works of Ardener and Lerner to maintain how
the dominant discourse has long been formulated and perpetuated by males, designed
exclusively to accommodate a most androcentric relationship between the signifier
and the signified, and taken de facto as the lingua franca of all agentic species. The
muted discourse, according to both Ardener and Showalter, is not necessarily silent,
but garbed under the pretence of a seemingly androcentric conformity ( Showalter
200), i.e., while women’s writing, especially from the feminine phase may appear to
comply with the traditional roles ascribed to men and women, there is always a
secret (and suppressed) note of rebellion in them that has to be read between the
lines. This suppression is an anomaly, and if not in the regular medium of assertion,
must make itself known in ways more hidden than opaque, more evasive than direct.
As Ardener puts it, in response to the question of expression for the ‘symbolic
weight of the other mass of persons’, the muted discourse must be detected in female
art and ritual (48).

North and South perfectly situates itself for such a critical scrutiny. Published
in 1854, the novel is the direct product of a literary tradition that has been
compartmentalised as the feminine phase in the female literary curve. The phase is
marked by the painful and often conspicuous internalisation of the andro-conformist
ideas of culture, history gender expectations and society (Showalter).

Gaskell’s protagonist of North and South is a young girl of twenty who has
lived most of her life alternately within the confines of her cousin’s stately home in
London and the limited landscape of Hampshire. Following the struggles,
occupations, and interactions of her feminine world, one is almost surprised how
easily the novel lends itself to a social realist scrutiny. Indeed, it is almost in the
wholesomeness of the novel’s thematic implications and commentary on the

51
deepening polarity between the working class and the Masters, juxtaposed with the
somewhat limited society of Margaret, populated mostly with female companions,
that we come to endorse Lerner’s belief in the equanimity of the female culture.
According to Lerner, one must not think of the consciousness of the female world as
a subculture. The culture of the majority must not and cannot be subjugated. While
the female experience might be marginalised in the masculine tradition for its
otherness, women have resorted to remodelling this relation by turning this otherness
into a complementarity of sorts, thereby redefining it. That is, a female’s experience
might be different, but not necessarily inferior to a man’s. It is complimentary, not
deviating (Lerner 229).

Surely such a perspective makes it easier for one to understand how novels,
such as the one under discussion, lend so willingly an insight into the general social
dynamics when they apparently confine themselves to the occupations, and
consciousness of a female protagonist.

The primary plot of the novel North and South revolves around the tensions
and the climactic strikes that Milton workers put up against the diminishing factory
wages. The Preston Lockouts of 1853 were probably the inspiration behind the
Miltoners’ strike in Gaskell’s novel. Gaskell’s tone is reformist and conciliatory, as
opposed to accusatory and vindictive. The reclamation of suffering, especially on the
part of the Milton workers, however abject and pathetic, resonates strongly with that
of a similar reclamation that female writers have long indulged in. This appears to be
one reason why Margaret is more ready to side with the Milton workmen than
sympathize with the robust and, admittedly self-righteous declarations of Mr.
Thornton. As Lambert points out, there is seemingly a “resonance” between the
difficulties that Gaskell has faced in making her voice heard as a novelist and the
ones that the poor working class of her novels face in making theirs matter (124).

One of the main motives for the author of Mary Barton and North and South
in penning these works of classics was to use the medium of novels to disclose the
grim reality of the poor lives of the working class, during the time of the Victorian
revolution, to the middle class which formed the greatest bulk of her readership and
was widely ignorant of the former’s egregious circumstances. In her novel North
and South, for example, Margaret’s association with Bessy Higgins from the
working class was a way to make the readers ‘see the individual reality behind the

52
amorphous and anonymous mass of the poor who elbowed them daily in the streets’
(Lambert 122) but from whose consciousness the somewhat privileged stood visibly
aloof.

But it was more than that. It was not just the reality of the poor. It was the
reality through the often marginalised lens of a middle class woman who chose to
play the part of a reformist despite the limitations of her ‘resourcefulness’ for being
one. Bessy’s miseries appear compounded under the sheer weight of the economic
wrongs wrought upon the poor in general, and her self-imposed state of muteness
before her father about her personal sufferings brought on by the conventions of
gender on which the study will shed ample light shortly. In such a state Margaret
alone comes to bring Bessy, a lower class factory worker, some respite from the
shackles of public injustices and private conventions. Within the greater economic
spectrum that the industrial novel hinges upon, the female consciousness is often
marginalised. It must be noted that the most common referential standpoint from
which industrial novels are subjected to literary criticism is essentially Marxist and
once again committing the mistake of placing the male consciousness at the centre of
mankind’s experience (Donovan 441-442). Gaskell’s project however was bigger
than that. It was akin to her motive behind writing the first industrial novel Mary
Barton (1853). Critics have long argued that Mary Barton was a product of Gaskell’s
need to give vent to her personal grief of losing her infant son. Critic Christine
Krueger has some interesting comments with regards to that. According to Krueger,
taking Gaskell’s writings as a grieving mother and missionary’s wife’s “therapeutic
exercise” appears just to be society’s way to garb, under the robe of convention, the
literary achievements of a woman whose “political convictions forced her to
circumvent masculine social and literary authority” (Krueger 169).

In other words, Gaskell’s andro-conformist and self-approbatory language is

a way to a) criticise the long prevailing forms of consciousness that is thoroughly
masculine, especially within the scope of social economy, b) materialize female
political power that was almost non-existent in practice, c) create a female
community or in the words of Showalter, give a more tangible form to the female
culture, and most importantly amongst all, d) ‘feminize political discourse’, or in
other words, normalize the participation of women in political discourses and
evaluate politics from the perspective of women as well as men.(Lambert 125).

53
Gaskell does this by putting women’s consciousness and experience, both menial and
serious, at the centre of her novel. The audience becomes familiar with Margaret’s
world occupied with “ladies’ business” (11).

Fairly early in the novel, readers are nudged with hint of self-approbation,
quite akin to the indulgence in Showalter’s reclamation from before. In response to
Henry Lennox’s comments on ladies’ business being unlike men’s business, “which
is true law business” (Gaskell 11), Margaret has this to say: “Ah, I knew how you
would be amused to find us all so occupied in admiring finery. But really Indian
shawls are very perfect things of their kind” (Gaskell 11).

Inconsequential as the episode is, Margaret’s admission of Mr. Lennox’s

somewhat disparaging remarks on women’s occupations and her modification of this
disparagement into an instance of masculine ignorance calls to mind Ardener’s “no-
man zone” (qtd in Showalter 200). This is a zone from which the male consciousness
is distinctly barred, and in which female consciousness undergoes unique
development.

It is in episodes such as these and others, precisely one where Margaret and
Thornton enter into a gruelling debate on the relationship between Masters and
workmen (208), that the feminine and feminist traits intertwine almost inextricably in
the female writing.

Often in the novel, femininity, the weakness of Margaret’s sex, also becomes
her strength. For example, her impulse to send Thornton into the raging crowd of the
protestors first, realization of the mistake she made, and the decision to protect
Thornton by throwing her physical form between the manufacturer and the rioters is
a keen reminder of her social inexperience but one which the society cannot put her
at fault for.

Confined to her modest household, befriended with a single, poor but

righteous Higgins’ family, and filled greater ideas of sentimentality than practicality,
one could hardly have expected anything different. Yet who is she answerable for her
conduct and the possible fatality of incidence? Certainly not to either Mr. Thornton
or the rioters. Her mortification for this incidence stems purely from the gossips that
follow between Fanny and her maid, where the former pronounces her act too “bold
and forward” as to suit a lady (Gaskell 328).

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 The discourse here is once again embedded with duality of implications. On
the surface is the dominant discourse, whereby Margaret is both inexperienced and
impulsive. While Mr. Thornton is unfazed by the “infuriated multitude” (Gaskell
311) of the rioters who seemed to be looking for the “taste of blood” (Gaskell 311)
following the betrayal brought on by recruiting the Irish hands, Margaret loses
composure. This is the discourse in conformity with the dominant one of Hubbard,
Laycock and similar Victorian biologists who believed that females must be frail and
incapable of taking upon the weight of the practical world (King 8-30).

There is, however, another discourse prevalent. The muted discourse. The
spectacle is too much for Margaret because, unlike Mr. Thornton, Margaret has
befriended one of the strikers’ kind, the sickly and wan Bessy Higgins. While the
general culture keeps the masters and the workmen at bay, the norms of social
separateness between classes become less stringent in their applicability upon
females. While Mr. Thornton’s business and culture of social dominance and
hierarchical discord makes it impossible for him to befriend strikers on a personal
level, Margaret, being a woman from the peaceful county of rural Hampshire, has no
such restrictions.

Her acquaintance with Bessy, a result of the latter’s fanciful attachment to

Margaret who bequeaths her a set of roses, was an acquaintance of solicitous
admission on the part of the Higgins. It was a friendship grounded in the notions of
compassion, sympathy and a sisterly affinity between the two. Difference of status
didn’t regale Margaret because, as a female and daughter of a church dissenter, she
didn’t have much to assume either.

Fulfilling the role of nurturer and caretaker that nature has ascribed to the
female sex, Margate takes it upon herself to nurse Bessy intermittently during the
final days of the former’s consumption. This sisterly bond brings her into the
domesticity of a life much alienated to her and the general public of her social class.

Friendship between members of the two classes was not prohibited in any
written form. Indeed, Margaret’s own father befriends both the Higginses and the
Bouchers on Margaret’s behalf, but when he does so, he does it in the capacity of a
former missionary who desires to bring relief among the people of his parish. The
walls, erected out of class consciousness, somehow remain transfixed. Margaret,
however, is able to transcend the abstract walls of class-difference because the
55
dynamics of the female culture allow her to do so. Her attachment to the Higginses
arises, on the one hand, out of an innocent need on Margaret’s part to provide relief
to another human of her kin who would rather find solace in a distant female friend
than the rough, albeit well-meant, injunctions of her father, while on the other hand,
there is a kind of female consciousness at play. This once again calls for an
inspection of the female culture that Ardener, Lerner and Showalter spoke of.

As opposed to the general culture, which is marked by a communication

rupture between different classes, the female culture is more accepting of it. The
master-worker relationship was a relatively newer type of working relationship
during the beginning of the industrial revolution when compared with the mistress-
servant relationship that had a long prevalent tradition in the Victorian culture (Gavin
and Oulton 54-55). A short detour into the understanding of this culture that contains
the special dynamics between mistresses and female servants is absolutely necessary
to examine Margaret’s “theatricalised dissension” (Hadley 2) of the convention
exemplified in the exposure of her form to the rioters’ violence.

The industrial revolution and the resulting movement of the rural classes to
the urban hoods, gave rise to a distinctive group of white-collar salaried employees,
traders, manufacturers, retailers, artisans, intellectuals and professionals who began
to restructure the social position of the masses. Although this shift was publicly seen
as taking place with the advent of the newer occupations and businesses that came
with the plantation of industries, the changes were also part of the private domestic
spheres largely occupied by the females. Women, “especially middle-class
mistresses and their female servants, played a crucial role in defining the social
distinctiveness and character of this new, diverse group of individuals” (Chamberlain
53) and this is exactly the kind of redefining that leads Margaret to befriend and
understand Betsy on a personal level.

During the Victorian times, domestic servants coming from the working-class
poor were largely female for two reasons. Females were seen more serviceable,
mouldable and obedient than their male counterparts and warranted smaller salaries
in comparison to male servants. Mistresses of the houses, therefore had ample
experience in supervising servants and overlooking all related matters. Since men
rarely intervened in matters of domestic nature, servants were kept under the close

56
scrutiny of their female masters, who were likely to form a close attachment with
their servants.

It was therefore part of the female culture to forge a more personal bond with
the servants of the lowest order as opposed to the general norm prevalent amongst
their male counterparts. It is easy to see how the mistress-servant relationship was in
strong contrast with the master-workmen relationship where the primary dynamics of
mutual dependency were almost the same.

Just as how, the mutual dependency between the master and the workmen
meant that a refusal to work on the part of the latter could result in the dormancy of
the entire public institution, a similar power was ascribed to the female servants in
the private sphere. The mistresses understood this role of the servants and novels
were written, such as Howitt’s Work and Wages, where female servants chose to
mimic their mistresses while in reality they were sometimes taken to be mistresses
themselves (Burnett 171). Female servants therefore were allowed a lot more
indulgence by their mistresses than we see granted to the workmen by their masters.
This is one reason why Margaret fails to understand Mr. Thornton’s refusal to
disclose upon the workmen the real reason for not raising the salaries as had been
promised. According to Margaret, the tension between the masters and the workmen
were futile and insensible since “the two classes were dependent on each other in
every possible way” but each regarded “the interest of the other as opposed to their
own” (Gaskell 208) but this relationship of mutual dependency, understood as a
natural course of things in the female culture, remains incomprehensible to Mr.
Thornton until Margaret changes him for the better.

Mr. Thornton does not admit of any necessity of indulging workmen by

disclosing to them the ins and outs of manufacturing. Whereas Margaret alludes to
the divine injunction whereby masters are bound to the welfare of their workmen. It
has been a common custom within the novel for Margaret to voice opinions that are
either steeped in the biblical passages or either in a self-proclaimed show of
ignorance. Both seem to be stemming from the necessity of veiling female political
convictions under the fabric of a convention that is more acceptable to the society.
Since women were not expected to have strong political opinions, by referencing
biblical passages, Margaret’s opinions seem to appear less like a woman’s overt
participation in matters of politics and more like biblical injunctions that Margaret

57
was only forwarding. It is obvious that Margaret uses the divine injunction only to
prove a point which is originally steeped in the experience of her female culture.

In the public sphere, where the norm was for the masters to regard the
workmen as mere ‘hands’ and thus reduced to a dehumanizing metonymy, there did
not appear any reason to indulge them to such a level and apprise their personal lives
up close. In the private sphere, on the other hand, mistresses allowed the female
servants room to assert their consciousness by and by. This is why Margaret, time
and again, struggles to understand the lack of communication between masters and
the workmen. But class consciousness was an important determiner when it came to
the master-workmen relationship. Amongst the females, it is easy to see now, why
this consciousness had always been less enforced. This also explains why Margaret
decides to go out of her way in befriending Bessy Higgins. Close companionship
between middle class and working class was less of an anomaly among women than
men and it was steeped in the unique dynamic of the female culture of mistresses and
their servants from the working-class poor. Margaret’s friendship with Bessy, the
natural product of the female culture that is more accepting of inter-class friendships,
was also a convenient medium for Gaskell to bring to surface the troubles of the
working-class poor during the industrial time.

The close affinity between the two females discloses to Margaret what she
would wish for Mr. Thornton and others to see for themselves. Chained to the bed,
Bessy one day explains the gruesome sobbing of the neighbouring Mr. Boucher,
whose family of a sick wife and seven under-fed children can no longer rely on the
scanty provisions following the strike.

Distraught and sorrow-ridden over such misery, Margaret immediately

refurbishes provisions for the family, but the incidence makes its mark. She can no
longer act as a bystander. Mr. Thornton, and indeed other men of power could not
have known the intensity of the workers’ helplessness whose decision to strike was
but another act of misjudgment.

Spotting Boucher amidst the rioters, for whose arrest Mr. Thornton has sent
the soldiers, Margaret’s actions of throwing herself upon Mr. Thornton are less likely
to be interpreted as impulsive. It seems convincing that Margaret is “guided by her
womanly instincts” (Gaskell 352) to protect not only one gentleman from the

58
‘violence of numbers’ but also the ‘the numbers’ from their own misconstrued
violence (Gaskell 352).

The female culture, the no-man zone spoken of earlier, formed from the close
alliance of Margaret and Bessy Higgins, is what informs the latter of the intense
domestic catastrophes that would have made the rioters only more miserable. Mr.
Thornton’s world, the world of polarized masters and workmen, could not have
allowed him that insight nor the resulting compassion.

Indeed, Margaret’s actions, somewhat injudicious, prevent major catastrophe

by protecting the Irish workmen from the impending violence and thereby averting
arrests that most likely would have resulted had the strike continued for even a few
more minutes. A gynocritical interpretation of such kind brings validity to the idea of
understanding a complimentary female culture rather than an inferior or marginalised
subculture within the dominant culture of the male consciousness. If it were inferior,
the implications of the sisterly communion between Margaret and Bessy would have
failed to make their mark on the general order of things. As it were, Margaret’s
sacrifice is an inadvertent display of female resilience to the trampling and all-
encapsulating force of the male culture. This is an act which Whitney A. Womack
would most likely have described as “instituting” the domesticities of the female
culture in the public sphere (133).

Margaret may have been inclined, in the fashion of her male counterparts, to
take the side of one party than another. However, it is owing to the female culture of
the Victorian times that Margaret abstains from making such an error. Earlier, the
thesis proved how within the general culture of the industrial revolution that was
marked by a clear tug-of-war between different classes for economic control, the
female culture housed a degree of neutrality. This culture made it easier for Margaret
to refrain from taking sides or jump to conclusions too soon.

Having been part of and lived among the gentility all her life, Margaret could
not sympathise with Mr. Higgins’ vehement disregard for biblical injunctions of
what Margaret would call as “God’s order for what kind of life” it is to be (Gaskell
154). Indeed, in trying to reconcile Mr. Higgins with the idea of accepting his fate
and quitting the strike she was closer to the convictions of Mr. Thornton than Mr.
Higgins. In fact, more than once she almost takes the manufacturing lords’
standpoint in justifying the economic downturn that kept the masters from increasing
59
the labourers’ wages. However, the female culture of economic dependency and the
gruelling social and psychological constraints that result from these make it easier for
Margaret to understand the “cause” of the workmen (Gaskell 320), something Mr.
Thornton and other manufacturing masters were unable to do. For Margaret,
acknowledging their interdependency was the way forward for both the classes and
she was left perplexed as to why this should be so difficult to achieve. But what was
easily impressed upon Margaret in the limited scope of the female culture, became
the great conundrum in the male dominated economic setup.

Gaskell hence ingeniously segues back and forth between the dominant and
the muted discourse, where the former has economic discrepancy as its subject
matter and the latter has female intuitive adequacy as its thematic concern. While the
dominant discourse revolves around what were definitely perceived as matters of
masculine aptitude, the latent or muted discourse does not pass without the hint that
masculine wit is as prone to misjudgment as feminine wit was thought to be and that
where men have seemed to apparently fail, Women’s intellect may be given a try.

And it is given a try, as far as the novel is concerned. Margaret’s marriage to

Mr. Thornton is happily aligned with the improved lot of the workmen and a general
sense of economic and social bliss in the end. The change in Mr. Thornton’s opinions
in the matters of economy should not be deemed as the prevalence or triumph of one
gender over another. Gaskell has, in the fashion of other women writers of her time,
taken great pains to adjudicate the cause of a mutual regard for the opposite gender’s
opinion by putting the female protagonist at the mercy of a male saviour more than
once. In fact, it seems as though every time Gaskell becomes so bold as to put her
female protagonist into the carcass of a warrior or a protector, she quickly
compensates for it by bringing in the motif of ‘the damsel in distress’. When
Margaret steps out of her defined sphere of feminine delicacy by taking a hit in place
of Mr. Thornton which results in “grazing (her) forehead an cheek” (Gaskell 320),
Gaskell apparently gives more heroic credit to Margaret’s guts than the Victorian
audience of her time would give credit for. Immediately in the next moment,
however, Margaret goes back to her ascribed feminine status by getting caught up in
a fainting spell arising more out of a shock that proves too much for her feminine
constitution than any physical harm.

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 Similarly, her somewhat audacious disregard for Mr. Thornton’s feelings and
marriage proposal is rightly reprimanded when Mr. Thornton becomes the magistrate
for resolving a case in which she and her brother become accidently embroiled. In
line with the general Victorian expectation, Mr. Thornton comes as Margaret’s
saving grace and rescues her from what would have been a matter of great personal
and public mortification. And it is somewhere around this time that Margaret submits
her judgement to an open endorsement of Mr. Thornton’s nobility of character, his
better sense of judgement and his social superiority. She feels a sense of “anxiety and
a pang of sorrow” (Gaskell 630) over losing him. Indeed, Gaskell goes so far as
putting Mr. Thornton’s opinions “alongside with the displeasure of God” for
Margaret’s shortcomings, and this marks as one of the most blatant internalization of
the Victorian expectations. (Gaskell 512). Nevertheless, it is an internalization that is
not free of the suggestions of female aptitude thereby pioneering change.

In another way, the duality of discourse can be located between the narration
of Gaskell and the actions of her male and female creations. As stated earlier,
Margaret more than once admits the inadequacy determined by her sex to understand
matters of the male world order. Mr. Thornton’s assessment of the relationship
between workers and their masters, and his reverence for self-made manufacturers
who make their fortune from the “straightforward honesty of their hands” (Gaskell
216) than proprietors by destiny is tangential to Margaret’s principles but the latter
slowly warms up to the former’s notions. Margaret’s conformity, albeit belated, to
the androcentric notions of the greater male wisdom and acumen suggests the
internalisation of the dominant discourse. This becomes a paradox when one
remembers that the words ascribed to both the somewhat naïve Margaret, and the
more informed Mr. Thornton, Mr.Hale and other men have all stemmed from the
penmanship of a female author.

Henceforth, the apparent chain of actions, from Mr. Hale’s indulgence of

religious doubts, to Mr. Thornton’s deft role in acquitting Margaret from a serious
charge and thus saving her from immense distress conform neatly to the
phallocentric dominant discourse. What’s interesting is that in gratifying her male
characters with greater social power and self-indulgence, Gaskell is simultaneously
conforming to and running against the current of convention.

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 On the forefront, Mr. Hale’s sagacity, his bold insistence on indulging
religious doubts however depreciating, his fortitude in prioritizing his conscience
over a worldly semblance of missionary infallibility, all conform to the conventional
notions of male authority and consciousness. Readers of Gaskell’s time would have
found a man’s act of religious dissension based on deep routed question of
philosophy, though not ideal, tolerably digestible. In the muted discourse, however,
we see Mr. Hale’s actions and arguments as merely an inflection of the author’s
intellectual thought processes. Through the medium of Mr. Hale, Gaskell was able to
advocate the need of questioning religious autocracy. As part of the muted discourse,
this becomes Gaskell’s way of pioneering the need to question conflated mesh of
theological, biological and cultural assumptions which not only germinated the long-
embedded concepts of class division but also women’s role within the gendered
sphere. (Chamberlain 53-56). Even by today’s standard, and definitely in Gaskell’s
time, this must have been a bold declaration on the part of a woman.

Before North and South, Gaskell’s publications of Mary Barton (1848) and
the subsequent publications of Ruth (1853) and the Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857)
garnered both praise and massive disapproval. Copies of her work were publicly
burnt by the congregation of which her husband was a member and she
simultaneously received threats of legal actions. North and South appears to advocate
similar principles of the need of bringing respite to the working class as she
previously vouchsafed, but in a more subdued tone. And it is in the unravelling of the
dominant discourse in order to salvage the muted discourse that the complete
understanding of Gaskell’s North and South can be secured.

Mrs. Gaskell has been described as a woman bestowed with a compassionate

understanding of the difficulties faced by the working class that few could surpass
(Williams 98). With regards to both Mary Barton and North and South, her works
are apprised as documenting the miseries faced by the working-class poor for the
purpose of reform. While Mary Barton seems to exemplify these miseries from the
perspective of the oppressed sections of the society, North and South takes up the
subject of “changing attitudes towards this class” (Lambert 53-54). Where Mary
Barton materializes the growing need amongst the working class for an outlet that is
more than capable of taking on a violent façade, North and South scrutinises middle

62
and upper class’ role in damping, and if possible, purging any such need of a violent
protest from amongst the poor working class.

In this regard, it is easy to confuse Gaskell’s sympathies for the poor

workmen for an advocacy against the superiority of the southern values over the
north. Far from it, Gaskell in fact advocates the need for both the north and the south
to curb their immoderate exigencies and take from the other what it lacks in its
primary constitution. The problems of south, as become obvious from Mr.
Thornton’s visceral condemnation, and Margaret’s inability to reject these, are
complacency and lethargy. These characteristics, according to Mr. Thornton (and by
implication according to Gaskell herself) were counterproductive in a time when
ideas of pre-possessed wealth were starting to become more and more questionable.
Margaret’s own decision to marry Mr. Thornton is in strong contrast to her insistence
in the earlier sections that she likes people whose “occupations have to do with land”
(Gaskell 26). Mr. Thornton was to Margaret what she described as ‘her first olive’
digesting which was not possible without “making a face” (Gaskell 298). Her mostly
middle class readers of the time, who must sympathise with Margaret and grow in
intellectual wisdom with her ideological growth, have no choice but to take the
similar course of abandoning southern regard for accidental nobility in favour of
nobility that is earned.

At the same time, it is likely that the inability of the working class to make
their voices heard in the industrial revolution has a strong resonance with the
inability of females to make their voices heard in the general culture. There appears
to be a link between Gaskell’s struggle to have her voice heard as a legitimate
authority and that of the lower classes and it is easy to see why many deem the
industrial novel as a predecessor of the feminist works that appear in great numbers
later in the century (Balkaya 20-22).

The muted discourse of Gaskell’s North and South therefore advocates for the
necessity of this discourse to be unmuted. For the female characters, voicing their
innermost concerns, opinions and troubles in silent tones results not only in plot
complications, from the perspective of literary aesthetics, but also keep the men from
partaking from this female culture. Like the lower order in general, women of all
tiers in the Victorian were remarkably restricted in giving vent to their internal
struggles in forms of concrete verbal aberrations.

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 Therefore, for females belonging to the lower classes, suffering multiplied
with their immobility and an absence of an outlet. While the poor workmen rioted
and cursed, women could hardly do more than assuaging and partaking from their
men’s grief. Bessy, regaled by the state of her own consumption, worries
interminably of her father’s hopes and fears over the strike. Although suffering from
the final stages of tuberculosis, Bessy never condemns her father for smoking despite
it aggravating her condition. Once, in a fit of miserable panic, she describes the
distress her father’s perpetual smoking causes to her health. Shocked over the pain he
had been unwittingly causing her daughter in her final days, but unable to withdraw
from the addiction, Mr. Higgins leaves the house to smoke outside. Even this small
incidence creates a moment of great alarm for his daughter. The fact that Bessy
critically vilifies herself for inadvertently forcing her father out of the house
discloses the need for women to suppress their own discomfort for the sake of their
men. This was evidently part of the larger Victorian culture (Ellis 23-24). Margaret
herself often shrouded her fears over her father’s dissension, her mother’s ailing
health and her brother’s safety, who was still persecuted for mutiny, by means of
muting her thoughts into secrecy. Her mother’s ill-health made it hardly advisable to
make her the confidante of her secrets. Lambert has written extensively over the
medium of silence as playing an instrumental role in the lives of Gaskell’s female
characters (Lambert 94-100). In Gaskell’s earlier novels, especially Mary Barton,
silence performed a number of functions. At times the female characters’ inability to
speak becomes a medium of self-defence. This was the case with Mary from Mary
Barton who would resort to silence whenever she felt herself entwined in a
conversation she didn’t wish to be a part of or when she felt that the words would fail
to convey the feelings she wished to expressed, for example, when she bit her lip
hard enough to bleed in trying to keep the angry words against her father from
surfacing or at the time of Jem’s proposal to her. Silencing their sentiments,
however, would result in rupturing these characters’ mental health and physically
exhausting them.

Mrs. Hale’s failing health appears as much a result of her inability to ease her
troubled mind over her son’s absence, as it is due to the smog driven air of Milton
north. Mrs. Hale’s discovery of her own chronic illness and the decision to keep it a

64
secret from her family arises from a similar need that keeps Margaret hushed over
voicing her opinions in front of her family.

This practice of silencing in the female culture is somewhat contended in

Gaskell’s writing, at least where North and South is concerned. Gaskell makes it
obvious how the fewer opportunities given to the females for the change of air and
occupations, compounded with their inability to give full vent to their private
troubles, is what aggravates the condition of the vulnerable female health. Bessy,
Mrs. Hale, and, at one point, Margaret too become the victims of this self-imposed
case of silence. More than once Mr. Hale has been tormented at the sight of
Margaret’s wan cheeks and flailing physiognomy. However, it never occurs to him
that his daughter’s depreciating health could stem from some kind of mental fatigue
and the expectation to curb her own consciousness for the peace of her family, to
“give strength (to them) out of her own scanty stock”, and “act the part of a Roman
daughter” (Gaskell 436).

Bessy Higgins from working-class poor has attracted consumption from

inhaling fluff from the cotton factory. Her situation is aggravated because of her
father’s tenacious smoking, yet she chooses to not alarm her father as much as
possible. Bessy’s case calls to mind Rosemarie Thomson’s comments on the
inevitability of female disability to instill the idea of destitution in industrial
literature. This destitution, arising from self-imposed silence becomes a part of the
collective female consciousness. The physical disability of women in such novels
“operates as a badge of innocence, suffering, displacement and powerlessness that
renders the disabled woman sympathetic and alarming figures of vulnerability”
(Thomson 557).

This is in conformity with the general Victorian culture. Women of England

were supposed to feel proud when they served their men and created a nurturing
environment in their homes while simultaneously forgetting their own comfort. They
provided care to their men and denied themselves in making them comfortable.
When such duties were assigned to wives, mothers and daughters then “innumerable
channels (were) opened for the overflow of those floods of human kindness, which it
(was) one of the happiest and most ennobling duties of women to administer to the
weary frame, and to pour into the wounded mind” (Ellis 23). According to Ellis,

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women should have three characteristics. They should be swift in their actions, have
“energy of thought” and should have a very benevolent attitude.

It is interesting how Ellis’ account of a true woman’s duties did not

fundamentally take into consideration the question of women’s comfort. So,
consuming herself with devotion towards the family, women are almost goaded into
accepting a life of servile self-denial. In the case of the women of North and South,
this self-denial and the all-too consumptive roleplay of the “angel of comfort”
(Gaskell 450) achieved by curbing the urge of voicing their deepest fears and
expectations, takes a great toll on their physical and mental health.

When Margaret’s mother passes away, she must suppress her own grief so
that her father and brother can freely alleviate their passionate sorrows by giving
them vent as she bustles about to make arrangements for the funeral. When the cup
of suppressed emotions become too brim-full for the heart, she lets some of it spill by
“hiding her face in the cushions that no one might hear her cry” (Gaskell 452) over
the departed and then doubles over the loss that must not be spoken of. Only Dixon,
her female servant catches her in this vulnerable state and strives in any measure to
make her feel better.

Under such circumstances of silencing oneself, harbouring thoughts of

secrecy or sharing them with a close female companion surfaces as an important part
of the female culture and by extension their collective consciousness. Women have
to rely on the companionship and confidence of other women characters who are,
almost exclusively, same-gendered and outside of their immediate family circle.

For Mrs. Hale, the outlet is Dixon, her long-time family servant. Margaret’s
meetings with Bessy, too, were meetings that took place as part of committing to this
culture. Apparently, these were meetings desired by Bessy and granted by Margaret
as a token of compassion for the chronic patient in her final days. However, it would
be a mistake to think of these as bringing one-sided respite. Margaret equally
benefitted from these meetings. Indeed, she occasioned them during times that were
most crucial to her own family. What then, one wonders, could promulgate
Margaret’s expeditions under such emergency?

Bessy’s irrecoverable health, the Bouchers’ desperation and Mr. Higgins’

restlessness over the apparent dormancy resulting from the strike provided rueful

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moments when she could forget her own troubles for once. The spectacle of distress
and fading hope were solemn reminders of millions suffering from a worst plight
than her own. For someone who has been barred from the relief of confiding her
troubles, visits to Bessy gave her the chance to act, for once, as a solicitor than a
victim. Nor was it that Bessy and Margaret were strictly confined to the roles of
interlocutors and auditors. There were times when Margaret too found a listener in
the person of Bessy for her deepest contemplations. Her yearning for Helstone, a
topic she seldom reverted to before her own family, her own mother’s irrecoverable
health and the absence of a confidante were matters of grief that she disclosed to no
one but Bessy. Indeed, the latter learnt of the fatality of Mrs. Hale’s illness through
Margaret even before Mr. Hale did.

More than once Margaret prevents giving vent to the accumulating emotions
of grief and sorrow to ease the minds of her father and brother. The necessity to
conform to society’s expectations of being a source of domestic solace compels
Margaret to prioritize the comfort of her family over her own. Twice we see
Margaret assume these roles in the midst of great domestic turmoil. First relates to
Mr. Hale’s decision to quit the church of England on account of admitting “painful
and miserable doubts” around ecclesiastical theology (Gaskell 53). The blow is a
great one to Margaret, but she must suppress her own fears and perturbations for her
family’s sake. In the instance where Mr. Hale refuses to break the news of his
religious dissension to his wife, Margaret steps up to take the responsibility. She
must spare her father the “humiliation” (Gaskell 56) of being vilified by his wife
over his theological mutiny while trying her best to reconcile her mother with the
fresh blow and pacify her as much as possible. During the family’s departure neither
Mr. Hale nor his wife, the family heads, take charge of overseeing the move.
Margaret assumes the charge of the packaging of the furniture and even settlement of
the family in Milton. In this episode, as in the ones that populate the novel later,
Margaret surfaces as the ultimate picture of sacrifice and domestic solace.

One cannot help but notice how Gaskell, in conforming to the dominant
discourse of feminine nurturing, subdued the tone of this dominant narrative with
another one of muted suggestions. Margaret’s ability to subdue her grief for her
family’s sake while conforming to the Victorian expectations, in another way, goes
completely tangential to the other dominant of feminine inaptitude. That is, it goes

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against the discourses of Professor Hubbard, Paul Broca, and Thomas laycole who,
in the words of the latter, were of the belief that “females have less capability than
men for dealing with the abstract in philosophy, science and art due to smaller frontal
convolutions” (quoted in King 21). Margaret’s understanding of her father’s need to
resign from the Church, her desks that are clustered with the copies of the dictionary
and the Paradise of Dante, her shrewdness in deciding matters of family settlements,
her ability to subdue her own fears for the comfort of her family, and later, her keen
insight into the discord between masters and workmen and the real nature of
capitalistic social order are diametrically opposite to the cultural assessment of
female aptitude in the Victorian times.

This has been the special pedigree of female Victorian writers from the first
and second phases of the female writing tradition. It is well that Gaskell’s novel
belongs to the industrial genre but has a female protagonist, without much
experience of industrialisation, at the centre. The uniqueness of this combination
makes it easier for a gynocritic to discern the muted discourse under the garb of the
dominant, to account for apparent feminine ineptitude by placing it within the
oppressive dominant discourse that constricts the number of opportunities for
females. And by doing both of the above, prove how writers, such as Gaskell, have
ingeniously used the genre as a medium to advocate the similarity of ambitions,
dreams, fears and desires between the two sexes making them more similar than
different.

When talking to Mr. Thornton on the subject of the master’s treatment of

their workers, Margaret is at the same time both in and out of her element. The more
Margaret questions Thornton on account of her admitted inexperience in the matter,
the more she inadvertently reveals the making of a better manufacturer in her own
person. This is another instance where the muted discourse extricates itself from the
chains of the dominant narrative and comes out in full bloom.

It is clear from the conversation between Margaret and Mr. Thornton on the
subject of the relationship between masters and the workmen, that the masters do not
think of the workmen as anything more than servants, reducing them to an even more
denigrating epithet of being the masters’ “hands” (208). Margaret is quick to notice
the arrogant but misplaced dismissal of the rights and opinions of the workmen. Her
line of reasoning is thus: “I don't know--I suppose because, on the very face of it, I

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see two classes dependent on each other in every possible way, yet each evidently
regarding the interests of the other as opposed to their own; I never lived in a place
before where there were two sets of people always running each other down”
(Gaskell 208).

It is obvious that Margaret not only owns greater compassion than Mr.
Thornton, she also has the makings of a better manufacturer since she is so easily
able to pin down on the very crux of capitalism, whose aftereffects had still not fully
appeared before either the public or the economic speculators. Gaskell seems to be
advocating the need for the two classes to come together through the channel of
dialogue. Many novelists, writing about the condition of England at that time, argued
in favour of better communication between masters and servants (Baklaya 2015).
Moreover, in Gaskell’s novel this thesis is rendered by a young lady who has lived a
very short life amongst industrial people. The fact that she is able to assess the
situation of interdependency, a situation that neither the workers nor the masters are
able to see and the fact to which Mr. Thornton will eventually submit, shows how
women, if put under the experience, have the faculty to understand and interpret
larger subjects of economy, industry, and society as well as any man if not better.

2.3. Shifting Ambitions in the Female Culture

Margaret, being the spokesperson for this mass of unheard voices comprising
both the lower order and the muted women of the Victorian times, has her
limitations. Although her status as the daughter of a gentleman situates her in a better
place than the indistinguishable hoard of factory workers, she must still find a way to
break through the conventions to which her sex subjects. Almost every time, Mr.
Thornton and Mr. Hale take up a discussion, Margaret has to make use of the
feminine art of embroidery or lacemaking to admit herself into the discussion. Secure
behind the pretense of taking up some leftover piece of sewing work, Margaret can
easily eavesdrop into the conversation that passes between Mr. Thornton and Mr.
Hale. Her interjections are crafted to give the semblance of questioning all that she
has ‘overheard’ instead of consciously listened to with the aim of understanding the
workings of the manufacturing city and negotiating the cause of the poor classes.

Gaskell seems to have the tendency of choosing what Lambert (2018) calls a
gendered activity for the defense of her female characters. This gendered activity

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performs a significant role in the female culture. In her novel Mary Barton, this
gendered activity took the form of singing. According to Lambert, “Alice Wilson’s
mother sings to her and this becomes a metaphor for the love that follows Alice and
sustains her throughout her difficult life” (128). Mary herself resorts to singing in
order to distract herself from thinking too deeply about Jem and the persecution of
Harry Carson. Song became Women’s weapon for voicing their innermost thoughts-
thoughts that were forced to keep veiled. In North and South this gendered activity
comprised of sewing.

Margaret mainly takes to sewing in the drawing room to disguise her apparent
need to intervene in the men’s conversations around manufacturing, strikes, and the
treatment of the workers. Conversations in which females didn’t find any apparent
need to participate. The act of Margaret “sitting at her work” (212) of embroidery
while Mr. Hale welcomes Mr. Thornton into the quarter of his modest drawing room
is almost mentioned as a formality of sorts. It is obvious that without this façade of
female occupation, Margaret’s admittance into the conversation would appear out of
place to both the gentlemen and the readers. Margaret’s act of taking up sewing has
also been described as a pretence by Gaskell herself who wanted to make clear the
activity necessary to simultaneously feminize Margaret’s masculine endeavours of
understanding industrialism and challenging Mr. Thornton’s- an established
industrialist-understanding of it. The act of sewing thus becomes one way for
Margaret to “negotiate the barriers to the entry into the public sphere” (King 21).

In the Victorian times, sewing had always served an integral purpose in the
female culture. It was thought as women’s exclusive weapon. Within the domesticate
sphere it became an expression of female consciousness and outside of it, the art
paved way for some respite from dependence. So exclusive was sewing a female
enterprise that even when it was taken into the male dominated confines of the textile
and lacemaking factories, young and adult female employees completely
outnumbered male employees. In fact, machines were designed, such as the Jenny’s
wheel which could best be operated by the small and nimble fingers of young
females. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the lacemaking industry
became responsible for providing a minimal level of independence where possible,
and in households where these females contributed to the mainstream economy of a

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male head, the family was able to fairly rise out of destitution (Stephen and Oxley
723-749).

Not only then sewing becomes a woman’s way to disguise her other
passionate motives under the garb of a humbler enterprise such as Margaret’s
rendezvous into the public realm, it also brings Margaret respite when she needs
them. Every time it becomes difficult for Margaret to face Mr. Thornton, sewing
would become her excuse to deny conversations on account of being visibly
occupied. Similarly, her little project to make a lace apparel for her cousin Edith’s
baby brings her both comfort and distraction from the domestic and public worries of
Milton. Interestingly, sewing, a largely feminised and gendered ritual, especially
during the Victorian times, also becomes Gaskell’s way to break against the bounds
of this very convention. When Mrs. Thornton comes to pay a visit to the Hales, she is
left without bemusement over Margaret’s finesse in lacemaking. “Flimsy useless
work” (Gaskell 165) is what she terms Margaret’s little artistic advent. Margaret, it
seems, is in her most valuable and productive element when she chooses to take her
place in the public sphere. Her bouts in the private sphere are, although aesthetically
pleasing, devoid of practical use. In the similar fashion of Gaskell’s earlier creation,
Libbie Marsh from Sketches Among the Poor, No 1, who must “look about (herself)
for somewhat else to do” since God seems to have kept her “out of Women’s natural
work” (quoted in Lambert 126), Margaret, too, both mocks the internalised
conventions of the female sphere and is successfully able to break through them.

The female culture of which Margaret and her domestic affairs are a part, is
intricately woven by Gaskell within the larger cultural pattern of the English
industrial revolution.

This, according to Caroline Lambert, was a tendency prevalent amongst

various female writers of the industrial genre. Writers such as Martineu, and even
Trollope and Gaskell, “placed women more centrally” within the economic theory
and its practice (Lambert 125). While men, both as manufacturers and workmen,
were the active instigators of the economic upside, the industrial novels penned by
women depicted women as the passive lubricators. It is obvious that Mrs. Thornton
has modelled her son after her own indomitable principles of fortitude and resilience.
During the strike, Mrs. Thornton is as contemptuous of the strikers as her son. On the

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other hand, Bessy, despite her state of consumption, echoes her father’s sentiments
with regards to the relationship between the masters and the workmen.

Since the genre of the novel is industrial, the question of a derailing economy
and its after-affects takes precedence over other themes, including the prevalent
theme of a collective female suffering.

There is, hence, a tendency prevalent amongst the females of North and South
to live vicariously through their men in this general culture. Mrs. Thornton gloats
proudly over her son for having accomplished what she undoubtedly would have
accomplished for herself had her sex been allowed the social freedom.

Similarly Margaret, barred from the world of power and ambition in the
general Victorian culture, seems to savour the taste of ambition in the boastful
discourses of the men around her. During a party at the Thorntons’, Margaret is
pleasantly amused by the show of garrulous conviction from the powerful Milton
masters talking amongst themselves:

She was glad when the gentlemen came, …she could listen to something
larger and grander than the petty interests which the ladies had been talking
about. She liked the exultation in the sense of power which these Milton men
had. It might be rather rampant in its display, and savour of boasting; but still
they seemed to defy the old limits of possibility, in a kind of fine intoxication,
caused by the recollection of what had been achieved, and what yet should be
(291).

This short passage is one of many that lends itself to several hypocritical
angles of scrutiny all at once. The mastery with which Gaskell segues from
Margaret’s distaste for her female companions’ “petty interests” (Gaskell 291) and
appreciation for the gentlemen’s “exultation in the sense of power” (Gaskell 291)
suggests both an internalization and a reproof of the traditional concepts of the
feminine and the female.

While there is a mass of the other person whose toil in the Victorian times did
not involve a sphere outside of the immediate household domesticities, there were
women like Margaret who delighted in the exultation of power that were practically
enjoyed by her male counterparts. And she enjoys it not for the ignoble reasons of
egoistic gratification that such an exultation must bring to its sentient moulds. She
enjoys it because it seems to “defy the old limits of possibility” (Gaskell 291).
Gaskell’s remarks on how, with the rise of the manufacturing class, so much has
been achieved and so much is yet to be achieved reflect a sense of progress that may

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as well come to the aid of the female sex itself. Already Margaret has begun to exult
over the slow erosion of traditional limitations. Was female exclusion from
participation in the general social sphere not one such limitation? And is it not
probable to think that through Margaret’s expectation of all that is yet to be achieved,
Gaskell is almost hoping for the time when humanity will come to play on an equal
field. It is doubtful that in this instance, Gaskell’s assumptions of the progressive
humanity, free from traditional and dated constraints, would bar females from the
circle.

It is also important to understand that Gaskell does not morph all of her
women characters into heroes capable of the power to subdue the menfolk with their
intellect and passion. If anything, the female population of North and South shows as
much plurality of character as is possible within the scope of some hundred pages.
Mrs. Hale is indecisive, Fanny is giddy; Mrs. Thornton lacks temperament when it
comes to sentimentalities and Bessy is devoid of any will. Most of these characters,
however, have some redeeming qualities.

Mrs. Hale may not be the most resolute person, but she fulfils the traditional
feminine expectations of possessing the kind soul of a nurturer. Mrs. Thornton is the
complete opposite. Firm and tenacious, she does not mistake principles for
compassion. The woman, despite her keen dislike for Margaret, shows the latter what
compassion her principles warrant during times of distress. Bessy, the quintessential
female specimen of the working class, may lack the will to look for happiness in her
definitive state of chronic illness, at least manages to garb her suffering in the
presence of her father. The plurality of female characters in itself calls out the fallacy
of lumping together the concept of female in the one important difference of being
the other sex.

The industrial novel in fact played a decisive role in eradicating much of the
traditionally debilitating ideas of femininity. While Margaret is Gaskell’s
protagonist- her outlet for the muted discourse, at times, her sentiments are resourced
in male spokesperson. A very lengthy debate that ensues between Margaret and Mr.
Thornton on the differences between north and south can be taken as Gaskell’s
commentary on the recidivist policies of the south and the forward looking vision of
the north disclosed by the latter. And it is Margaret who warms up to the latent truth

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in Mr. Thornton’s discourse around this matter. In a way then Mr. Thornton’s
progressive and ambitious ideas become a conventional outlet for Gaskell’s own.

As the Hales move from the south to Milton northern, the city becomes a
metaphorical meeting point of traditional notions of divine aristocracy and the
industrial world’s progressivism. Barring, for one minute, the exceptional cost of this
progress, it is obvious that Gaskell sees the inevitability of such a revolution taking
over England sooner and later, and perhaps for the greater good.

A number of critics have remarked how, in advocating notions of class

equality, the industrial novel set the precedence for the upcoming fight for Women’s
rights. In fact, at one point, R. Simmons enunciated how the industrial novel became
a “victim of its own success” (350) and brought into the mainstream such discourses
as feminism and socialism:

(A)s legislation enacted reforms and the working-class enjoyed improving

conditions, other issues such as socialism and feminism (as in the “new
woman” novel of the 1890s) came to the fore. Nevertheless, the condition of
England novel played an important part in the development of Victorian
literature, and more generally in Victorian politics and culture (350-51).

It is interesting how the industrial novel became a successor of issues such as

feminism and socialism. But it seemed only natural that the discourse of class
equality should narrow down to that of gender equality within classes after the first
purpose was achieved. Although class equality is still widely debated, the insistence
amongst academic, political and intellectual circles on debating what had previously
been understood as de facto pioneered a change of ideology with regards to gender as
well.

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 CHAPTER 3: JANE EYRE

The second genre that this dissertation attempts to explore in regards to

women’s writings is the Bildungsroman. Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre has been
regarded as the “quintessential novel of female bildungsroman” (Green 5) and the
following analysis will attempt to determine how the particular genre helped Bronte
stretch the boundaries of female agency, how it helped to position the female culture
within the larger public context, and how its treatment of women as an autonomous
being of action is different from the preceding genre of the Industrial novel. Before
the study dives into seeking the answers to the questions posed, it will be of some
importance to the study and to understand the history and evolution of the
Bildungsroman, especially for women writers.

Amongst the canonical genres of English Literature, Bildungsroman has

always held a disputed place. There has been much debate around the origins of the
genre with the most widely accepted notion taking the genealogy back to Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–6).

This form of the novel, derived from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters as an

originary text, was first transplanted into the English soil by Thomas Carlyle with his
English translation of the novel by the name of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship
(Graham 5). It is said that while some writers such as Scott, Edward Bulwer-Lytton,
and George Eliot possessed an appreciable scholarly interest in German literature,
others, such as Dickens and Charlotte Bronte, were acquainted with its translations.
Susanne Howe, in her pioneering study of the Bildungsroman, identifies a whole
body of texts produced throughout the nineteenth century that starkly resembled
some common motif identified by Howe herself for being stolidly Bildung in
essence.

Chief among the motifs identified by Howe is the sane and corrective power
of action. This, according to Carlyle, was a moral lesson that must be emulated by
fans of the genre. But Howe was against an empirical reduction of the novel’s chief
essence to moralistic or pragmatic functions. She chose to emphasize the need
amongst dandified upper-class protagonists of some Bildungsroman novels, such as
Disraeli’s Contarini Fleming (1832), to give room for one’s aesthetic and poetic
growth in harmony with the pragmatic functions of the society (Howe 82-100). In

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many ways, De Wintor’s advice to Contarini to “Act, act, act; act without ceasing,
and you will no longer talk of the vanity of life” (qtd in Salmon 62), resonates Jane
Eyre’s many philosophical ponderings on the need for humans to avoid becoming
prey to stagnation and idleness. Action, the kind that gives vent to one’s mental and
spiritual growth remains the chief conflict in Jane Eyre, and this alone is reason
enough to constitute the novel as “ the quintessential female bildungsroman” (Ellis
168).

The popularity that the genre of Bildungsroman garnered for itself during the
nineteenth century neatly coincided with the emergence of the discourse on self-help
and self-culture (Salmon 65). While the two terms might seem to be directed at odds
against one another, their appearance as far was the genre was concerned, was
confounded. Self-culture, the aesthetic dimension of a harmonious social
development was not possible without mental and physical labour of the more
pragmatic kind. This is because some exponents of self-help, in particular Samuel
Smiles, did not see a “life of manual employment” (Smiles 28) as incompatible with
high intellectual development. Smiles, in fact believed that the spirit of self-help,
openly responsible for the noticeable intellectual growth in humans, emanated
directly from the sections of poverty. A life trained in physical hardihood provided
characters with the ingredients needed for the constitution of resilience, empathy,
and responsibility in the wake of social mobility (Salmon 65-68). These critics
believed that culture achieved without the discipline of labour was indeed futile and
failed to equip a person with any worthwhile intellectual growth. This intertwined
concept of self-help and self-culture is significant not only for its ubiquitous
prevalence in almost any novel characterized as bildungsroman but also for the way
it manifests itself in Bronte’s Jane Eyre and ties neatly with the proto-feminist
agenda that can be dissected from a gynocritical perspective.

A number of critics have already dissected Bronte’s Jane Eyre for being a
classic bildungsroman based around the female agency. The purpose now of
subjecting the novel to a gynocritical reading is to uncover how the intrinsic motif of
self-help and self-culture enabled the work to emerge as the pioneering proto-
feminist work that it is celebrated as in modern English criticism. What makes the
reading of Jane Eyre from a gynocritical lens so relevant is that the bildung themes
of self-help and self-culture are very similar to the gynocritical themes of

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apprehending the female culture by studying women’s “occupations, interactions,
and consciousness” (Showalter 27). In “A Literature of Their Own”, Showalter
emphasized how the history of women’s creation saw an evolution from male
imitation to creating a subculture within the larger framework of the society where
both the women writers and their female characters were united by their values,
conventions and experiences in an attempt of direct self-expression. It is easy to see
the common concerns that govern both the genre (Bildungsroman) and the critical
lens (Gynocriticism) that will be used to inspect the novel.

Bronte’s Jane Eyre covers the life trajectory of its titular protagonist from her
disconsolate childhood spent in the unwelcome wards of her indifferent Aunt,
condescending Reed sisters and their tormenting brother John Reed. In the classic
bildung vein, Jane is seldom brought respite from the cruel and at times inexplicable
contradictions of her limited world until she comes of age and fosters an agency that
learns to be somehow resilient to the mentally and physically truncating social
institutions. At the same time she also finds, through alternative employment of the
qualities of self-help and self-culture, room for personal growth and contentment. A
close gynocritical scrutiny of the novel will enable the study to form some kind of a
judgment on Bronte’s depiction of the female culture in the background against
which the narrative unfolds. It is obvious that the exclusive culture of the females
will inform the way discourses of self-help and self-culture are taken up and
exploited by the women of the time for personal development and an upward social
ability. Like most protagonist, Jane Eyre’s journey towards personal development is
a natural consequence of discontent, undue suffering, and an innate knowledge of
bigger horizons that offer one more than the superficial preoccupations of lace frills,
the so called higher society and dandified pastimes enjoyed by the cultured upper-
class gentry. As a woman, Jane’s apparent rejection to stay content with her lot was
perhaps the first of its kind and becomes the starting point of exploring the
possibility of women’s activity. At the same time, this discontent and suffering is the
leitmotif of the bildungsroman and it is taken to be the experience of both failures
and suffering that is thought as the real experiential base of all education
(Grandchamp 2). Hers has been the life of toil and yet it’s the hope of a greater toil
that sends her on the impulsive bout of advertising herself as a governess in the
newspaper. It is the same yearning for agency that convinces her, a single woman of

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eighteen, to pack up and vacate her lodgings for a tedious journey alone into the
unknown moors of a county she’s never tread before nor heard of. The feat in itself
should be somewhat of a rarity for a woman belonging to the time as Jane was, but it
was a feat indispensable in the novels of development that instead of putting
knowledge at the disposal of its protagonist, must knock the latter about amid the
tumult of the unknown. Thus, begins the journey of self-help and self-culture.
Without aid and inwardly afraid, Jane Eyre must overcome all adversities to find the
purpose that is to give meaning to her troubled life and resolve all incongruences
with an epiphany that could not have come to her had she chosen the less daunting
but more idle course of physical and mental stagnation. And she must do it all within
the means society ascribes to her on account of her female sex.

3.1. Jane Eyre as a Bildungsroman

The incongruences, spoken of earlier, begin at a significantly early period of

her life when the mind is at its most impressionable and firmly engraved by the
slights of the past for future references.

What makes Jane Eyre circumstances more egregious than would otherwise
be, is that her suppression comes both at the hands of the more traditional forms of
patriarchal control as well as the members of her own sex. In a way, Jane’s
suppression, even during the earliest formative years of her mental and physical
development, are tainted with the politics of gender. Jane is marginalized from both
her family and her surrounding not so much because she is a girl but because she
lacks the three things that society values most in a girl: beauty, prestige and place.
Jane does not belong with the Reeds. So much is instantaneously clear from the way
she is treated by John Reeds whom many critics, such as Sarah E. Maier, believe to
be a childhood semblance of the suffocating patriarchy waiting for her more adult
years. (320)

The opening scene regales readers with the crucifying libel of “a rat” (Brontë
41) that John rewards Jane with and dictating her ‘habitually obedient” (Brontë 42)
self to appear before his. Leaving her deceptively transparent window space, Jane
puts her bearance before John to hear him declare how she had “ no business to take
our books; you are a dependent . . . you have no money; your father left you none;
you ought to beg and not to live here with gentlemen’s children like us, and eat the

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same meals we do’ (Brontë 42). Too acquainted with her cousin’s brutal vilification
by now, Jane’s only response is to stand by the door to which she is ordered and
sustains an attack from the boy. When she chooses to retaliate, the consequences are
dire. In the true classical sense of the genre, the backdrop of physical and mental
isolation and a deliberate search for a caregiver that can dress the child’s mental and
physical wounds are apparent in the novel’s opening scene. John’s wild screeches as
she flings both herself as well as her imprecations at him are enough to bring his
sisters at his aid, who in turn call forth their mother. Her arrival at the scene does
little to bring any respite to Jane who by now is bleeding in the clutches of Mrs.
Reed’s son. In fact, it does quite the opposite. Instead of condemning her son for his
physical perpetration, Mrs. Reed orders Jane, currently a “picture of passion” (Brontë
9), to be locked away. This is not the first time Mrs. Reed, a failing matriarchal
figure, displays her complicity in instituting a systematic form of female suppression.
Even earlier, Mrs. Reed has displayed her contempt for Jane’s questioning
disposition. She does not admire “cavillers or questioners” (Brontë 5) alluding to the
now commonly accepted notion that women’s place, like that of the children’s in the
Victorian society, allowed them to be seen but not heard. Jane being both female as
well as a child (not the family’s own) understandably makes her plight so much
worse. It is her failure in assuming a more " sociable and childlike disposition, a
more attractive and sprightly manner—something lighter, franker, more natural”
(Brontë 5) that bars her from partaking into the privileges that the lady of the house
claims to be reserved for only “contented, happy, little” (Brontë 5) children.

What Mrs. Reed fails to notice is that Jane’s plight offers something of a
paradox. Mrs. Reed refuses to hear Jane out until she begins to discipline her
emotions into that of a “happy” and “contented” child. But it is precisely the lack of
a mother figure who is ready to lend her emotions an ear that shoves Jane into such
discontentment. And any show of discontent over not being heard and treated with
fairness evokes the sentiments of “unnaturalness” in Mrs. Reed’s mind. In the strict
Victorian context, this seems a probable episode since the Victorian values dictated
quite submission, especially for young girls, regardless of the cause that may prompt
in them such outburst. The typical trend amongst Bildungsroman to plant the
protagonist’s journey amongst the social and historical movement was first detected
by Mikhail Bakhtin.

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 In his renowned essay “Bildungsroman and Its Significance in Historical
Realism”, Bakhtin commented on how a man’s individual emergence is inseparably
linked with the historical emergence, which is a course in opposition to those of the
historical philosophers (Bakhtin 23). While the latter impose a “story” onto “history”
through a grouping of critical phenomenon under abstract categories correlated on
dialectical principles or those of entelechy, the novel of education shows history
“puls(ating) through ordinary objects” (Boes 275). In the course of Jane Eyre’s
journey from self-deferral to self-affirmation, it is poignant to look at the historical
scenarios and Victorian values that were shaped, inhibited, or even inverted by these
historical social forces.

Bronte does a commendable job of questioning these Victorian values when

the household servants find Jane Eyre’s miserable plight a natural consequence of
her gender and circumstance when pondering how if “she were a nice, pretty child,
one might compassionate her forlornness; but one really cannot care for such a little
toad as that” (Bronte 40). We also see an inversion of these values upon noticing
how the slightest display of discontent yields such dire punishments for Jane but
“Eliza, who was headstrong and selfish, was respected. Georgiana, who had a spoiled
temper, a very acrid spite, a captious and insolent carriage, was universally indulged.
Her beauty, her pink cheeks and golden curls, seemed to give delight to all who
looked at her, and to purchase indemnity for every fault” (Brontë 21). Sarah Maeir
in her research “Portraits of the Girl-Child: Female Bildungsroman in Victorian
Fiction” declares that Jane’s troubles, even during the earliest period of her life were
three-fold. “From this opening scene.” declares Maier, “there are three main
influences which Jane must combat in her childhood years which centre on her
inherent sense of justice: the prescribed and accepted societal repression of females,
the unquestioned right of male governance, and the complicit women who have been
incorporated into the patriarchal system” (321).

On this complicity of females in the suppression of their own kind, Sarah

Stickney Ellis had much to say in her essay “The Wives of England: Their Relative
Duties, Domestic Influence, and Social Responsibilities”. Ellis narrates how, amid
the chain of indulging boys with a sense of superiority from their very childhood,
placing them in public schools where the very word “woman” was synonymous to
“contempt”, being nurtured by “foolish and indulgent mothers” and being afterwards

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“associated with sisters who were capricious, ignorant, and vain”, it is a wonder they
should not be even more tyrannical and selfish than were thought to be (Ellis 60). In
this instance, the cultivation of proper male education seemed to be inextricably tied
with proper female nurturing, in the absence of which, male personages such as John
Reeds were bound to occur.

Being a female, Jane’s toil and troubles, her share of that classic formative
struggle that must push her male equivalents from similar traditions to construe their
own sense of identity, self-worth and uncompromising ways of social assimilation,
are decidedly different. Her departure to “Lowood” and the subsequent chapters in
this history shed light on the contrasting nature of male and female suffering in the
bildungsroman tradition. Since it is a gynocritical study, the focus of the research is
less on the comparative and contrasting elements between male and female
bildungsroman, or if the novel should even be described as one, and more on Jane’s
mechanism of dealing with the inward and societal turmoil so necessary for self-
formation. In her earliest years, Jane’s ways of finding solace and comfort, amid the
psychological and physical afflictions of Gateshed, mirror those of an adult and
children simultaneously. Her brief rendezvous to the little quite corner is one where
she can read Bewick's 'History of British Birds' and lose herself amid “the haunts of
sea-fowl… the coast of Norway, studded with isles from its southern extremity, the
Lindeness, or Naze, to the North Cape…or the bleak shores of Lapland, Siberia,
Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland, with 'the vast sweep of the Arctic
Zone, and those forlorn regions of dreary space” (Bronte 9-10). Her deep interest,
and a natural admission of finding such esoteric foreign accounts fascinating can be
seen as Bronte’s ways of only naturalizing the concept of female admiration for
readership and adventure. Alternately, Jane professes to keep one discarded doll as
the sole object of her love with her at all times. While the latter is the more accepted
and natural mechanism for a child to deal away with the grief of being unloved,
Jane’s reasons here are both thought-provoking and perhaps departing from the
traditional interpretation. Jane reverts to her doll out of a need amongst “humans” to
love and without “worthier” objects of “sensations” (Bronte 22) she chooses to
bequeath the inanimate object what love and affection she can muster in the cold
recesses of her bed.

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 Instead of seeking love from these “worthier objects of sensation” (Bronte
22), Jane begins to brace herself for the characteristic journey that brings the
opportunity of both self-help and self-culture for the dependent prodigy. Her decision
to anticipate her departure from Gateshead towards Lowood is inspired by her desire
to partake from some of the accomplishments that the Victorian society so ostensibly
dotes on. No “appalling” (Brontë 38) stories of school discipline could deter her from
beginning to marvel on the ability to execute flawless rendering of beautiful
landscape, immaculate knitting, and stunningly performed renditions of transcending
musical pieces. These are all had women nurture, and the mastery of which allowed
these women to assume the epithet of a “lady.” She was thereby ready to take the
“long journey” (Brontë 38) that is to open the gates and allow the “entrance into a
new life” (Brontë 38). What Jane is yet unaware of is that Lowood, a quintessential
Victorian social establishment, with institutional suppression, humiliation and
undermining of its female scholars is to spark anew the flames of rage, discontent
and vengeance that she expected to leave behind at Gateshead. The school’s
principal, Mr. Brocklehurst is the “epitome of the patriarchal phallus” (Maier 322)
whose oppressive finger exclusively emanates sentiments of fear and undue
suppression from each target that it chooses to publicly humiliate.

In much the same fashion as Dickens’ Mr. Bumble in Oliver Twist, Bronte’s
Mr. Brocklehurst is an appalling caricature of hypocritical Victorian social workers
and evangelists who not only failed to dole out relief to the very victims that were
supposedly in charge of, but also remained blind to the misery that this hypocrisy
wrought amongst their parishes. While Mr. Brocklehurst is no beadle, he still
reserves the prestigious title of being head of a public welfare institution that runs on
charity and seems to be openly embezzling funds to indulge his own daughters
whose gaudy attires are always a grim contrast to the simplicity he preaches and
instills amongst the female scholars of Lowood. Once again it is the complicity of
the women in the project of institutionalizing the silent suppression of women that
throws Jane almost in a frantic search of a female companion and a role model she
can look up to. The first comes in the form Helen Burns. It becomes obvious to a
sensitive reader that Burns’ admirable tolerance of the public humiliation unleashed
at her by her teachers is not meant to inspire any Victorian sense of awe and
approval. Quite the contrary, it is Burns’ silent acceptance of the social oppression

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that further aggravates her failing health and sends her into an early departure from
this world. Her despondency failing health seems almost a result of her inability to
give vent to the utter sense of and despair, a trait exhibited by the female characters
of Gaskell’s North and South, such as Betsy Higgins and even Margaret Hale.

Helen Burns’s Christ-Like perseverance and resolve to take in any and every
kind of abuse with patience does not reciprocate any reward in this world. Her only
solace is to rise victorious in the Hereafter for her patient suffering and join the
league of similar martyrs who have gone before her. Her early death after a
troublesome, oppressive existence within the confines of Lowood is a metaphor for
Bronte’s rejection of the idea of passive acceptance that the patriarchal structures and
their complicit females have reserved for women. Jane Eyre too, openly denies
Helen’s passive reception of her public harassment and mistreatment at the hands of
her teachers. For Helen, the oppression and overwhelming “distress” (Brontë 59) that
both she and Jane suffer are the natural exchange for the life of happiness that is
waiting for them beyond “death”. In spite of all her words of wisdom that exhort
Jane to quench her passion, it is easy to see that when the reward for such silent
suffering is only a release from it that comes with “the separation of spirit from
flesh” as Helen puts it, (Brontë 59), the suffering remains unjustified and must be
questioned and disposed of. But such questioning comes through a kind of agency
and activity that is, so far in the novel, quite vehemently denied to women.

In a way Helens too is complicit in implementing the dominant structures

which fail to provide women with the vehicle that allows them the drive towards
greater functions, ways of self-expression and valuable occupations. In light of
Helen’s constant humiliation by her teachers, Jane declares that she would rather die
than to be “hated” so (Bronte 113). As Jane flies in a comprehensible rage over
Helen’s silent acceptance over her grim fate and its possible repercussions on her
health, she is instantly berated by her friend for being “too impulsive, too vehement.”
(Brontë 113) And that “the sovereign hand that created your frame, and put life into
it, has provided you with other resources than your feeble self, or than creatures
feeble as you” (Brontë 113). Helen’s biblical allusion to one’s subordination before
trial is supposed to resound the widely popular Victorian sentiment of one’s plight
being divinely ordained, but Bronte has obviously designed for Burns’ speeches to
evoke an unsettling feeling among the readers. One can almost sense the prevalence

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of a “muted” discourse spoken of earlier that manifests itself in the contradiction
between Helen’s glorious acceptance of her state and the sad realization on the
readers’ part that some activity and a severance from the Victorian model of female
passivity would perhaps be a better response. Bronte, however, refrains from openly
declaring so. The most she does is give vent to the “alloy of inexpressible sadness”
(59) that Jane cannot help feeling despite the tranquility that comes from Helen’s
heroic insistence of silent suffering.

At the same time, it is easy to see that Jane and Helen’s close attachment
provides readers with a simulacrum of a female culture in the close confines of the
Lowood establishment. And while Helen may be more in tune with the male-
generated doctrines of female passivity, in the security of this female culture, Jane
can at least give vent to the kind of passion that would completely dissever her from
the society should she choose to make them visible there.

The second female role model comes in the guise of Miss Temple, the
superintendent of the seminary. To her alone, Jane dedicates the “best parts of (her)
acquirements” (Brontë 137). So invested was Jane in the companionship that brewed
between herself and Miss Temple that her retirement from Lowood triggers the onset
of the kind of discontent that will spur her into undertaking a self-expanding journey.
Together with Miss Temple and Helen, there forms a sisterly community that allows
these women a way of self-expression and a healthy exchange of intellectual
empathy that is free of the gripping and controlling forces of the patriarchal figures,
the most phallic representation of which is in the form of Mr. Brocklehurst, whom
Jane’s impressionable young eyes solidified as “a black pillar” (Brontë 48). Miss
Temple too, with all her intellectual superiority and a desire to nurture the same into
her students through doses of mild disciplining and a recourse to affection, stays
hapless before the afflictions dispensed by Mr. Brocklehurst’s constant reprimands.
Silent mutiny is all she can display before Mr. Brocklehurst when he chooses to
castigate her for her generosity in allowing Lowood pupils breakfast portions that
were slightly better than the burnt porridges he was wont to dispense:

Miss Temple had looked down when he first began to speak to her; but she
now gazed straight before her, and her face, naturally pale as marble,
appeared to be assuming also the coldness and fixity of that material;
especially her mouth, closed as if it would have required a sculptor’s chisel to
open it, and her brow settled gradually into petrified severity. (Brontë 95)

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 Insinuations of a rebellious defiance resound in her stance but she knows it
best to not give them a more audible semblance. At the same time though, phallic
perpetrations seemed to melt away outside the walls of the sisterly communion-that
female culture which appears to be the no-man zone. Quite literally in this case, the
no man zone is the office chamber of Miss Temple where she entertains Helen Burns
and Jane Eyre with delectable treats and a refreshing acceptance of their talents past
their apparent shortcomings. Up till now, Jane Eyre’s account of Helen’s perpetual
castigations at the hands of her Lowood instructresses lent the reader a suspicion of
her dismal inadequacy which cannot help but result in her open ostracism, but once
within the secure confines of that female constituency that leaves all Victorian
principles of propriety outside, Helen is able to slip into the real persona. This is
where Jane, and through her the readers, see Helen’s merits for the first time. No
“clumsy”, forgetful waif is she, but in an exchange with Miss Temple, reveals the
unlimited capacities of her young mind. Helen is more than able to retain in the
feeble recesses of her wit the legacies of nations and times past, of discovering the
secrets of nature that are at best simply “guessed at” (Brontë 119), but it is only
apparent to one who is willing to look past the frail superficialities of the classic
Victorian accomplishments and prejudice, and cares to take notice of the superior
intelligence that is indiscriminate of its bearer. It is also telling that Helen would not
admit outsiders, even women, such as Mrs. Scatchered who often humiliated her
publicly, complicit in upholding artificial Victorian standards, into her intellectual
realms. This goes to show that the qualifications of being admitted into the female
culture go beyond putting the robe of the female sex. The female culture, that no-
man zone is a place for women to discard the social artificialities and indulge their
more visceral impulses. It is obvious that chief of these, at least in the Victorian
times, was to partake from the working of the world around them that was almost
secretive to them on account of their inability to admit themselves into any higher
social institution. In North and South, Bessy Higgins and Margaret’s exchanges,
relating to both the personal and public took place under similar circumstances.
These exchanges brought upon Margaret the keen awareness and insight that was lost
on even the men. Just as how Margaret would look for an exclusive corner to give
vent to her personal grief or intellectual bouts, Jane Eyre cherishes the memory of
retiring to the woods “like gypsies” (Brontë 126) onto some secretive feminine
adventure. Here in the woods, the stony corner becomes her safe haven on which she

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settles next to another chosen comrade Mary Ann Wilson. Once again Wilson is
described as a “shrewd, observant personage” (Brontë 126) whose perceptive
mannerism and wit provided ample opportunities for Jane to indulge her curiosity.
There now seems to be a common pattern in Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Gaskell’s North
and South of retiring to literal regions of no-man zones when looking for the
opportunity to quench their intellectual and adventurous appetite.

In the same way, Burns’ capacity and retrospective ability comes to full
bloom only when she is sure of no prying eyes chastising her understanding of the
world and no vain ear berating her philosophies of life for falling short of superficial
Victorian utility. Within the close confines of Miss Temple’s ward, who treats Helen
with an intellectual equality that is unseen before, does it dawn upon Jane what
intelligence the tranquil retreats of her mind contain:

They conversed of things I had never heard of; of nations and times past; of
countries far away; of secrets of nature discovered or guessed at: they spoke
of books: how many they had read! What stores of knowledge they
possessed! Then they seemed so familiar with French names and French
authors: but my amazement reached its climax when Miss Temple asked
Helen if she sometimes snatched a moment to recall the Latin her father had
taught her, and taking a book from a shelf, bade her read and construe a page
of Virgil; and Helen obeyed, my organ of veneration expanding at every
sounding line. (119-120)

Helen’s flawless rendering of Virgil might have spurn a vein of unmistakable

admiration amongst Jane, but the same could be hardly concluded for the generic
Victorian audience of the time, where, as Sarah Stickney Ellis describes in her essay
“The Women of England”, husband did not quite care for the fact that their wives
could perform perfectly vocalized renditions of Virgil without a dictionary (60) and
where the only education seen as befitting a woman is that which prepares them for a
lifelong course of disinterested kindness (21).

The idea of disinterested kindness is exactly the one that Jane is incapable of
internalizing and no amount of schooling can prepare her for that. The slightest of
infringements settles an ashy taste of vengeance upon her soul and during times like
these, preoccupying her restless mind with thoughts of activity of a more superior
kind are her only consolations. Bronte’s Jane Eyre therefore advocates separating the
socially acceptable accomplishments for women from the more visceral needs of a
female sect. Every now and then Jane Eyre bursts into long passionate soliloquys on
the inadequacy of the society and women’s more privileged counterparts, the men, to

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assume that they ought to be content without this agency, even declaring at one point
that they will “make it (action) if they cannot find it (Bronte 180).”

While education and good company undoubtedly helps Jane become a better
and more socially acceptable women of accomplishments, there still remains some
inherent contradictions that forbid Jane from living an almost passive life of a school
teacher. For one, her reasons for cherishing the “excellent education” of Lowood and
zealously dispensing her responsibilities once she is vested with the office of teacher
lose their meaning with Miss Tempe’s departure. What once appeared to her as years
of fruitfulness since they were not “inactive” (137), begin to weigh on her shoulders
as invoking stagnation. Once again, through the intervention of a male figure, Rev.
Mr. Nasmyth, whose matrimony with Miss Temple results in the removal of the
latter from Lowood, Jane’s left with feelings of abandonment and loss. Here’s
another muted discourse of what marriage can do to female communion beyond the
obvious unification of a woman with her newfound duties. Miss Temple’s
matrimony proves a great discord in Jane’s tranquil life as she realizes that those
eight years that apparently brought her some contentment were merely her mirroring
the attitude of a woman she regarded so highly. Jane realizes that instead of being
contented, she was simply imbibing miss Temple’s tranquil influence. The thought
of one so worthy being in her vicinity was reason enough for her to persevere in her
duties and oblige her responsibilities with utmost dedication. But the departure of
Miss Temple from Lowood becomes a premonition for an unsettled feeling of losing
all associations that made Lowood a home to her. From that time, it only takes Jane
an afternoon of contemplation to realize that she is completely transformed by the
occasion of Miss Temple’s marriage and her subsequent departure. Left “in her
natural element” (139) and no longer under the tranquilizing and stabilizing
influence of her female companion, the same old discontentment resurfaces.

The passage is suggestive since it appears to be both going along and against
the Victorian sentiment of women’s education being there, for the most part, to
enable her better perform her feminine duties of being a loving and doting maternal
figure. Jane’s education does precisely just that. It replaces that bitter aggression in
her with more harmonious thoughts of giving allegiance to obligation and duty. But
where it slightly subverts is where 1) the allegiance is towards a sisterly community
of female scholars residing at Lowood and thus undermines the necessity of women

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only finding worth in obliging their strictly maternal duties. Second, women possess
the ability to wilfully spill their cup of affection but it requires for the other party to
be worthy of this indulgence as well as reciprocate the same with similar affection
and regard. As soon as Jane loses both through Miss Temple’s removal from
Lowood, she simultaneously retracts all show of contentment with her life at the
seminary. Bronte takes some pains to describe this need in a passionate soliloquy
from Jane where she justifies the growing feelings of unsettlement by alluding to that
intrinsic desire in humans (not just women) to pine for objects worthier of their
devotion.

It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they

must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are
condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt
against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political
rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are
supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they
need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their
brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation,
precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more
privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to
making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and
embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if
they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for
their sex. (Brontë180)

When Jane breaks a case for human beings’ needs to quench their passion and
look for meaningful life of activity, she does so without succumbing to the use of
gendered pronouns, at least in the first half of her soliloquy. Here is Bronte’s effort
to make a case for women’s activity on simply humanistic grounds. This is what
precisely makes her work a seminal proto-feminist piece. Here is embedded the
message of moving past the notion of women as an object of household adornment
and admit their agency, but Bronte does not state this message directly. She implores
to the perceptive ability of her readers and exhorts them to take a more humanistic
standpoint when debating on the prescribed sphere for women. The study has already
made ample commentary on the role of women and the dichotomy between the
public and private spheres in Chapter 1. Clearly Jane is in the mood of denouncing
and rejecting this dichotomy. In fact, there is something of a suggestion towards a
complimentary female culture where women would want to seek a life beyond the
domestic subscription, and “exercise their faculties” the same way their male
counterparts are wont to do. In the doom of a stagnated and stiller life, Bronte casts
men and women together. She does not discriminate between the trials and

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tribulations of the two sexes and feels apologetic for anybody cast to a “stiller doom”
be it man or woman. We see the precedence of an almost even playing field. A
gynocritical perspective allows us to see how Bronte has almost turned the tables of
literary critique. As opposed to the long-standing tradition of male-writing either
broaching for or against women’s cause in the absence of a formidable female
spokesman, women have begun broaching the cause of men on their behalf. In this
regard, Bronte’s Jane Eyre can rightly be seen as a proto-feminist work written in the
vein of a female bildungsroman. (Schor 172-173).

Bette London in her essay “The Pleasures of Submission: Jane Eyre and the
Production of the Text” contrasts Ellis’s traditional response towards woman’s
vocation as steeped in silent suffering with Bronte’s poetic self-entitlement. Bronte,
declares London, “transforms the duty of silent suffering into the site of pleasure and
passionate investment” (198). This coincides with Showalter’s view in “Toward a
Feminist Poetics” that “the reclamation of suffering is only the beginning; its purpose
is to discover the new world” (Showalter 32). This becomes especially easy in a
bildungsroman tradition where difficulty and suffering are the primal base from and
upon which the best education and the finest endowments are erected (Smiles 1-2).
And it is precisely during this suffering that the protagonist is hit by an epiphany to
find a vocation for him/herself where they can put to use what learning came to them
through those trying times.

Nor does Jane fall precariously short of a suitable vocation to put her on this
journey of self-expansion. Critics have long commented on the intrinsic
discrimination of the bildungsroman when it comes to undertaking an expansive,
self-reflective journey by its protagonist based on gender. It is often, and rightfully
noted that female bildungsroman does not offer much space for women to explore
and implement the concepts of self-help and self-culture (Abel, Hirsh and Langland
3-12, Annis Pratt 39). This is a natural repercussion of the limited means available to
women in the nineteenth century to provide sustenance for oneself independent of a
male intervention. For Jane Eyre, however, it only takes an afternoon of racking her
brain to come up with the most pragmatic solution that will send her off to a
precarious adventure she so longs for. Securing the post of a governess is what she
deems to be her only way of getting out of the stagnation of Lowood and exploring
the county on her own. Keeping true to her words of “making” room for adventure

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and activity where she could not find it, Jane places an ad in the wants section of the
newspaper offering her services.

Neither is Jane without premonitions. She has heard grim accounts of the way
governesses are treated by host families. There is clearly a dilemma here for the
Victorian readers, who despised manual labour among genteel women but also
expected them to be financially stable at the same time. Through the character of
Jane, we can see that Bronte’s depiction and treatment of the subject of governesses
is mostly in an empathic light. Jane is a hard worker, possesses apt skills in
languages, art, and other subjects, and, being patient, merits the qualities of a good
teacher. Traditionally, this can be ascribed to the true bildung treatment of manual
labour as superior and qualified for the making of a civilized and enculturated being
ready for a successful assimilation within the society. Another perspective enables
one to see how Bronte, in a gynocritical sense, does away with the politics of
rebellion and victimhood, two forms of female dependency, and paves ideas of self –
sufficiency for women in the nineteenth century. The two perspectives are not
necessarily in opposition to one another and might in fact be complimentary.

One of the reasons why this genre works so well with the concept of female
agency is its primary insistence on the value of self-help and self-culture that the
study spoke of earlier. Jane’s position as a governess in Thornfield Hall somehow
situates her in a similar or only slightly better capacity than Mrs. Fairfax the
“housekeeper/manager” (Brontë 164). Both work for and are financially dependent
on Mr. Rochester, owner of the Thornfield Hall. This explains the warm reception
that comes Jane’s way and which gets her curious as to how the stories of colder
treatment of governesses did not match with her own experience. Her subsequent
encounters with Mr. Rochester and his kind, however, soon puts her abreast of the
place the Victorian society designated for governesses. For the audience of that time,
this was sure to pose a dilemma of a paradoxical kind. On one hand, there seemed to
be an unwritten rule for ladies of the upper-class gentry to not indulge in the manual
labour of any kind. For a woman like Jane who could not boast of prior connections,
working as a governess was the only respectful means of providing sustenance for
herself. But so occupied, she was automatically removed from the possible list of
suitable matches for men (Maier 317-321), such as Mr. Rochester whose circle
involving the likes of Miss Ingram disdained manual participation in a chore of even

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an intellectual kind. Jane’s inability of presenting herself as a suitable match for Mr.
Rochester is a paradox because her otherwise excellent education and philosophical
bent of mind makes her the best candidate amongst any potential match that later
appears at Thornfield Hall. Jane herself is evidently aware of being the perfect match
and this confidence is enough to prevent her from assuming societal airs and a false
persona that does not match her own.

There is a palpable awareness lingering of her superiority on account of her

more active life experience and incredible schooling. Jane even refuses to see Miss
Ingram as a rival, considering her a “mark beneath jealousy” on account of her lack
of empathy and intellectual depth (Bronte 306). If later, the Ingrams refuse to
assimilate or even acknowledge Jane’s presence, she adequately reciprocates the
sentiment. The animosity between the tall, dark and gorgeous Miss Ingram and the
plain, diminutive governess is apparent to all-even to Mr. Rochester, who plays with
the former’s sentiments quite liberally in order to jealously drive Jane to confessing
her feelings for him. Once again this does little to deter Jane’s aspirations for a life of
new ventures with Mr. Rochester. She might be of a lower order in the social
hierarchy of the nineteenth century, but in the bildung tradition of self-help and self-
culture, she surely comes across as the more accomplished and integrated love
interest for somebody of the likes of Rochester who, like Jane, value nothing more
than stretching one’s limit to find action even if it were at the expense of manual
fatigue. Jane does a commendable job of reclaiming her past and present suffering
for being short of the qualities of wealth, beauty and prestige, an creating something
of value out of them. This valuable entity is a sense of self-assurance, and self-
sufficiency, something which her rival Miss Ingram, despite her dashing and daring
countenance, could not achieve. The lesson of course is an inversion and
reassessment of desirable traits in female. Miss Ingram possessed all of the
celebrated Victorian traits of a true lady; beauty, prestige and position. But, almost
on account of these very traits she lacked traits that Jane believed indispensable in a
woman who proposed to be match for Mr. Rochester. In Jane’s own words, Miss
Ingram was “too inferior to excite the feeling (of jealousy)” in her (306). Jane then
proceeds to explain the paradox. She thinks of Miss Ingram as a

mark beneath jealousy (because)… She was very showy, but she was not
genuine: she had a fine person, many brilliant attainments; but her mind was
poor, her heart barren by nature: nothing bloomed spontaneously on that soil;

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 no unforced natural fruit delighted by its freshness. She was not good; she
was not original: she used to repeat sounding phrases from books: she never
offered, nor had, an opinion of her own. She advocated a high tone of
sentiment; but she did not know the sensations of sympathy and pity. (Brontë
306-307)

In other words, the attributes that the Victorian society prided itself on
contributed nicely (and paradoxically) in the making of the kind of woman who was
incapable to exhibit disinterested kindness and life lived for “the service of others”
(Abrams) and thus far from the ideal “angel in the house. Bronte dialectically
advocates how, on the contrary, exposure to real challenges along with an excellent
education (and not beauty and prestige) are the ingredients that allow a woman to
assume the semblance of “busy, able and upright figure who drew strength from her
moral superiority and whose virtue was manifested in the service of others”
(Abrams).

Samuel Smiles’ understanding of the bildungsroman, as discussed by Salmon,

implies the necessity of poverty as a “material basis” of all organic growth (65). Just
like David Copperfield, that ideal bildungsroman figure, Jane too draws strength
from traumatic experiences which made her who she was. Her equally mortifying
experiences at Lowood under the harsh, inflicting eyes of Mr. Brocklehurst, whose
sight would never miss the slightest transgression for public castigation prepares
Jane tremendously for the rebuking gazes of the guests at Thornfield who, for one
reason or another, takes a dislike to Jane’s presence. Jane herself recollects as much
when she declares how, once removed from the toxicity of the Brocklehursts, she
lost no moment of appreciating the exclusive opportunity of excellent education that
came her way, and so excelled in her commitment to reciprocate with an enculturated
transformation when she was later vested with the teacher’s office. Her restrained
disciplining at Lowood, combined with her vindication from filial responsibilities on
account of being an orphan, and an ambitious soul seeking agency prepare her as the
perfect protagonist for a bildungsroman novel that follows the exhaustive course of
spiritual fortification and self-realization through manual drudgery as a governess
and a yearning to learn and be the best. Bronte makes it clear that such vocation was
open to women, that it was in fact sought by women and the latter must be allowed to
indulge in a modicum of such drudgery to hone their faculties to the utmost.

Her earlier tribulations help develop a philosophy of life that results in

precisely this kind spiritual fortification that even strengthens her feet in open

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defiance before St. John towards the end of the novel. A spiritual reconstruction of
the self that comes from experiencing the highs of a self-filling journey and the lows
of earlier privations is what allows Jane to come across as a superior being and
therefore a better match for Mr. Rochester, and perhaps even superior to Mr.
Rochester if spiritual fortification is to be the criterion. This is because Jane’s self-
reconstruction comes through her own agency and desire to better oneself through
activity, while Mr. Rochester’s spiritual reconstruction occurs through the agency of
Jane. In one sense Jane performs the classic feminine role of calming the turbulent
mind of a male persona through her enlightening and bettering influence and here
once again we see the complementarity of the male and female cultures. There are
various references in the novel where subtle insinuations foreshadow Rochester’s
reconstruction through Jane. One instance is during the conflagration of Mr.
Rochester’s room by his mentally unstable wife Bertha Mason. Jane arrives at the
rescue and, in tellingly biblical terms, describes the scene of his rescue that
foreshadows his later spiritual resurrection: “I rushed to his basin and ewer;
fortunately, one was wide and the other deep, and both were filled with water. I
heaved them up, deluged the bed and its occupant, flew back to my own room,
brought my own water fetch a water-jug, baptized the couch afresh, and, by God’s
aid, succeeded in extinguishing the flames which were devouring it.” (246).

The Christian allusions to an all-extinguishing deluge and baptism hint at a

religious resurrection of Rochester that must be performed by Jane and this is
precisely what she does later in the novel. The more she acts as an agency of security
and tranquility for Rochester, the more the novel explores the capacity of women as
active agents who given the right education could become capable wives to their
husbands and assist more successfully in matters of the family. Like the industrial
novels, female bildungsroman can be seen as paving way for heightened female
activity in both public and private spheres as a means to aid men in their everyday
struggles. There is then a possibility of a subversive intent in the creation of
characters such as Margaret, whose guiding hand nurtures feelings of compassion
and sympathy in an overly-hardened Mr. Thornton, and Jane whose comprehension
of Mr. Rochester’s need for a self-filling agency and constant displacement, finally
instills a sense of home and tranquility in the latter. On the outside these characters
appear in conformation with the roles of nurturers that the Victorian society was so

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wont to scribe to the women. The subversive intent here is of providing women with
the kind of education and freedom of activity that could bring them at par with their
male counterpart and, for once, allow them the opportunity to operate on a more
level ground.

Elaine Hauffman Baruch in her research “The Feminine Bildungsroman”

speaks of the possibility of a modern interest among the interiorization of women as
responsible for the production of a more delicate sensibility among men. With
women allowed to explore the domestic and private sphere per will, and female
writers on the rise, there developed a growing interest in the private sphere. With this
came the necessity of variety in characterization and a more nuanced comprehension
of sentiments and complex characterization that men owe to women. Quoting De
Stael, Baruch claims that it was women who “discovered the self” (qtd. in Baruch
338). If, for the sake of arguments, De Stael’s claims are taken as true, and it was in
fact women and their private world that originated the novel of formation or
education, it is easy to see why self-culture and self-help became the primary tenet of
this genre. Since self-help and self-culture were exactly the practices that women
yearned for the most within the confines of their domestic sphere. Difficult as it was
for the men, for women it appeared almost exclusively dependent on the institution
of marriage, with all other institutions of higher educations closed to them. To this
subject, the analysis would return shortly. For now, however, it is easy to see why, as
a genre, the female bildungsroman favors a gynocritical project. Bildungsroman has,
as its subject of interest, one’s life trajectory, private culture and the way the
protagonists integrate with society at large, and gynocriticism seeks precisely the
same thing for its female subjects.

It is imperative to understand that women’s heightened mobility is never

characterized by Bronte as impinging on the territory of their male counterparts.
Centered on more humble aspirations of putting one’s distinctive faculties to a more
productive cause, the greatest accomplishment for these female protagonists still
remains their ability to generate appreciation in their male counterparts by proving a
valuable tool in their lives.

This much is evident from the episode where Jane “baptizes” Mr. Rochester
and subsequently saves him from the conflagration. Coming out of the scene and
overcome with the happenings of the night and more formidably, what could have

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ensued had she not been there, she vehemently declares how that one night alone
could weigh over all other nights lived during the eighteen years of her life:

The incident had occurred and was gone for me: it was an incident of no
moment, no romance, no interest in a sense; yet it marked with change one
single hour of a monotonous life. My help had been needed and claimed; I
had given it: I was pleased to have done something; trivial, transitory though
the deed was, it was yet an active thing, and I was weary of an existence all
passive. (Brontë 191)

For Jane to unabashedly declare the precedence of the night she rescues Mr.
Rochester over the eight years lived at Lowood, first in the capacity of a student and
then as a teacher; over the toils inherent in acquiring an excellent education, and over
the years that fostered her deep attachment to Miss Temple says all that there is
about a Victorian women’s motives in wanting greater agency. Hilary M. Schor
declares how for the typical Victorian society, Jane’s ideas of self-sufficiency and
undertaking a self-discovering journey were quite feminist and progressive for her
time. (174). Bronte seems to have taken great care in garbing these in more socially
believable undertones and most importantly removing any threat of such progress
toppling the dominant hierarchy and family institution. With Jane’s most prized
memory being her salvaging Mr. Rochester from getting scorched by the flames set
up by another woman, Jane’s character assumes an overt complicity that emphasizes
her femininity and outs her in sharp contrast with the prevalent discourse around the
non-complying “New Woman.”

The New Woman who, according to the Victorians, looked for agency
beyond the confines of her home appeared masculine and unholy for jeopardizing the
sanctity of family and home. The New Woman, in her “unnatural” and selfish pursuit
of independence and leisure was far removed from the ability to show “disinterested
kindness” and a sacrificial negation of self which was proclaimed the elemental
characteristic of a desirable woman (Cunningham 2-5, Smith Rosenberg 156). But
Jane displays all of these, despite, holding some of the more progressive views of the
New Woman. With two men of higher caliber and social prestige as her potential
suitors, Jane clearly subverts the myth of the New Woman being unattractive and
undesirable to men. Gaskell’s Margaret was similarly ambitious but clearly more
careful in giving vent to her vocation. Her greatest tool had been the ability to live
vicariously through the ambitious men, such as Mr. Thornton, whom she had a
socially acceptable access to. Bronte’s Jane is similarly passionate and the author

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does not hold back in experimenting a bit more with this idea of the New “active”
Woman. In contrast to Margaret, Jane refuses to reconstruct a sense of self and
impart the same to her male counterpart simply by breathing. Hers is a more active
role till the very last moment of her decision to go back to Mr. Rochester. No amount
of imploring, threatening, and reminders of her spiritual duties can exhort Jane to
take a course that she, in her mind, decides not to tread. Being a woman, Jane’s
active participation in carving out her own destiny becomes understandable when
rendered in the conventions of the bildungsroman. Readers familiar with the genre
understand and sympathise with the “temporal retrospection of the protagonist, her
drive to fulfil autonomous creative, professional, and spiritual needs, and her
eventual reintegration within an established social hierarchy” (Salmon 69) all of
which classical traits are exhibited by Bronte.

The genre, therefore, comes wonderfully to Bronte’s aid as she explores the
workings of a female world. It is passionate and craves activity, just as the men’s
world. In fact, for being a no-man zone, it might not be all that different than that of
the men’s but involves limited mechanisms to achieve what its occupants crave.

Mr. Rochester’s apt comprehension of Jane’s dilemma also comes as an aid

against any protestation of dissipating femininity. Her paintings of the dark
cormorant boasting the gold bracelet that it separated from the fair arm of a
submerged corpse below the green waters, and “the pinnacle of an iceberg piercing a
polar winter sky” (Brontë 208) were representations of her own restlessness and
hopelessness of any relief from it. They are obviously interpreted for what they
exactly are and yet Mr. Rochester only describes them as “peculiar” for a school girl,
along with being curious to know whether she was “happy” with the renditions. It is
precisely Mr. Rochester’s unquestioning response to her ways that draws Jane into
his confidence. Mr. Rochester, the powerful and central male figure is also her ally
setting her cause into motion. He is the first and only male figure to understand her
reservations and sympathizes with her plight of confinement that has often sent Mr.
Rochester himself on escapades. He describes Jane as a “vivid, restless, resolute
captive” (Brontë 230) but does not fault her for this restlessness.

—I see you laugh rarely; but you can laugh very merrily: …; and you fear in
the presence of a man and a brother-or father, or master, or what you will—to
smile too gaily, speak too freely, or move too quickly: but, in time, I think
you will learn to be natural…; and then your looks and movements will have
more vivacity and variety than they dare offer now. I see at intervals the
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 glance of a curious sort of bird through the close-set bars of a cage: a vivid,
restless, resolute captive is there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high.
(Brontë 230)

In that one speech, Mr. Rochester lays bare the historical and long-standing
dynamics between men and women, masters and servants, private and public spheres
during the time Bronte penned Jane Eyre. His admission of the conventional order of
things in a Victorian society being of a disadvantageous nature to women
immediately sets him out as an ally and a close confidante for Jane who begins
seeing the former in much the same light. The possibility for somebody like Mr.
Rochester, a man so removed from the company of women, to so perfectly
understand Jane’s private inhibitions is a clear indication towards a gradual
acceptance of women’s culture and expanding activity in the general Victorian
culture of the time. There is thus a clear junction between Jane’s yearning for a more
experiential learning and the need for a spiritual reconstruction that Mr. Rochester
seeks through marriage to Jane. If Margaret was a representative figure of the more
controlled kind of femininity, Jane contrives the depiction of femininity of more
varied kind. Jane is visibly more vocal in her sentiments and growing affection for
Mr. Rochester. One might even conceive of her confessions as quite bare and
passionate for the more subdued countenance typically scribed to women. But just as
there are stark contrasts between varying male agencies, the same can be said about
women. Jane frequently alludes to the growing need of Mr. Rochester’s presence in
her life. She has no qualms in yielding her admiration for this male figure of greater
pragmatic awareness. Once again, Jane’s need for activity does not encroach upon
that of the men. She listens to Mr. Rochester’s enchanting narratives with relish. One
may drive the implication that, where admiration is befitting, a woman of knowledge
will not hold back in releasing it. Mr. Rochester’s presence at Thornfield becomes an
interest of which Jane becomes utterly thankful. She finally confesses that she was
“so happy, so gratified … with this new interest added to life, that I ceased to pine
after kindred: my thin crescent-destiny seemed to enlarge; the blanks of existence
were filled up; my bodily health improved; I gathered flesh and strength” (242). This
admission can virtually be taken for a harmonious co-existence of men and women
coming from equal intellectual faculties; for a complementarity of cultures spoken of
earlier.

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 Jane’s insistence on Mr. Rochester’s presence yielding a vigorous effect over
her fragile form is a clear admission of her dependency on the former, despite her
earlier claims of being a captive with dreams too big to contain her within the
confines of any household. Bronte is clearly at work here in normalizing a
relationship based on a more equal footing. Jane, who barely warms up to strangers,
let alone her superiors, allows herself to make this one exception sensing an
opportunity to finally meet an intellectual equal after a long time. Mr. Rochester too,
with his sympathetic treatment of Jane’s reclusive nature, paves the ground for a later
period of frankness. The open admission, especially by someone whom Jane perhaps
saw as just another symbol of phallic dominance, of the injustices that patriarchal
institutions like Lowood can hurl upon women, and the problem of being female
within strictly patriarchal structures comes as a breath of fresh air. And Jane doesn’t
disappoint in reciprocating his intellectual superiority with an equal admiration and
understanding of his troubles. “…I had not forgotten his faults; …He was proud,
sardonic, harsh to inferiority of every description….But I believed that his
moodiness, his harshness, and his former faults of morality … had their source in
some cruel cross of fate. I believed he was naturally a man of better tendencies,
higher principles, and purer tastes than such as circumstances had.” (243)

Despite being in awe of almost every aspect of his enchanting persona, Jane’s
own superior education and experiential learning allows her to retain fairness in her
judgements. While she is generous in her admiration of Mr. Rochester, Jane can
easily identify the faults where they lie and is sensible enough not to look past these
due to these new feelings of admiration and attachment. But her education and life
philosophy simultaneously allow her to note that the faults may owe themselves to
some “cross of fate” (Brontë 243) since he had, from time to time, displayed greater
merits and the breeding of a true gentleman. Jane’s retrospective nature and faculty
for observation allows her to dissect Mr. Rochester for exactly the kind of man he is.
Just as he can see through Jane to decipher her real persona beyond the grim wall she
momentarily erects before each encounter with him. But being a woman, and socially
inferior to her love interest, Jane is not devoid of complexes and premonitions. In
one especially fitful episode, Jane, under the impression that Mr. Rochester possesses
matrimonial designs for Miss Ingram, she reprimands herself more severely than
might be due. Her speech here lends an insight into a largely female perspective of

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relationships outside the bounds of matrimony. It is also suggestive of how, in a
society such as that of the Victorian age, being plain was something akin to a failure
for women and they were somehow meta-cognizant of this fact. Jane fervently
reminds herself of the audacity of assuming herself to be the object of adoration for
someone in a much superior position. The only punishment she deems fit for such
audacity is to place herself before a glass and sketch out each irregularity of her
feature, softening no harsh line and making such a faithful rendition as would remind
her of her glaring inferiority of beauty. It is very telling that other than the
transgression she makes in assuming herself to be the object of interest for Mr.
Rochester, her greatest flaw is being plain. It illustrates the severity of the situation
for women when one remembers that Mr. Rochester himself is not what one would
describe as a “beauty” and is proclaimed as less than flattering by Jane herself
around several occasion. At one point she even ascertains that “most people would
have thought of him as an ugly man” (Bronte 219. Even for someone as intellectually
sound and mentally grounded as Jane, the thought of her own physical inaptitude is
too overwhelming. Her self-castigations, executed in solitude, are solemn reminders
of the pressures women have faced and continue to, in subscribing to the standards of
true femininity set by the Victorian society.

The two women who meet these standards are shown as ostensibly complying
with the discriminatory societal practices for they are nicely poised at the receiving
end of the difficultly attained standards. The first of these is Miss Blanche. Jane’s
rival for Mr. Rochester’s name and a potential suitor. Ms. Blanche exemplifies the
quintessential Victorian femininity that Jane so devoid of. Tall, dark and gorgeous,
Miss Blanche has a superior talent for the piano and the poised humour of a lady who
lives to entertain. It is also clear that Miss Blanche is too invested in the idea of
winning over Rochester through the facade of her contrived charm that Jane’s
observant eyes instantly unmask. There also seems some unspoken exchange
between Miss Blanche and Jane that sets the two apart from the absolute start. Miss
Blanche could be reminding Jane of all the hypocrisies of childhood that she hoped
to discard through her departure from first Gateshead and then Lowood. For one, she
is conceitedly gorgeous like her vain cousin Georgina, and Jane could almost
delineate the potential of indulging that vanity which is suppressed behind her
carefully carved smile. Miss Blanche Ingram’s characterization clearly honours the

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kind of female complicit who enjoys the prestige their beauty grants them since, as in
the words of Miss Ingram herself, “loveliness (was)…the special prerogative of
woman— her legitimate appanage and heritage (Brontë 296)!” For the many whom
such adage puts at a perpetual disadvantage, Miss Ingram and her likes would not
have much to say. In some other form of the novel, Miss Ingram could have been a
formidable rival, but within the bildungsroman, where the discourse of self-help and
self-culture retain such value, Miss Ingram comes across as blatantly short of the
right resources that should make her a befitting wife for any worthy male suitor.

She also appears to be mirroring the hypocrisy of the Brocklehurst daughters

in her sheer disparagement of governesses. Ms. Ingram’s indictment of governesses
either being “detestable” or simply “ridiculous”, and “all incubi” (Brontë 291) is
another instance of some women’s complicity in restructuring the confining ward of
self-expansion for women. It is also obvious that she does not possess the intellectual
width to separate personal associations with the subject and cast upon it a more
neutral eye: one that would appreciate the availability of a singular respectful
vocation for females that allows them self-provision and a freedom from male-
intervention.

Ms. Ingram, with all her apparent accomplishments falls obviously short of
the qualifications that would make her a suitable match for Mr. Rochester, and the
latter, for being a man of superior understanding, is willing to look past her more
superficial charm to avoid “twelve months’ rapture (that) would succeed a lifetime of
regret” (Brontë 626). From a gynocritical perspective, Ms. Ingram’s inability to
become a suitable partner for Mr. Rochester is Bronte’s way of undercutting the
Victorian standards of femininity and ideas surrounding the materials for a good wife
and husband. Mr. Rochester clearly mirrors the sentiments of Mary Wollstonecraft
and the nineteenth century novelist Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle). The former
advocated opportunities of equal education for women so as to equip her with the
resources that would make her “good mothers” and “faithful wives”. Stendhal took a
similar standpoint when he perpetuated the debate that equal education would render
women as more desirable and lovable companions than artificial graces (qtd. in
Baruch 336).

Ms. Ingram’s problem is not the lack of education but her failure to
incorporate that education in the reconstruction of herself, the thriving motive of a

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bildungsroman tradition. She seems to be a living embodiment of the Victorian
institutionalization of artifices and outwardly acquirements. As such, she misses the
incarnation of that “inarticulate Self-consciousness (which) dwells dimly in us;
which only our works can render articulate and decisively discernible’ (Salmon 61).
Unfortunately, for Miss Ingram, such incarnation of the self is only possible through
the annihilation of one’s vainer fantasies and labour. On the other hand, her prior
associations with prestige and place makes the acquiring of such a labour literally
impossible for her. The qualifications of a good wife seen from a gynocritical
perspective, lent to a novel of education, instead place Jane Eyre more favourably.

As opposed to critics such as Annis Pratt, who could only see a possibility of
doom, societal uproot and models of “growing down” (39) in the female
bildungsroman, Bronte saw an opportunity to use the conventions of the genre for
highlighting the female cause, value of female agency and the feminine retrospective
ability. It is easy to see why it is only when one assesses the bildungsroman from a
gynocritical perspective that one sees the possibility of a distinct female trajectory of
retrospective learning and experiential expansion within her own distinct female
culture.

It is virtually not possible for conventional bildungsroman to curtail the

opportunity of such an experiential learning that was based on labour for women
since such learning would have been desired mostly by women who were deprived
of the means through which more privileged women like Miss Ingram sought self-
culture: namely worldly associations and prestige. For women who came from more
socially subordinate positions, the only way to acquire self-culture was through an
indulgence in manual labour and a commitment to self-help. Ironically, although the
job of a governess required high level of intellectual skills, it was still seen akin to
labour. This is one reason why Jane so readily splits her new found income towards
the end amid her new found family. She detests the thought that her cousins, Diana
and Mary who were governesses, were “slaving among strangers” (Bronte 651). But
concepts of self-culture, mostly through self-help and a sheer admission of making
the most from one’s privations are concepts celebrated the most by this genre
(Maynard, John R 290-292, Salmon 60-68). This is why Jane, despite lacking beauty,
place and prestige, easily manages to prevail upon the formidable Miss Ingram and
poses as a much more suitable match for Mr. Rochester. Had Jane Eyre been penned

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in some other vein, Mr. Rochester’s decision to marry Jane instead of the more
socially suitable match, Miss Ingram, could have evoked sentiments of extreme
incredulity amongst the readership. And while such might still be the case, these
sentiments are mostly assuaged through the narrative technique of the author who
emphasizes the importance of self-help and self-culture and sets the precedence of
the triumph of these over any other social acquirements for later chapters.

It is for the same reasons that Miss Oliver, despite her unmatchable
loveliness, remains incapable of wooing St. John. The latter, unlike Mr. Rochester, is
a more representative figure of the patriarchal kind. He’s brought into Jane’s life as
an evangelical relief when she was lying deadbeat at the steps of his house looking
for shelter after having fled from Thornfield. In a strange mix of events, it is found
that St. John and his two sisters, Diana and Mary Rivers are cousins to Jane.

Grim and stoic, St. John is the epitome of the Victorian religious values that
despise the demands of the flesh in favour of the education of the soul. St. John
favour Jane over Miss Oliver, because unlike most men he’s looking for qualities in
his potential partner that may quench his “insatiable” (Brontë 629) desire for
eminence. He finds Jane a “specimen of a diligent, orderly, energetic” woman
(Bronte 629). But the missionary takes the Christian tradition of self-imposed
suffering to newer extremities where abnegation is almost synonymous with self-
sacrifice. While Jane, with all her achievements in self-education and self-help along
with her somewhat romantic inclinations, is simply looking for abnegation of a more
fulfilling kind. This is why Mr. Rochester turns out to be a much more suitable
match for Jane, despite St. John’s repetitive insistence on their matrimony on account
of joint interests.

Elaine Hauffman Baruch in her insightful study based on the conventions of

the female bildungsroman, speaks of the role of marriage in the self-expanding
journey of the genre’s female protagonists. Citing several cases in point, one of
which happens to be Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Baruch illustrates how, as far as the female
bildungsroman are concerned, the institution of marriage played a pivotal role in
providing females with the agency with which they advanced their projects of
expanding their knowledge, acquiring newer skills and partaking from the adventures
of the world. So far as Jane Eyre is concerned, the importance of marriage as her
ultimate destiny cannot be denied. Nor is it that Jane’s desire for independent growth

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is great enough to seek a solitary life. Jane, in the true feminine tradition, has wanted
to live for one separate from her own self, provided that separate being is deserving
of her affections and ability of self-abnegation that has taken her years of toil and
perseverance to inculcate.

Most nineteenth century novels featured women who hoped to seek a

marriage that would bring them into a closer contact with education of a more
experiential kind, hoping also to exert this influence beyond the confines of the
immediate domesticity. It is understood that traditionally manhood is measured by a
man’s capacity of doing away with these guides, a woman’s womanhood is modeled
on her ability to procure the right man for her (Baruch 339-340). One might wonder
if it was indeed a literary convention exploited for the longest or simply a differently
angled lens of criticism.

To categorize a female’s association with a man as purely a design benefitting

the latter and sought by the same in a greater measure is adjacent to dissecting these
texts from the kind of male-centered approach that the texts set out to combat. It is
unfair to cast celebrated female heroines such as Austen’s Emma and Gaskell’s
Margaret Hale in the same lot of women proving their femininity through acquiring
prestigious matches, when in fact, as in the case of both Emma and Margaret, it is
typically the men who come up first with the design of matrimony, and faced their
share of rejections. A gynocritical reading of the texts would rather be appreciative
and sensitive to these women’s corrective influence incentivizing the men in need of
an equality in marital relationship and Jane Eyre makes for a similar case in point.

Bronte’s Jane Eyre is especially original in its depiction of womankind’s

capability to lift more than their fair share of the burden, especially one acquired
with an increased participation in the public sphere, when they could have taken a
much easier route. In Jane’s case, this easier route would have been to stay at
Thornfield under Mr. Rochester’s generous patronage. In the dominant literary
tradition, before Jane Eyre, a woman would be rescued, via marriage, right before
she plummets herself further down the most difficult recesses of her self-expanding
curve (Baruch 338). Jane Eyre, the protagonist, takes the opposite route. She
chooses to leave behind the safety of a shelter when she is quite clearly without
alternative resources, and finally decides to revert to Mr. Rochester when she had
both financial independence and the possibility of claiming a worthy suitor in the

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person of St. John Rivers. In fact, Jane Eyre’s decision to reject St. John’s offer of
marriage shrouded in deeply evangelical overtones has long put critics on either side
of the interpretative divide. As opposed to the novel’s overt sympathies with polite
liberality and a woman’s right for a self-defined vocation, themes that would have
been quite questionable in its time, Jane Eyre, makes some strong religious
articulations and close connections to strictly evangelical overtures. Being raised in
a conservative evangelical family, it is likely that Bronte shares some of her sect’s
theological views and even proceeded to vehemently defend her novel against
charges of “immorality and anti-Christian” sentiments (Lamonaca 3). How can then
one atone for Jane’s blatant disregard for St. John’s clearly religious invocations in
favour of a more worldly one? The answer may once again lie in a gynocritical
dissection of both her thoughts and the actions that are informed by the latter.

3.2. The Victorian Evangelical Culture and Jane Eyre’s Virtual Dissension

Parama Roy in his article “Unaccommodated Women and the Poetics of

Property” believes that Jane Eyre was one of the first texts to advocate religious
autonomy and radicalism for women (713). This most definitely marked an
important turn of events for women, for steeped in the orthodox Christian doctrines
were sentiments of a natural hierarchy. Works of writers such as Milton, whose
sentiments, “He for God only, she for God in him”, were fervently quoted by
evangelical priests and clergymen to popularize ideas of conjugal love being a
representation of the union of all divine principles that emanate from the most
supreme to the lowest sources (Lamonaca, 247). It wouldn’t come as a surprise that
the supreme source came to be vested in the guise of husbands while the wives came
to represent that lowest state which constantly needed the spiritual lubrication from
its more worthy and understanding counterpart in order to function properly. In this
marital hierarchy then, women were advised to seek men of “understanding” and
men to seek women who loved most this understanding in him. In other words, the
man must seek God, and women must seek the God in him.

When St. John refuses to tie the knot of matrimony with the enchanting
Rosamand Oliver in favour of the much plainer Jane, he does so on purely religious
grounds. It is precisely this very act of rejecting worldly bliss, which came in the
guise of a beautiful suitor, that affirms St. John’s description “rigid, patriarchal, and
gloomy” (Lamonaca 245). He represents the unbendable doctrinal controversies of
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the Victorian times that this novel set out to contest through a depiction of
independent female agency. Accordingly, Jane’s rejection of him is consequently
seen as a rejection of piety and the Christian worldview by some (Lamonaca 245)
while others, such as Gilbert and Gubar interpret it as Jane’s defining resistance to
getting assimilated into the “patriarchal religious value system” (366) in favour of a
more equalized marital relationship with the “reformed and chastened” (Rich 490)
Mr. Rochester. Bronte herself defends Jane’s virtual dissension as simply an act of
“pluck(ing) the mask from the face of the Pharisee” as opposed to raising an
“impious hand to the Crown of Thorns” (Bronte 3). Bronte’s choice of words are
extremely suggestive. The object of the epithet of “Pharisee” cannot be vested into
the singular mould of one Mr. John. Jane Eyre definitely intended to criticize the
self-righteous and hypocritical Victorian society of her time that denied women any
intelligence independent of that which has been granted to her during the course of
her meagre schooling, but expected her to be well-disposed enough to attach herself
to a “man of understanding” (Baruch 336).

When St. John proposes to Jane, his linguistic form is quite ostensibly garbed
under the weight of biblical injunctions and religious vocations. In fact, not only he
but Mr. Rochester too allows himself the indulgence to align his wish for matrimony
with God’s will. In refusing both, Jane thus rejects the rigid patriarchal structures
that rest on the marital hierarchy apparently sanctified by divinity itself. This was the
autonomous female spiritualism that is best suited to the bildungsroman genre. Jane’s
rejection of Mr. Rochester earlier and St. John in the later section of the novel
superimpose women’s need to find a balance between the precarious course of
human idolatry that either suitor impersonated, albeit in widely different ways but
furnishing the similar end of a badly mediated relationship between a woman and her
God. It also sets forth the tradition of female evangelism, where women could decide
for themselves their divine calling.

We know that Jane’s love for Mr. Rochester, something of innocent

infatuation with his roguish charm and imperfect mannerism, morphed very quickly
into a blinding passion. From an interest for whose presence Jane was thankful, it
evolved into an object of necessity whose removal from Thornfield eliminated all
joy, finally to become that poisonous well whose “divine” (288) drops are willingly
consumed by the thirsty wanderer. At one point, she openly confesses to be

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‘worship(ping)” (Bronte 526) Mr. Rochester despite his imperfections. Two cases of
female agency arise at this point. Bronte’s narration here of Jane’s voluntary
rejection of Mr. Rochester’s proposal is extremely consequential because it
simultaneously battles two longstanding attributes that the Victorian society had
come to assign women; first: the attribute of the reformer discussed aptly during the
analysis of North and South, and second that of naivety in religious vocations.

Mr. Rochester’s passionate pleadings before Jane to intertwine in a

polygamous bond with him, unchristian as they sound, are delivered by Mr.
Rochester under conditions of agony. In the fashion of other celebrated heroes, such
as Mr. Thornton and Mr. Darcy who ultimately come to seek the support of a female
agency in order to operate as a more functional and integrated members of the
society, Mr. Rochester also vehemently appeals to Jane as the only person
withholding his redemption. He beseeches her “good, gifted and lovely” nature
(Brontë 525) to revoke his past “youth and manhood passed half in unutterable
misery and half in dreary solitude” (Brontë 525). Here is the perfect opportunity for
Jane to act the role of the nurturer that for the Victorians was best ascribed to the
female sex by nature and which most fulfills her feminine charm and place in
society. Further adding to the egregiousness was Mr. Rochester’s pseudo-allegation
that Jane’s refusal to accept his hand in a polygamous marriage would drive him to a
sinful life “fling(ing) (him) back on lust for a passion--vice for an occupation (Brontë
528)”. Jane alone could salvage him from his misery in the name of matronly
affection disinterested of purely personal gratification. But, in an unprecedented turn
of events, not only Jane refuse to do so, but flees from Thornfield embarking on a
solitary journey while being friendless and without any resources. It is obvious Mr.
Rochester has to find light through his own suffering. Or once, his education,
reformation, and moral rectification must come without the aid of a woman. Since,
here’s a woman who must look to her own rectification before she embarks on a
mission to do others any good.

In a way Bronte is perpetuating a cause on behalf of women that is in direct

contrast to the Victorian evangelical teachings. Women, as Jane professes, must be
given the chance to fulfil their right of self-proclamation and self-contentment before
they are taken up with the task of relieving others from the burden of social
obligations and moral injunctions. There have been a legacy of female heroes

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forgetting their own woes in the face of a family calamity. Selfless figures, such as
those of Margaret Hale, have populated the novels of the Victorian times in earnest.
For these women, relief only came in the obscured corners of their households where
their own grief must be secretly disposed lest they may have to step down from the
pedestal of the angel in the house- a defining idea for women throughout the
nineteenth century (Hogan & Bradstock 1-5). Jane takes the novice step of
expanding that exclusively feminine zone to a more generic sphere shared both by
males and females. There does come a time when Jane is almost overwhelmed by
that matronly duty of putting the family before their own selves that is inadvertently
ascribed to women by the Victorians. One cannot blame her for that fragility of
decision since for most women, comforting their partners came as a calling. Jane
almost gets sucked into adopting a similar vocation. Her entire conscience and
reason turn traitors against for refusing to enter into a polygamous affair, goading her
to “comply…(t)hink of his misery, think of his danger…remember his headlong
nature; consider the recklessness following on despair-soothe him; save him; love
him (Brontë 529)” . And right when she is on the verge of questioning who would
reprimand her for her one misstep given the life she could save in return, she is
reprimanded by her better judgment. “Who in the world cares for you? Who will be
injured by what you do? (Brontë 529)”. She proceeds to ask herself, and herself she
answers:

I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more
unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by
God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I
was sane, and not mad—as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the
times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when
body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate
they shall be.... Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I
have at this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot. (Bronte, 529)

In a classic act of reversal, perhaps the first of its kind for a female, Bronte
inverts the application of the very Victorian principles whose stoic implementation
was the sole staple of the partially bent patriarchal structures that produced them.
Bronte shows how, provided a more level playing field (as in the case of a
symmetrical literary genre) those “preconceived opinions” and “principles” such as
the ones perpetuated by Miltonic clergymen (Baruch 335-337) can be made to apply
to women in the same fashion as their more privileged counterparts. It is just as well
that Jane adheres to her evangelical upbringing in sanctifying her need to find a

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different and more noble vocation than uplifting a married man from the pits of
despair, it allows her to doge any accusation of selfishness, unnatural repudiation,
and a self-centeredness that is too wanton in a woman (Wollstonecraft 12-15). And
although women have been gratifying their personal whims in that no-man zone that
this study spoke of earlier, Jane Eyre expands this zone to that of her more privileged
counterpart, apprising the latter of the need for women to find their own voice and
vacation before they can help others find theirs. It has been commented by many
how earlier commentators and champions of female education veiled their cause
under the more admissible garb of greater familial good. This was why, under the
banner of female education rendering woman as endearing wives and noble mothers,
Mary Wollstonecraft proposed the opening of all public vocations to women
(Wollstonecraft 69-75). Bronte seems to be keeping in tow of a similar mechanism in
place. By molding her vocation as a divinely ordained injunction, Jane assigns a high
degree of legitimacy and validity to the destiny she chooses for herself. By doing so,
she also saves herself from two-fold sin of blind idolatry of her lover, and entering
into a sacrilegious polygamous marital relationship with a man. We thus see Jane
escaping the convoluting commitments of the patriarchal structures by the very token
which sanctified these structures in the first place.

If Mr. Rochester’s proposal presented with a trial of passion, St. John’s

proposal presented one of reason. In a way, refusing St. John’s offer of iterating the
role of a missionary’s wife and reformer, bringing back the verdict of God in
wretched locales, proved a much greater test for Jane. Moreover, Jane was chosen by
St. John for the very virtues, principles, and qualities that, till now have enabled Jane
to erect her rare bildung trajectory; virtues that helped her prevail over the dashing
Ms. Ingram and the enchanting Ms. Oliver. Now these very qualities were being
called upon to influence via its mettle the evangelical preaching to which St. John
himself was disposed. It was easier for her to summon her “preconceived opinions”
and “foregone determinations” (Brontë 529) in the face of Mr. Rochester’s unholy
temptations, but here was the noble mission of a stoic and upright Christian. So
gifted is St. John to his cause, “he will sacrifice all to his long-framed resolves”
(Brontë 599) and what’s more is that he truly understands Jane’s need for stimulus.
But although Jane understands that there is no other suitor for her and by marrying

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St. John, she can expand her missionary influence far and wide, she refuses his
proposal.

Jane’s rejection of her second suitor can be understood on the grounds that
she was able to descry hints of patriarchal self- approbation in St. John’s “long-
framed resolve” that was not completely unlike those of one Mr. Brocklehurst, but
while the latter’s dilemma was sheer hypocrisy, the former’s verged on hubris. What
makes St. John’s particularly “rave in (his) restlessness” is his inability to go on
harsher ventures as his “ordained minister” instead of being “buried in morass”,
“pent in with mountains” (Brontë 598). Gubar and Gilbert sense a hint of “masculine
self-aggrandizement and domination” (366) in St. John’s religious agenda. Taking
the allegations as true for the sake of argument, it is possible that Jane could have
descried these flaws in him before the reader could and foresaw the very stifling
monotony of a missionary’s exertions looming before her, which she originally set
out to contest by leaving Lowood. A telling episode foreshadowing this draining
servitude that Jane despised more than anything occurs when Jane comes to feel
stifled in his presence owning to his demands and expectations. When she finally
belches, he immediately pronounces her as “unfeminine” (Bronte 693). To a woman
so given to the cause of carving her own destiny and speaking freely to like-minded
intellectual epicures, St. John’s “exacting” (668) influence becomes strangely
suffocating.

By degrees, he acquired a certain influence over me that took away my liberty

of mind: his praise and notice were more restraining than his indifference….I
could no longer talk or laugh freely….because … vivacity (at least in me)
was distasteful to him. I was so fully aware that… in his presence any effort
to sustain or follow any other became vain… I fell under a freezing spell.
When he said “go,” I went; “come,” I came; “do this,” I did it. But I did not
love my servitude. (Bronte, 668)

St. John’s appraisal of Jane’s constituency and merits is deprived of the two-
tiered understanding of the female journey of self-formation. For women, their
bildung/formative journey must meet the two-fold objectives of leading a more
experiential lifestyle, while allowing them to fulfill their domestic vocation by
exercising their more feminine charms.

Reading Jane’s powers from a strictly masculine view, St. John can only
think of one vocation suited to her, that of uncompromising, backbreaking labour in
the guise of a missionary’s wife. He completely fails to understand Jane’s refusal to

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tread the laborious path of leading an evangelical mission under the scorching Indian
sun. From the patriarchal vantage point, a plain-looking woman like Jane who has
been subjected to toil from early on, cannot be built for love but labour and fulfilling
the latter vocation should be sufficient for her. A gynocritical perspective, however,
allows us to exclusively reach into that no-man zone of which St. John is obviously
short. In this no man zone, Jane is perfectly able to exhibit her truest nature, inclusive
of what St. John and even Mr. Rochester failed to descry. What is also important to
notice here is that more than once, Jane purports to bring St. John within the
premises of this exclusively feminine zone but the latter remains under a state of
exile. This also poses a question of a more gynocritical nature. Are men innately
without the ability to venture into the no-man zone on account of the biological
difference of sex and its related manifestations or is this a form of self-imposed
exile?

When St. John fails to comprehend Jane’s too willing and “gleeful” (Brontë
656) an abdication of her post as the mistress of the village school she takes up
towards after her departure from Thornfield, he ponders as to what occupation could
be of more interest and consequence to Jane. The latter’s long explanation of the
domestic nature of affairs that seem waiting for her attention strikes strange to the
missionary. They are strange because they seem so inconsequential and menial when
compared with the more noble vocation of imparting education. But, before the
arrival of her cousins Mary and Diana following the opportune disclosure of Jane’s
inheritance, Jane’s goes into a long speech of “clean(nig) down Moor house from
chamber to cellar…rub(bing) it up with bees wax…till it glitters… keep(ing) up
good fires in every room… beating of eggs, sorting of currants, grating of spices,
compounding of Christmas cakes, chopping up of materials for mince-pies, and
solemnizing of other culinary rites” (Brontë 656). Her new vocation as Jane herself
describes is to “have all things in an absolutely perfect state of readiness for Diana
and Mary before next Thursday” (Brontë 656) and her ambition is to “give (the girls)
a beau-ideal of a welcome.” To this illumination St. John has but a forced smile of
dissatisfaction as a reaction and despite seeing the “flush of vivacity” (Brontë 656)
with which she proclaims her newfound vocation, he does not shrink back from
reminding her that whatever her motives for the present, she must prepare herself to
“look a little higher than domestic endearment and household joys (Brontë 657).”

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When Jane replies that the latter are “the best things the world has” (Brontë 657), it
makes clear Jane’s need to leave Lowood first and then Thornfield Hall. Her
destination, the final end of that mission of self-help and self-culture goes beyond the
escape from a monotone existence. She has been on the lookout of a home filled with
love and wisdom, and where her passion for intellect and knowledge, far from being
thwarted, should suffice for the home’s very protection and progress. In a way then,
the end of Jane’s journey of self-formation is not very different from the end that the
society prescribed for Jane, but what Bronte accomplished here is the depiction of
how the desire amongst females for agency and newness is not necessarily tangential
to the duties and obligations of the domestic life.

By activity, it must be noted, Jane does not necessarily connote a

backbreaking chore amid the vilifying temperaments of the unforgiving seasons, the
uncouth trails, the unpredictable courses of nature, and the unforgiving vicissitudes
of time. Her definition of activity is simply a meaningful life and it is not exclusive
to the public domain but can be found in the private wards of one’s household. This
meaningful existence, a life lived and spared for both the society and wellbeing of
those to whose service the most solemn bond of unconditional love subjects one was
the only thing keeping her at Lowood in the guise of one Miss Temple and later at
Thornfield in the form of Mr. Rochester. We can therefore draw a parallel between
her decision to leave both establishments. The onset of her journey from Lowood
was triggered by a realization brought about by Miss Temple’s removal, that the
person for whose approval she toiled day in and day out was no longer there to
recompense her efforts. In a similar vein, Jane chooses to leave Thornfield knowing
that in the presence of Mr. Rochester’s maniacal wife, matrimony between the two is
impossible and once again, with the object of her toils removed, she chooses to
leave.

From another perspective Jane’s journey of formation becomes a caravan of

which the many men and women she comes into contact are now a part. It is not only
she who undergoes experiential education, but her closest associates too. Mr.
Rochester and St. John make for two such instances. Her final rejection of Mr.
Rochester’s advances are on grounds of religious impropriety and she only returns to
a more chastened Mr. Rochester when no legal, ethical, religious or moral
obstructions prevent a nuptial union between the two. This Mr. Rochester, that the

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readers encounter towards the end of the novel is quite a contrasting picture against
the imposing Mr. Rochester from the earlier pages. And it is to the service of this
spiritually improved Mr. Rochester that Jane marks her return.

Similarly, St. John’s virtual apotheosis towards the end of the novel has been
given to several interpretations but in the light of this study, this apotheosis can be
taken as a sign of St. John’s reformation from religious-patriarchal to a complete
evangelical preacher. “St. John is unmarried: he never will marry now. Himself has
hitherto sufficed to the toil; and the toil draws near its close. No fear of death will
darken St. John’s last hour: his mind will be unclouded; his heart will be undaunted;
his hope be sure; his faith steadfast.” (Brontë 764).

St. John’s has been a lesson of resignation to his solitude missionary

transformation. His nonchalance towards and even antipathy against Jane’s vivacity
and love for domestic endearments is carved into the mould of a patriarchal
imposition resting on the plinth of self-aggrandizement. Upon this plinth, there is
room for only a single form to stand erect which is the bust of St. John himself. In
aligning herself to this mission, Jane will have to uproot “half her self” and go to a
“premature death” (680). Had she chosen to subscribe to this fate, one could have
seen Annis Pratt’s widely proclaimed model of “growing down” at work but it is not
so. By living a life of activity, Jane never implies self-immolation but self-
affirmation. She is ready to perform the services of an evangelical preacher as St.
John’s cousin but not his wife. This is because the latter status would give St. John
the complete authority to command Jane’s entire constitution and the protagonist’s
experiential education has sufficed enough to bring her this metacognition. She is
prone to agency but not blind subservience.

Although Jane is conscious of the fact that the emotional chasm created by
the removal of Mr. Rochester could best be supplanted by an occupation that “God
assigns… of noble cares and sublime results”, she shudders at thought of performing
these duties under the watchful eyes of St. John whose regard for Jane barely equates
that which a soldier reserves for “a good weapon and that is all” (Brontë 680). Bronte
seems to be implying that while worldly and spiritual accomplishment by means of
subscribing others around him to blind slavishness could be a man’s end, it is not a
woman’s. Jane abstains from making these sentiments known to her cousin St. John,
the veil of a muted discourse being on her, her narrative ponderings make things

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clear to the reader. To St. John, Jane’s most passionate denials are only manifested in
her intentions of giving her “heart to God” (Brontë 683) since he “do(es) not want it”
(Brontë 683). Jane is never quite able to completely inform St. John of her
sentiments either for fear of being understood or thought unnatural for a show of
cognition that is supposedly not meant for feminine sensibilities. This is one reason
why her persistence in refusing St. Jane’s offers are ultimately labelled as
“unfeminine” (Bronte 694) by him. This calls to mind Ardener’s divisions of muted
and dominant discourses. It appears as though women, at least in the Victorian times,
were inadvertently devoid of the ability of making themselves precisely
comprehensible to their more privileged counterparts, the men. If and when such
comprehension begins to take root, it is not without the allegations of unnatural
severity and an unfeminine constitution. St. John is unable to pass the check imposed
on him by Jane’s suggestion that marrying him would mean killing herself. His
response, instead of probing into the nature of such a declaration, is to regard her as
“violent, unfeminine, and untrue” (Brontë 694). All he can fathom from such stark
show of refusal is that Jane must be in possession of “an unfortunate state of mind:
they merit severe reproof: they would seem inexcusable (Brontë 695).” In the
dominant discourse therefore, women cannot let their more intense emotions reign
lose without being misunderstood.

This fear of being misunderstood, although leaves her “heart-wrung” (Brontë

695), does not stop her from self-realization. It is this realization that not only
apprises Jane of her own limits but also others. Reading St. John’s restless
disposition on one occasion, Jane goes into a frank admission of all the qualities that
prevent him from becoming a “good husband (Brontë 680).” This judgement is
engraved in his “lofty forehead, still and pale as a white stone (Brontë 660).” While
she stipulates other reasons for her suspicions of St. John, this description of him
evokes a pallid, unfeeling sentiment. The charge here is of a lack of emotions and
sentiency that is completely aversive to Jane. However, in the fashion of many of the
other female protagonists, such as Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice and
Margaret Hale of North and South, Jane does not go about the project of rectifying
St. John. This is his own course to take. In fact, Jane hardly points it out as a flaw
needing alteration. His disposition is one fitted best for the vocation he has chosen;
she sensed him to be “of the material from which nature hews her heroes…her

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lawgivers, her statesmen, her conquerors: a steadfast bulwark for great interests to
rest upon; but, at the fireside, too often a cold cumbrous column, gloomy and out of
place (Brontë 660).” There is an apt conglomeration of praise and rebuke in this
description of St. John. In short he possesses a steely temperament fit for the public
domain but not so much for the private. And since the latter will account for much of
Jane’s occupation, she rightfully rejects the idea of taking him as a husband.

On the other hand, St. John’s approval of Jane’s faculties, his generous
admission of her powers, resoluteness, control, tractability, untiring assiduity and
perseverance seem to suggest that she herself possesses the qualities that have
allowed men of greater ambition to quench their passions. They are also qualities one
can detect in a diligent governess, but Jane’s primary contention was with his
apparent judgment that her constitution, so disciplined, renders her more eligible for
labour than love. Why should a woman, made of stronger sensibilities and tougher
material, be excluded from the joys of love, warmth and feeling? Bronte makes it
clear that feminine dreams of marital bliss and mutual affection are not necessarily
incompatible with a female’s desire of fulfilling her vocation. She can prove to be
both a diligent labourer as well as a beloved wife. She could step propitiously in both
public and private spheres without needing to alter any of her natural temperament.
Too often woman of ambition has been regaled as unnatural, unfeeling and devoid of
the qualities that could fashion her into the homemaker. St. John, too, seems to be
operating on a similar belief. Jane’s vivacity and an insistence on enjoying the warm
joys of a homely establishment, sisterly communion and little endearments cause
severe consternation to her cousin, who thinks such a feminine comportment
incommensurable with the life he has planned out for her. But, as a woman, Jane has
clearly shown herself to be able to do both. She can both make for a healthy home, as
well as undertake the hardships of an estranged public life of constant toil, but on the
condition that the latter does not require any form of self-erasure, since doing so
would be synonymous to an importune early death. St. John failing to reconcile to
this awareness of female sensibility and agency marks the cue for Jane’s retreat back
to Mr. Rochester. The latter, with his newfound religious, social and moral permit to
court Jane, becomes a much more suitable match. His character marks the social
progression of accepting women’s dichotomous ability. He perceives in Jane the

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vivacious spirit needed to keep pace with his own restive one, as well as the gentle
care that would complement the same.

Jane, too, remains on the receiving end of this mutually beneficial marriage.
Her experiential education and toil have finally brought her at the helm of a marital
harmony which, instead of integrating her into society in a more subdued
comportment, unites her with all the resources that bring her the freedom to deploy
her aims even further. Far from being an agitated soul forced into unwilling
submission either in Lowood, as Mr. Rochester’s mistress, or as St. John’s
missionary wife in India, Jane escapes all for what could be many Victorian
women’s end from the beginning: to find a place filled with life, movement and
liberty.

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 CHAPTER 4: LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET

Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret was a sensational success in

her time. The novel, being penned by a female writer in close acquaintanceship with
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose wife herself had experienced the debilitating effects
of being locked away under charges of insanity, traverses the story of another
“seemingly” mad woman with the cause of unraveling her secret. Braddon’s Lady
Audley’s Secret is the third text that this study has chosen to interpret owing to a
possibility of significant cultural revelations pertaining to women’s aberrations in the
Victorian times once it is subjected to a gynocritical scrutiny.

The Sensation novel seems to be one of the most befitting genres for a
gynocritical analysis for several reasons. The most pertinent of these is the subject
matter that this genre exploits and the goal of gynocriticism. Gynocriticism, as has
been established numerous times by now, deals with the problem of exploring the
existence and possibility of an innately female culture that exhibits itself most in
what has been described as “the no man zone”. As such, this zone must entail
attitudes, beliefs, experiences and aspirations that are exclusive to women, a
woman’s “secret” of sorts. And since women’s “secrets and secrecy” are the primary
edifice on which most sensation novels are erected, it makes sense to analyze one of
the best-selling and most popular sensation novels in light of the gynocritical theory.

4.1. Lady Audley’s Secret as a Sensation Novel

Literary experts have often defined the sensation novel in close association
with the Gothic tradition. The only difference lies in the setting where these Gothic
elements of sensationalism, murder, betrayal, uncontrollable love and vengeance
unfold. No longer unravelling amid the forsaken castles of the moors, the forbidden
sensationalism is now brought into the drawing rooms of respectable upper and
middle class English gentry. The fact that the most hideous of crimes and secrets are
performed and embedded within the confines of the domestic sphere has
inadvertently made the woman responsible for the demise of middle-class English
respectability and sanctuary. Far from being the angel in the house, the woman has
now transmogrified into an uncontrollable monstrosity who is both sexually and
socially perverted. According to Jill Matus in “Disclosure as Cover-up”, the vile
actions of these female hero-villains of the Sensation novel formulated an “other” for

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the Victorian society which could then be used as a warning, a cautionary tale and a
symbol of the plight of the recalcitrant woman to keep the good and moderate
Victorian women in check (Matus 334). By following these actions, one can possibly
draw conclusive evidence around the cultural expectations of morally, socially, and
religiously integrated women of those times.

The problem here is that the Sensation novel, as a genre, is more warped than
its counterparts in separating the vile from the virtuous. It is by conflating the two
that authors like Mary Elizabeth Braddon were so successfully able to lure, regale,
divide, and traumatize their audiences. A simple declaration of vice as vice and
virtue as virtue would not lead to the kind of emotional jolts that made these novels
such a hit. As is the case with Lady Audley’s Secret, often the aberrations of women
in these novels are contextualized in a manner that prevents the perpetrators from
taking the full blame for their actions, or as Adrienne Gavin put it in her article ‘The
Work of a She-Devil” and at times even making the criminal its heroes (224). The
social, institutional, religious, biological and patriarchal duress is often the most
palpable causes responsible for deviance amongst the heroines. It must, however, be
borne in mind that writers often do not expose this duress in stark and vivid terms.
These forces are subtle, even as they operate in the real world, and to detect their
prevalence and extent, readers must have a keen and interpretative eye. Since most
sensation novels often deal with female deviance, analyzing this text from a female
oriented cultural theory appears to be the most sensible route.

This chapter will thus attempt to uncover, through a close gynocritical

examination, these very constricting cultural practices and expectations of the
Victorian times and women’s response to them. In doing so, the study will hopefully
draw important links between popular literature by women of those times and the
female cultural setup during the Victorian age. The premise of this chapter is that the
genre of the Sensation novel brought female writers an unprecedented opportunity to
document the problems with the general Victorian culture at large where women
were concerned, along with the existence of an impenetrable, exclusionary female
culture that sometimes allowed women to get around these in ways that the society
either willfully denied or deported perpetually into concealment under the guise of
insanity.

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 Lady Audley’s Secret is a quintessentially sensation novel as it centers around
the existence of a morally turbulent and catastrophic secret. The main plot circles
around the unravelling of this secret and the novel approaches its conclusion once the
secret is uncovered. However, the social and economic conditions of the protagonist,
our Lady Audley, make it more than a simple case of uncovering a gruesome murder
plot. Precisely because, as Lady Audley puts it, there was no gruesome murder to
begin with. So, when Lady Audley gets roped into becoming a killer, a bigamist, an
arsonist and finally a madwoman, the questions that arise revolve around
corroborating whether these crimes were premeditated, resulted from the inevitable
fate of a woman with unchecked morality, and reflected an innate capacity within a
woman to elicit vile, almost demoniacal traits that get subdued within the general
Victorian culture but surface in that strict no-man zone of unbridled female
expression.

Lady Audley, previously known as Lucy Talboys descended from a drunken

veteran father and a mentally unhinged mother. With such humble prospects, there
was not much that Lucy could have anticipated in life except for one unmistakable
asset: her exceedingly beautiful form. Having grown in a society that placed
disproportionate premium on women’s beauty, it seemed plausible that Lucy should
retain hope of a brighter future. Her plans to marry well and escape the destitution,
poverty, and humiliations form her past fail to materialize when she weds George
Talboys, the kindly but somewhat inept descendant of a wealthy patriarch and
landlord, disowned by his father. When she is abandoned by her husband, who leaves
behind a note about abandoning her to find his fortune in Australia and not returning
unless he has had his luck, lady Audley decides to take matters into her own hands.
The moment she takes the initiative to supplement her family’s income by taking the
position of a governess in a wealthy and respectable neighborhood, the plot of the
story begins to make its advance forging an intricate subject matter that is open to
various interpretations. Lady Audley does not escape the chance of taking a second
wealthier husband, Sir Audley who is much older than her, thereby performing the
first of a series of crimes: bigamy.

As it is Showalter’s theory of gynocriticism in general and the female culture

in particular that is informing this analysis, the focus of this chapter is less on the
nature and atrocity of crimes committed by Lady Audley and more on the cultural

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elements that force her into such stark aberrance. It will also focus on the society’s
response to women of the likes of Lady Audley and its eventual repercussions for
other women.

Interestingly, Showalter herself has performed an analysis of Braddon’s Lady

Audley’s Secret in her extensive book titled The Female Malady. However, her
analysis is vastly limited to the question of madness amongst the general Victorian
public and its portrayal in the novel. Madness, is undoubtedly an important subject
not just in Braddon’s novel in particular but in the sensation novel at large and this
analysis will also shed some light on depictions of madness, or precisely the female
madness, but with the end result of tying this so called constitutional insanity
amongst women to a flawed Victorian bias that only fully reveals itself once we look
at women not as a biological category but as a culturally and socially colonized sub-
domain.

To do the latter, one must take Showalter’s gynocritical theory dealing with
“women’s writings and women’s culture propounded in her article “Feminist
Criticism in the Wilderness” (197) into account. The idea manifested by Showalter in
her famous book Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness foregrounded the existence of
a particular dynamic between the ways in which women conceptualize their bodies
and their sexual and reproductive functions and their cultural environment. The
female psyche and language too, according to Showalter, are a construct of the
society (190-195). But the greatest advantage of using Showalter’s cultural model is
that it admits the interventions of race, class, nationality and history in these
constructions. Indeed, as far as the novel under question is concerned, female roles
and expectations are as much a product of the Victorian culture’s assessment of class
and history as they are of the assessments of gender. By bringing in the question of
class into the collective female experience for the Victorian women, the analysis will
follow a certain point of departure from Showalter’s analysis of the novel.

There’s an interesting inversion when it comes to documenting women’s

history. As Gerda Lerner maintains in her book The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing
Women in History, women on the whole have been largely been under-documented
in history but “not because of the evil conspiracies of men in general or male
historians in particular, but because we have considered history only in male-
centered terms. We have missed women and their activities, because we have asked

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questions of history which are inappropriate to women.” (Lerner 140). But while
they are under-documented in the general historical evolution of the English people,
there is one area where they suffer from over-documentation, and it is the public
asylum. Now since the question of madness, what Showalter described as the
“female malady”, is so centric to the sensation novel, and the question of its cultural
significance for women is equally centric to the theory of gynocriticism, this chapter
will first begin with accounting for this “female malady”, also detected in our
protagonist Lady Audley, by placing it into women’s cultural subtext that allows not
only a discussion of their biological and gender differences but also the existing
historical and class dichotomies.

It is important to note that when we evaluate women’s culture, the focus must
not solely rest on the “the roles, activities, tastes, and behaviors prescribed and
considered appropriate for women” but also those activities behaviors, and functions
actually generated out of women’s lives (Showalter 198)”. The need for
understanding the female culture came about as the androcentric models of
understanding women began to fall short of and prove inadequate to make sense of
different female experiences. Everything that these androcentric models could not
accommodate was immediately cast aside as “deviant” or “ignored” (Showalter 199).
For a long time, these external observations have failed to bring veracity to the
female experience and it became more and more clear that what the society needed
was an insider’s perspective. For these, analytics and critics turned to women’s
diaries, their anecdotes, creative arts and novels. For a similar purpose, the study
turns to Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret.

The most exploited subject within Braddon’s novel is the exact nature of
Lady Audley’s secret. On the outset, it appears that her secret is bigamy alone which
soon evolves into a potential murder. But in the almost climactic and thoroughly
dramatic declaration by Lady Audley before Robert Audley, her terrific secret all
along was in fact her madness. Interestingly, many critics and analysts, including
Showalter herself, have chosen to discard Lady Audley’s madness as the climactic
secret of the novel. Jill Matus in her study “Disclosure as 'Cover-up': The Discourse
of Madness in Lady Audley's Secret” takes great pains to maintain how Lady
Audley’s real secret is not that she is mad but that there is an underlying tone in both
her actions and behavior that suggest that she is in fact “not mad” (Matus 350). In

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this way, the reader receives an emotional jar similar to the one experienced by Lady
Audley herself when she recognizes her extradition from England into an asylum in
France. However, the reader’s reason for experiencing this jolt would be different
from Lady Audley’s. For the protagonist, the idea of lifelong confinement within the
wards of lunatics should be a severe emotional and psychological blow. For the
readers, the blow comes from the recognition that the unnatural bestiality and
brutality of the female protagonist that an androcentric model of female culture
would simply discard as deviance arising from madness, as Andrew Mangham
explains in his book Violent Women and Sensation Fiction (44), is very much a latent
and dormant force perceived easily by other women. This is one reason why Lady
Audley’s female servant becomes an immediate complicit to her mistress’s secrecy
and her daughter-in-law Alicia Audley remains suspicious of the woman despite
having no concrete reason to justify her mistrust. The reason why the women in the
novel seem to share, albeit unwittingly, the understanding of an indescribable secret,
when the men in the novel are either unaware or come to the same conclusion
through an arduous and laboring journey involving heavy-handed detective work
could be attributed to "the broad-based communality of values, institutions,
relationships, and methods of communication” that is the essence of the female
culture (Showalter 198).

The men on the other hand account for this “secret” or lady Audley’s moral
deviance through the long-standing androcentric discourse about the female
madness. And it appears that Lady Audley herself assimilates this discourse to
escape a much crueler fate.

In the nineteenth century, the discourse on madness was rampant in England.

The English were particularly concerned with how madness manifested in males and
females. Thus, alongside the English malady, there was the female malady. There
prevailed an androcentric and patriarchal view to account for madness in men and
women even when the symptoms were similar. Men’s madness appeared to have
been a failing of their intellectual and economic conditions while madness in women
resulted mainly from their unbridled sexuality and something more innate to the
biological constitution of women. The nineteenth century biological discourse in
England focused relentlessly on the essential “vulnerability” (Showalter, 7) amongst
women to experience insanity. Their madness was described as “feminine” and they

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were thought to experience it in ways that were different from the way men
experienced them. A close gynocritical scrutiny of Braddon’s text, however, suggests
the possibility of a similarity between the madness experienced by men and women
and this is because its cultural model chooses to look at women’s conditions outside
of their biological confines admitting alternative and plausible reasons for their
social breakdown.

On the outset, it appears that Braddon was penning the novel in support of
these prevalent discourses on women’s madness. In her final confession before
Robert Audley of her sin and apparent moral deviance, Lady Audley appears to
attribute the hereditary taint of madness in her to the prevalent discourses around
puerperal insanity or post-partum depression. She claims, “"My mother had been, or
had appeared sane, up to the hour of my birth ... the only inheritance I had to expect
from my mother was—insanity!" Talking about her husband’s desertion, Lady
Audley continues,

I looked upon this as a desertion, and I resented it bitterly. ... I did not love
the child, for he had been left a burden upon my hands. The hereditary taint
that was in my blood had never until this time showed itself by any one sign
or token; but at this time I became subject to fits of violence and despair ...
for the first time I crossed that invisible line which separates reason from
madness. (Braddon 540).

In short, Lady Audley suggests that she had become insane on account of
giving birth to a child under egregious circumstances. But convoluted and then
completely gleaned over in her confession is the discourse of class.

There was no apparent fits of madness and she did not hurt her child. In a
way, she did exactly what her husband did: deserting the family in search for a
fortune and not returning until that fortune was found. Two important conclusions
can be drawn here: the first is that Lady Audley was not mad, simply desperate to
alleviate her poverty, and second, that in fleeing from her duties as a mother she
causes an aberrance that, in the eyes of the Victorian era is akin to madness. Let’s
dissect both of these in greater detail.

In The Female Malady, Showalter speaks of how the Victorian society slowly
worked towards the “domestication of insanity” (28) and its “feminization” (28)
coincided with assimilation in the Victorian institutions. The nineteenth century
England saw a predominant number of females confined in its mental wards than the

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males. This was the time when it became a statistically verifiable phenomenon and
with it emerged several attempts to explain the predominant trace of madness
amongst women. What is crucial to note is that before 1845, there was the opposite
trend. Men were recorded to have outnumbered women by at least 30 percent within
the asylums but this changed with the passing of the Lunatics Act. The number of
mad women in the asylums began to increase and had begun to outnumber the male
counterpart a decade later. Then ensued a fierce debate around the reasons for the
predominance of this female malady (Showalter 4-10).

Amongst the various theories that surfaced, the most widely accepted was one
that attributed this malady amongst women to their puerperal and biological
condition, the one also assimilated by Lady Audley.

While contrasting views surrounding poverty, illnesses and dependency made

rounds and seemed to even hold weight, Victorian psychiatrist lost no time in
attributing the female malady to what they thought was their biggest fear: a
constitutional inaptitude in the female sex owing to a malfunctioning of their
reproductive systems. These they believed interfered with their emotional, sexual,
and rational qualifications making them more vulnerable to bouts of insanity. Thus
the “biological crisis of the female Lifecyle-puberty, pregnancy, childbirth,
menopause—during which the mind would be weakened” (Showalter 57) became
responsible for giving rise to what seemed like a theory of latent insanity in women.
A number of terms emerged whose sole purpose was to qualify madness as primarily
a feminine or even female condition. Terms such as “reflex insanity in women”
(Storer 78) that was the “special law” (Storer 78) of nature making women the
“victim of periodicity” (Storer 78) and an illness that found "neither homologue nor
analogue in man." The periodic mental illness, to which women were naturally
subjected on account of their biology, came with the process of pregnancy, post
parturition, during lactation and during the time of menopause. Psychiatrist were
confirmed of a “sympathetic connection” (Blandford 69) between the brain and
women’s uterus. This for the Victorians manifested itself as an explanation of female
malady as clear an undeniable as broad daylight. Doctor George Man Burrows wrote
in his book Commentaries on Insanity: “The functions of the brain are so intimately
connected with the uterine system, that the interruption of any one process which the
latter has to perform in the human economy may implicate the former (235-236)”.

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Given this disposition of the Victorian public, doctors and lay men alike of the
inherently flawed constitutionality of women, Showalter almost finds it a wonder
that most women could actually experience a lifetime of sanity (56). Indeed, there
were psychiatrists who found it boggling that more women did not experience
madness at least once during their lives.

However, if we look at the circumstance of Lady Audley’s crime of

fabrication and bigamy, she starkly exhibits characteristics that were in contradiction
to the prevailing narratives of puerperal disorders. For one, Lady Audley does not
turn to infanticide. The worst feelings that she harbours towards the baby are feelings
of frustration. Lady Audley, then Lucy Talboys, understood very well the plight that
awaited women who were deserted by their husbands. In many cases they were
worse off than middle-aged unmarried single women whom the Victorians
unanimously treated as a social problem. They were often stigmatized as
“redundant” and “superfluous” and once Dinah Mulock Craik argued in her book On
Sisterhoods how the Anglican sisterhood was a salvation to these women who were
left behind to be burdens. The choice remained between a convent and a mental
asylum (Craik 147-148). Lady Audley’s plight was worse because she was not only
“left behind” and shunned by the society, she also had a mouth to feed. For a brief
period she does seek the refuge commonly available to the women of her time and
finds employment in a female convent. But the vocation must have fallen short of her
expectations and she leaves the establishment to find a position in a wealthy family
as a governess.

There’s no telling whether procuring a vacancy so close to Sir Audley’s

establishment was a delightful happenstance or work of qualified premeditation.
Given her determination and ability to carve out her destiny through carefully plotted
steps, it is altogether dismissible that she had strategically chosen the post. The
vacancy she filled at Mr. Dawson’s was only to serve as a stepping stone until she
was eligible to fill the vacancy of being the mistress of the Audley Court. There are
several reasons to believe that this was her motive from the beginning and one she
was able to successfully pull off. And if one is to go by this route, it is unlikely that
the crimes were instinctive and a product of her latent insanity. As Dr. Mosgrave
acknowledges towards the end, Lady Audley really had the “cunning of madness”
(Braddon 582) instead of madness per say: two completely and terrifyingly different

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assessments and one that he will eventually withdraw for the conventional plot
resolution.

In other words, Lady Audley’s deviance can be understood to be as much a

product of a socially and economically restrictive English society as it was the result
of an innate moral aberration within her. This is what Showalter meant, when she
proposed understanding women’s madness from an insider’s perspective.

Earlier, the study briefly elucidated how psychiatrists made sense of the
increasing number of women in mental wards by attributing it to women’s biological
functions. There were contrasting theories to boot and it would do the study well to
shed some light on these. While there were some scientifically backed reasons to
believe that puerperal violence amongst women was a function of their biology this
was only half the truth. Clinging exclusively to this one dimensional assessment of
women’s plight did them most harm because it failed to take into account the much
prevalent social problems of female stigmatization, poverty, destitution, female
dependency, shocks and psychological adjustments to their new found maternal roles
(Showalter 59). Categorization of the female deviance, violence or incompetency as
an exclusively biological phenomenon and a natural product of women’s nature not
only cast the entire female sex in the mould of incompetency but also discouraged
the possibility of acknowledging the social slights sustained by them and moving
towards rectification.

It called for the assistance of some moral managers to check the social error
that so many psychiatrists failed to correct. The error of limited vocational and
intellectual pursuits. Some psychiatrists admitted to the maddening influence of
enormous restrictions that could be as mentally debilitating as a biological disorder.
Experts such as Reverend William Moseley in his book Eleven Chapters on Nervous
and Mental Complaints openly lamented the lack of any considerable exercise that
could help women hone, nurture, and train their mental energies and put them to
productive use. Another expert, W.A.F. Browne agreed in part maintaining that
while one could not deny women’s constitutional vulnerability, their imperfect and
almost useless education could be blamed in part on the undue duress on certain
mental faculties and the callous and willful neglect of the other resulted in a mental
and bodily perversion that strongly arrested healthy development, “spewed forth
sickly refinement, weak insipidity, or absolute disease” (Browne 43).

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 It is imperative to note that the vocations taught to women were not an outlet
for the mind’s craving but for simply display. And it is this need for display, of the
apparent show of wealth and accomplishment that came as the part and parcel of
upper-class English society which became the undoing of Lady Audley. So that she
was trapped in the insidious loop of a system that did not provide women with the
internal resources and self-discipline that checks moral insanity and the need to
perpetually remain on display to constantly run the chance of experiencing a public
fall.

But whether the increasing madness in women was attributed to their

biological function or sociological dystopia, their accounting remained purely
androcentric as discussed in The female Malady (Showalter 200) and the final verdict
had always something to do with the training of the will. There was a lack of
discourse on how this so called madness produced conflicts of the feminine role as
well as an insider’s perspective on how madness was experienced by women.
Questions that would be intrinsic to a gynocritic study such as, how did women feel
about their various biological problems, how were they treated by the asylum
workers and caretakers, and how did women working at these asylums perceive the
puerperal mania, etc., were completely ignored by these androcentric models of
women’s behavior. The pages of the professional journals that recorded the statistics
and symptoms of women’s behavior were largely inaccessible to women.

For these, critics from the gynocritical school have had to turn towards the
letters, journals and diaries of profound women, such as Florence Nightingale,
Charlotte Bronte and Mary Braddon’s sensational and psychological fictions for a
more in-depth and a more multi-dimensional understanding of women’s problems.
And indeed these writings reveal that madness amongst women stemmed from far
more complex conditions including a strict moral, social, and religious conditioning
than simply biological.

In fact in The Female Malady, Showalter is of the view that the rise of the
madwoman was Victorian society’s “self-fulfilling prophecies” (Showalter 73). The
economic and vocational restrictions imposed upon women, and stemmed in falsely
prevalent and calculatingly exaggerated accounts of women’s irrationality,
childishness, and sexual instability worked together to produce the kind of deviance
in women that allowed the largely male occupation, psychiatry and clinical

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assistance a highly lucrative opportunity: one, it was noted time and again, that the
husbands, brothers and other males relatives of the families did not feel shy of
exploiting. Male custodians of the public sphere leeched on to this psychological
frailty amongst women to keep them out of public vocations, property rights and any
meaningful indulgence conflating medicine with politics (Showalter 124-125). In the
doling of the moral management by these social institutions one could read the
cultural attitudes of the Victorian people of the time towards women with increasing
demands. And although the study agrees with Showalter’s assessment of this
madness, it goes a step further to declare that it also brought ambitious women a
chance to manifest their greater cunning and psychological predominance under the
garb of some innate frailty of nature.

In other words, the gynocritical study of the novel dictates how the sensation
novel as a genre brought forth the chance to Victorian writers like Braddon to bring
forth the secret of women’s madness in the Victorian times out in the open. The
duplicity, cunning, and psychological manipulating exhibited by Lady Audley are
not signs of moral insanity but moral degeneracy of an extremely clever and
cunningly opportunistic women. Residing latent within such an assessment is the
message of threatening female intelligence that women mostly shroud under the garb
of innocence and childishness to procure their wants and satisfy their ambitions. This
duplicity Lady Audley achieves in the following elaborate and carefully plotted and
conducted ways.

On the outset, Lady Audley has been described as the embodiment of

feminine traits of the highest and most cherished order. Indeed many a times, the
praise of Lady Audley’s unmistakable femininity and profound beauty verges on the
sense of comicality. The exaggeration and unbridled focus on her outward innocence
and elegance only reinforces an unsettling feeling of the mystery and murkiness that
lays hidden underneath. The double-edged meaning of her writings is prevalent not
only in her description of Lady Audley but what becomes her eventual
establishment-the Audley Court. The novel begins with an assessment of the
archway leading up to Audley Court. The clock tower at one end featured a “stupid,
bewildering clock, which had only one hand--and which jumped straight from one
hour to the next--and was therefore always in extremes” (Braddon 3). The
suggestions become more and more palpable as the reader makes his way into the

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establishment itself. According to Braddon, the house was a “noble place; inside as
well as out, a noble place--a house in which you incontinently lost yourself if ever
you were so rash as to attempt to penetrate its mysteries alone; a house in which no
one room had any sympathy with another” (Braddon 3). Also, lying some twenty
paces from the house was “an avenue so shaded from the sun and sky, so screened
from observation by the thick shelter of the over-arching trees that it seemed a
chosen place for secret meetings or for stolen interviews; a place in which a
conspiracy might have been planned, or a lover's vow registered with equal safety”
(Braddon 5). Braddon’s comic insistence on the oxymoronic qualities of nobility and
wayward secrecy lays the foundation of some gruesome mystery lying in wait. The
calm seems to await some sort of storm which eventually manifests itself with the
arrival of Lady Audley.

Braddon continues to work with her double entendre in the categorization of

Lady Audley. The undue stress on her childlike demeanor compounded with the
reinforcing of her obscure background is anything but assuring of her angelic
disposition, and yet she is, at least ostensibly the epitome of the angel in the house.

Lady Audley had, in becoming the wife of Sir Michael, made one of those
apparently advantageous matches which are apt to draw upon a woman the
envy and hatred of her sex. She had come into the neighborhood as a
governess in the family of a surgeon in the village near Audley Court. No one
knew anything of her, except that she came in answer to an advertisement
which Mr. Dawson, the surgeon, had inserted in The _Times_. She came
from London; and the only reference she gave was to a lady at a school at
Brompton, where she had once been a teacher….it was a part of her amiable
and gentle nature always to be light-hearted, happy and contented under any
circumstances. Wherever she went she seemed to take joy and brightness with
her. In the page 7 / 665 cottages of the poor her fair face shone like a
sunbeam…. For you see, Miss Lucy Graham was blessed with that magic
power of fascination, by which a woman can charm with a word or intoxicate
with a smile (Braddon 8).

This is not the only description of its kind that puts Lady Audley on an
impossible pedestal declaring her to be the “sweetest girl ever” (Braddon 8).
Numerous times in the novel, Braddon does not shy from educating the readers on
the immense charm and fascination exhibited by the protagonist that can beguile any
onlooker. But the writer’s select insistence on the words “intoxication”, “charm”, and
“fascination” carry the unmistakable tone of deception. There seems to be a
suggestion that instead of possessing an untainted beauty, her real magic lay in
charming and intoxicating others into believing that she is a woman of such profound

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gifts. Ironically, the insistence on her childish disposition would make her onlookers
appear more innocent than the object of this admirations itself. Her employer Mr.
Dawson, her husband Sir Audley, and his nephew Sir Robert Audley are equally
beguiled at one point or another by her charm, beauty, and outward show of purity
imposing more of a question on male susceptibility as opposed to female infirmity. It
becomes quite apparent later in the novel, although Braddon does not dare pronounce
it in any obvious manner, that the men were easily duped by the cunning women and
failed to display the kind of sensibility and judgment that was celebrated as the
exclusive asset of the male sex as was the general perception about men and women
in the Victorian times (Pykett 11).

Lady Audley masters the classic art of transforming her decisive feminine
asset into a lethal weapon. One that she uses to subjugate any with the exception of
Sir Robert Audley, who appeared to come in her way towards upward mobility.
When she manages to make Sir Michael second-guess his respectable first marriage
on account of this “fever” he described as love for Lady Audley, it reflects the
impressionability of men like Sir Michael Audley who makes the fatal error of
confounding love with infatuation for physical beauty, while on the other it manifests
the importance of beauty amongst women to have any meaningful connection in life.
Totally smitten with “the tender fascination of those soft and melting blue eyes; the
graceful beauty of that slender throat and drooping head, with its wealth of
showering flaxen curls; the low music of that gentle voice; the perfect harmony
which pervaded every charm” (Braddon 9), Sir Michael Audley briskly calls recalls
his first marriage as “a dull, jog-trot bargain” (Braddon 9) that was kept alive by a “a
poor, pitiful, smoldering spark, too dull to be extinguished, too feeble to burn”
(Braddon 9). Braddon cruelly inverts this premium that the Victorian society placed
on women’s physical aptitude and the stark error they make of taking their surface
perfections to be symbolize their moral profundity. As beautiful as Lady Audley is
on the outside, she completely fails to complement it with an equally flattering
character that resides within her and it is a shame that Sir Audley’s first wife’s
memories suffer a humiliating reduction to pitiable epithets of dullness and jog-
trotting bargain in the wake of another woman’s dubious charm. This remains a
common pattern amongst heroines of sensation novel to invert their apparent beauty
and charm with bouts of sometimes horrendous and incorrigible and sometimes high-

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strung behavior that surface in secrecy revealing the passionate and deviant women
that lie underneath (Dallas 8). In a way then, sensation novels, perhaps did more than
any other medium of public correction in displacing this disproportionate weight
placed on female’s outward beauty and the unquestioning association of the latter
with an unstainable moral character. This is one instance of the double-voiced
discourse. In the introduction, the study made it clear how women writers made use
of what Showalter called the double-voiced discourse. The idea itself was borrowed
from the works of anthropologist Edwin Ardener and his wife Shirley Ardener. In
their work “Belief and the Problem of Women and the Problem Revisited”, women
have historically been speaking in a male-perpetuated medium and that “words do
not speak while women do” (Ardener 48). In other words, what these anthropologists
have been holding out is the idea that women have to confirm to a strict set of rules
and expectations while voicing their opinion. In Braddon’s case, one can see the
same veiling of opinions under the garb of socially acceptable norms.

The Victorians cherished the idea of the untainted and uncorrupted lady who
grew up in the society imbibing only its best aspects and remaining impervious to all
the worst. This was obviously a horribly skewed expectation and one that women
had to go through great lengths to uphold. The sensation novels now exposed a
possibility of how, even where these expectations seemed to be so innocuously lived,
there was always the possibility of fabrication and unprecedented falsification. Doing
so, there spread an undercurrent of the need to revisit and restructure the roles,
expectations, and potential of women in the Victorian society. This was achieved by
unmasking the duplicity of women like Lady Audley and phoebe Marks, who,
trained in the social norms of their surrounding, managed to successfully pull the
chameleonic wool over the eyes of men and women alike without actually aspiring to
the incredibly bolstered ideals. Around the same time as the sensation novels became
a major hit, there was seen a significant rise in the newspaper publications of heinous
crimes unfolding in domestic settings making the Victorian nightmare come true.
Stories of atrocious crimes and skeletons in the closet of the respectable English
gentry, a thing unimaginable at one time, became somewhat of an expected
occurrence. So that while the Victorian reader was understandably aghast at some of
the sexual and moral transgressions that the genre so openly exploited and critics
such as Robert Buchanan could not hide their disdain over this appeal “not to the

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sympathies of the educated few, but those of the general public” (136), the latent
understanding of these crimes actually unfolding in the middle and upper-class
dining rooms was what kept the public glued to these novels (Pykett 48).

The narrative of the madwoman in the attic came to be replaced with the
narrative of the vengeful and spiteful woman who was too clever for her own good
and paid the price for her higher intelligence with feats of absolute cunning.
However, it would be a blatant dismissal to the more feminist interpretations of
Braddon’s novels to simply suggest that the author opposed the notion of greater
female intellect by posing them as innately cunning and only capable of using their
astounding wits to pull off immoral acts. Far from it, Braddon only seems to be
preaching the cause of finding a middle-ground for women of lower classes to make
their way into society with dignity and self-sustenance.

To prove that Braddon was neither critical of, nor apologetic for some
women’s greater intellectual capacity and ambitious derive could be seen in the
persons of two other important characters in the novel: Alicia Audley and Clara
Talboys. The first of the two, Alicia Audley is the headstrong, educated, and self-
driven daughter of Michael Audley from his first marriage. Unfortunately for Alicia,
most of her traits are apprised in the novel through the eyes of Robert Audley who
ostensibly disapproves of Alicia’s assertive and dominant force. Robert, himself
lethargic and devoid of purpose for the greater half of the novel, shies miserably
from the idea of courting Alicia who has taken an obvious liking to her cousin. What,
however, is noteworthy in Braddon’s writing is that she does not cave into the
satisfaction-inducing trope of seeing a shrewd woman gets tamed by a man. Alicia is
possibly aware of her overbearing force that unhinges Robert in ways he cannot
iterate, but she makes almost no effort to change these traits in order to make herself
a more suitable and appreciable partner for Robert. In this way, she mirrors the force
of characters such as Margaret Hale and Jane Eyre who denounce the idea or even
possibility of undergoing a major change of character or ideology in order to court
approval of their male counterparts. It’s a refreshing notion of mutual regard for the
temperament of the other without skewing the expectations of changing oneself in
favour of a particular sex. Alicia Audley, with her definitive stance and forward-
thinking gladly lands herself Sir Harry Towers after realizing that her personality is
as unsuitable for Robert Audley as his lethargy and snobbery are for her. Instead of

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entering into a grueling struggle of changing one another, the characters display a
mature recognition of the differences between them and opt out of unnecessary strife.

But it is precisely Alicia’s moral strength and emotional equilibrium that

prevents her from succumbing to the disappointment of not having married her first
choice. In the words of Sir Harry Towers, Alicia Audley is a “gal who knows what
she is talking about” (Braddon 200).

On the other hand, Clara Talboys assumes in the novel the classic position of
the “angel in the house.” As the daughter of the eccentric Mr. Harcourt Talboys and
sister of the whimsical George Talboys, Clara’s role is that of a peacemaker. In her
own words, Clara has always traversed a precarious route of indulging the
idiosyncrasies of her father and the dismissal of the latter by her brother. It’s clear
that to Clara and women like her, their chief role is in assuaging the flaring tempers
of their male counterparts within the house. Clara then becomes the epitome of the
female sacrifice spoken of in the earlier chapters. Like Margaret Hale, who must
suppress her own emotional fatigue in order to relieve her family of the same, Clara
Talboys has learnt to suppress the anxiety emanating from having to straddle the
unwarranted course of settling the father/son animosity. Clara’s figure is a close
idealization of female aptitude that works its way by ensuring that it doesn’t
ostensibly override the patriarchal beliefs. Unlike her brother Robert, who outwardly
and blatantly disregards his father idiosyncratically controlling and oppressive
manners, Clara Talboys learns to devour her suffering within herself but has the
presence of mind to initiate a silent rebellion of sort. Clara Talboys is the amicable
product of the upper class English cultural apogee that prides itself on the regulated
and nicely managed roles of males and females.

As the head of the family, Clara’s father has the role of a patriarch. Robert,
who transgresses his authority, suffers visibly. In fact, one may say his suffering is
almost endless, for despite being able to raise a fortune and ensuring his financial
position in the Victorian society, he’d live as somewhat of an emasculated man,
shunned first by his father as completely inept to carry his legacy, thus the
disinheritance, and then by the desertion of his wife. This emasculated identity, more
than anything, is what governs his eventual decision to relocate outside of England.
The absence of her brother further brings the burden of ensuring a functional family
down on Clara’s shoulders. She must silently approbate her father for his oppressive

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administration within the family but likewise stay by his side to assuage the wound
inflicted from a son’s disappointment. Clara cannot make a show of her own remorse
for various reasons. Unlike Robert, who even if scrapped off from all inheritance, is
still in a position to earn a livelihood for himself, Clara would be left completely
destitute were she to go against the unflinching rules of her father’s establishment.
Clara is the quintessential representation of women who are “the ultimate model of
maternal devotion and silent submissiveness” (King 10).

We must bear in mind that in depicting the plight of women, sensation novels
serve differently from the other genres analysed earlier, especially the
Bildungsroman. The latter, due to its innately embedded themes of self-help and
admiration of a life of trials and tribulations, gives one more room to experiment
with their liberties. In the sensation novels, however, it is precisely when they tend to
tamper with their liberties that the entire edifice of their economic and social status
comes plummeting down. So, while Jane Eyre escaped from the psychological and
physical abuse of the Reeds in the name of starting the quintessential bildung journey
of self-help, Clara Talboys is left more restricted in a novel that thrives on exploiting
the individualistic ventures of females regardless of how seemingly innocent they
are.

Clara’s position is especially precarious for two reasons. Escaping from the
holds of the Talboys establishment is unlikely to bring her any prominent relief
unlike Jane Eyre. Not only was Jane Eyre without fortune, being an adopted and
unwanted child in the family, she barely had a reason to want to profess gratitude or
loyalty to her unwilling benefactress. While here, Clara Talboys is tied to the oath of
loyalty on account of the very filial relationship she bears with her own benefactor:
the relationship of a father and daughter. It does cast the Victorian order in a dubious
light when we notice that a daughter’s obvious acrimony against the repressive
regime of her father would fail to yield her any substantial degree of favour from the
audience. Much better for her to imbibe her suffering as a natural state of her
existence than to take matters in her own hands, unlike her foil Lady Audley.
Moreover, coming from a genteel upper-class family, it wouldn’t serve her the
honour to work as a governess, the only relatively noble profession reserved for
women in those days. Choosing one such route would have cast her in a worse state
because women who took up jobs as governesses seeking refuge under middle class

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shelter appeared to reflect the failure of the fathers or husbands to accommodate the
female subjects of their family. Doing so, would have been considered a greater
moral transgression than anything her brother committed. So despite the growing
malcontent over her family’s affairs she chooses to “stifle” and “dwarf” any
mounting agony. While trying to convince Robert Audley to continue his pursuit of
the person responsible for her brother’s disappearance, Clara Talboys reveals the
matters of her heart to her interlocutor in clear terms.

I have grown up in an atmosphere of suppression," she said, quietly; "I have

stifled and dwarfed the natural feelings of my heart, until they have become
unnatural in their intensity; I have been allowed neither friends nor lovers.
My mother died when I was very young. My father has always been to me
what you saw him to-day. I have had no one but my brother. All the love that
my heart can hold has been centered upon him. Do you wonder, then, that
when I hear that his young life has been ended by the hand of treachery, that I
wish to see vengeance done upon the traitor? Oh, my God," she cried,
suddenly clasping her hands, and looking up at the cold winter sky, "lead me
to the murderer of my brother, and let mine be the hand to avenge his
untimely death (Braddon 310).

This passionate outburst from Clara Talboys is quite reminiscent of Lady

Audley’s fervour who’s had, by now, plenty of passionate speeches of her own. This
brings us an interesting opportunity to compare and contrast these two protagonists
of the sensation novel as a foil to each other and reflection of the moral opprobriums
and validations prevalent in the Victorian times.

In her sheer determination and thirst for blood and vengeance, Clara Talboys
is hardly different from Lady Audley who’s shown similar symptoms of
uncontrollable passions and thirst for drastic measures of vengeance. However, the
response of both the writer as well as the characters is completely different. When
Clara Talboys makes the passionate request of assuming the garb of an avenger,
Robert Audley betrays nothing but the fondest emotions for the urge and degree of
love she reserves for her brother.

Robert Audley stood looking at her with awe-stricken admiration. Her beauty
was elevated into sublimity by the intensity of her suppressed passion. She
was different to all other women that he had ever seen. His cousin was pretty,
his uncle's wife was lovely, but Clara Talboys was beautiful. Niobe's face,
sublimated by sorrow, could scarcely have been more purely classical than
hers. Even her dress, puritan in its gray simplicity, became her beauty better
than a more beautiful dress would have become a less beautiful woman
(Braddon 311).

It owes to the cunning of a gifted writer such as Braddon to give to the

outbursts of women’s unbridled emotions whatever mould she deems fit for them to

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assume. Clara Talboys, is oblivious to her brother’s role in bringing about his
eventual fate. But a reader cannot, given a fair sense of judgment on their part,
vindicate George Talboys from any responsibility whatsoever. It wouldn’t do to have
one’s complete sympathies for a deserter and it appears that Braddon did not mean it
to be so. In fact, in leaving behind her child and acquiring a new trade for herself,
Lucy Talboys, now Lady Audley, was not completely different form her husband.
She is no more a deserter, an adventurer, and an idealist than he is. But while the
social conditioning grooms one to be more acceptable of a man absconding from
their primary duties, this is clearly not the case for a woman. Even when it is obvious
that Lady Audley has not completely deserted her child. She secretly funds a decent
living for her baby and her father from the proceeds of the Audley estate, reserves a
clipping of the baby’s yellow lock and a little dainty shoe, and checks up on the
estate of her prior family occasionally.

Although the primary antagonist of the novel, there are several scenes that
cast Lady Audley in a more pitiful light making her not only an embodiment of
remorseless villainy but a representation of women jilted by tribulations of time. The
scene where Luke Marks and Phoebe comes across the relics of her baby is one such
strongly emotive scene of Lady Audley’s vulnerability and maternal humanity that
serve to cast her in a lenient light. Critic Andrew Mangham performed an interesting
analysis of the scene where Phoebe allows her then boyfriend Luke Marks inside
Lady Audley’s private chamber and probe around her possessions. Mangham senses
a metaphoric sexual undertone to this violation.

He went on cutting and chopping at a rude handle he was fashioning to the

stake. […] ‘It’s a mortal dull place, P hoebe’, he said. […] ‘I’ve heard tell of
a murder that was done here in old times’. ‘There are murders enough in
these times, as to that, Luke’, answered the girl. […Luke] uttered a cry of
wonder when he saw the ornaments glittering on white satin cushions. He
wanted to handle the delicate jewels; to pull them about and find out their
mercantile value. […] ‘What’s this?’ he asked presently, pointing to a brass
knob in the framework of the boxHe pushed it as he spoke, and a secret
drawer, lined with velvet, flew out of the casket. […] There was not much in
it; neither gold nor gems; only a baby’s little worsted shoe rolled up in a piece
of paper, and a tiny lock of pale and silky yellow hair, evidently taken from a
baby’s head. Phoebe’s grey eyes dilated as she examined the little packet.
[…] I’d rather have this than the diamond bracelet you would have liked to
take’, she answered; ‘you shall have the public-house, Luke’ (Braddon 45).

According to Mangham’s intense analysis, on one hand the scene is evocative

of a violent penetration of a woman’s privacy. He declares that the scene has been

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characterized with “Luke as a penetrating force and Lady Audley’s possessions as
various parts of the female sexual body…The jewelry box produces tokens
belonging to a baby and reflects, crudely, how the female sexual organs produce
infants” (102). There is additionally the imagery of death and murders surrounding
the scene. According to Mangham, as Phoebe and Luke continue to talk of murder
past and present and alternate the conversation with the sighting of the baby’s shoe
and hair-clippings, the scene must have evoked imageries of “infanticide and child
mortality” (92) thereby linking female sexuality to death and morbidness. At the
same time, however, there may be a parallel understanding of this scene and its
repercussions on both the plot of the novel later and reader’s sympathies.

While the scene is definitely redolent of the imageries of death and grief, it is
not exactly clear how they are tied to female sexuality other than the slow nit-picking
of certain suggestive terms. Mangham likens the glass knob on the box framework to
the female genitalia, the baby shoe and hair a crude reminiscence of the female
organs that are responsible for the birth of the child, etc. (Braddon 45). But this once
again seems to take an andro-centric point of view of a woman’s private chambers
and all of its associations. The truth of the matter is that most readers would be less
aware of the sexual undertones of the passage that directly link female sexuality with
death and destruction but to woman’s maternal instinct to keep close a relic of her
baby when the actual baby must be kept away. Other than evocative of the Lady
Audley’s bigamy, the scene is also rife with innocent and extremely vulnerable
images of an infant’s possession that have obviously come into the wrong hand. So
while one may describe the scene as portending the doom that must sooner or later
result from female transgressions, it can also be interpreted as suggesting the doom
that results from a forceful penetration and exposition of a woman’s privacy. In
addition, the vulnerable images cast a softer light of a still intact maternal attachment
within Lady Audley so easily gleaned over due to the enormity of her crime. The
scene with Luke Mars and Phoebe exploring the secret possessions of Lady Audley
is one of the many that, ironically, casts Lady Audley in a different light: as a mother
and now a vulnerable woman under the power of a dangerous man whose mercenary
designs will not stop from blackmailing her with the exposition of her secrets.

In fact, Lady Audley seems to have been as much under the control and
power of the various men about her as she seems to influence them. For the longest

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time, critics, such as Andrew Mangham, Richard Fantina, and Deborah Wynn, have
dissected Lady Audley’s character as one of extreme cunning, “a childlike murdress”
(Wynne 4), “capabale of assuming a new identity at a moment’s notice” (Wynne 59).
She seems to have the ability to lure and beguile almost whoever chances to set his
eyes on her. This is especially true of her male counterparts. For most critics or
readers, the story of Lady Audley is perhaps the story of an extremely vile woman
ready to go whatever lengths it requires her to clinch a social status and ambition that
someone of her stature does not have a right to. Her story is that of luring into her
trap first a naïve but genteel George Talboys in the hope of securing for herself some
kind of financial standing. When that scheme fails, she steps towards her next victim,
this time the reverential Mr. Audley of the great and mysterious Audley
establishment. And finally, when the threat of exposure becomes too palpable owing
to the relentless bout of Mr. Robert Audley, she tries once again to dupe him into
believing her innocence and at one point tries to rid herself of him via false
allegations of his unwanted advances.

Except that Lady Audley’s story, although true, is hardly complete. A one-
sided focus on the number of her male victims while completely gleaning over her
own miseries is too cruel and unfair a refusal of her plight. A gynocritical
examination of the lady shows her as much to be a victim of predominantly female-
exclusive culture that is set to derive any woman of ambition to insane lengths. As
researcher Jill Matus puts in her study, Lady Audley’s first and major crime was the
ascension to a social status that her legitimate means did not ascribe to her (350). In
order to acquire this status, Lady Audley grabs her chance at whatever legitimate or
illegitimate opportunity that she can avail. She is “moral but sane” which is not the
same as moral insanity (Matus 350). Compound this with egregious financial
circumstances and you get a recipe for total moral breakdown. But Lady Audley
commands the reader’s sympathies in other ways.

4.2. Lady Audley as a Perpetrator and a Victim

During her confession, Lady Audley speaks of the insane humiliations and
bouts of deprivation that she as the daughter of a debauched veteran soldier suffered.
She reveals the episodes of poverty and destitution that she suffered before coming
to Audley Court and the anguish that followed her after. Hearing her account of the
earlier tribulations and the faint hope of one day escaping the miseries that come
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with poverty, readers are bound to sympathize with her fate and lessen their
judgment on her other moral and sexual transgressions. The episode of her
confession in a way comes as a commentary that makes sense of a woman’s capacity
to commit crimes that, to the Victorians, went far beyond her capacity. By unraveling
the episodes that guide and govern the later course of actions, Braddon tries to make
sense of an apparently noble woman’s waywardness. This was important because
one of the premises of the sensational genre was to make sense of the social and
moral deviations in women. Many writers claimed to have derived the genre out of a
successful collusion of gothic and realism.

Deborah Wynne, in her book, The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family
Magazine speaks of the precarious standpoint taken by many writers of the sensation
fiction that was seen as alarming by the public. These writers appeared to make an
“attempt to align the novel (by now well established as a legitimate art form) with
journalism, particularly the sensationalism of the popular penny press” (Deborah 5)

Once actual crimes and misdemeanors had received initial exposure in the
newspapers, sensation writers reworked them, suitably disguised and
embellished, into their fictional plots. The fact that so many sensation novels
were serialized in magazines appeared to confirm a link between middle-class
literary tastes and the working class periodical press (Wynne 6).

Wynne noticed a marked relationship between the use of real-life sensations

and the criminality of females. Many novels from this genre sensationalize deviance
in women who come from respectable well-to-do families. These women were
modeled after the image of figures such as Madeleine Smith (a women of genteel
roots who was charged with poisoning her lover), Constance Kent (the notorious
woman from middle-class gentry who confessed to taking away the life of her young
brother) and Madame Rachel Leverson (the known beautician from London who was
accused and imprisoned for brothel-keeping and blackmail) (Wynne 109). In a letter
written to Edward Lytton, Braddon herself admitted to diving into the old catalogues
of Newgate (a book keeping a record of England’s worst criminals) to come upon
substance for her novels (Wynne 1)

Critic H.L. Mansel was similarly and disdainfully suspicious of the genre’s
obscure references to real life crimes, scandals, and tragedies in his article “Sensation
Novels” in the “Quarterly Review”. It riled the critic greatly that the novel took for
its muse the contemporary events and newspaper reports. His primary argument

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hinged around the fact that this rueful collusion of middle-class entertainment with
working class press was pandering to base tastes. To Mansel, it appeared that the
Sensation novel was targeted towards readers whose “ravenous appetite for carrion,
this vulture-like instinct which smells out the newest mass of social corruption, and
hurries to devour the loathsome dainty” (487). This collusion between sensation
novels and realism brought a great shock to the rising bourgeois who already
appeared to be suffering “from a nervous' debilitation which the genteel classes,
forced to keep up with the `frantic' pace of modern urban life, were believed to be
experiencing” (Wynne 7). Critic W.E. Houghton in The Victorian Frame of Mind
quotes Arthur Helps who went so far as suggesting putting up a statue to “worry”
given how predominantly this trait was rife and how it came to symbolize “the marks
of haste, anxiety, and agitation” (61). Right at the height of this fever pitch came
along the works of Braddon who unashamedly and abrasively proclaimed her novels
to be steeped in the daily scandals of the English bourgeois.

Andrew Mangham quotes an extract from the letter written by Braddon to her
friend and supervisor Edward Bulwer-Lytton and the content makes it clear that
Braddon had various reasons to seek inspiration from realistic but extreme events.
She states,

I am racking my own brain – or trying to rack it – in search of a rag of plot

whereon to hang three volumes of words. The worst part of the business is
that the books with murders in them – Lady A. & H. Dunbar – the whole
interest concentering [sic] in the murder – sell better than any others, & the
critics say Thou shalt do no murder. However, I think this time I shall once
more make my dip in the lucky bag of the Newgate Calendar (Mangham 87).

At another time in her letters, Braddon stated that so long as the sensation
novels continues to sell preferably, and she remained in need of financial assistance,
she’ll continue to exploit the titillating scope of the genre for lucrative purposes.
Once free of the financial toll and having carved a name for herself as an established
novelist, she’d defer to the more classic and genteel writing (qtd. in Wolff 10). It is
clear that Braddon saw two main incentives in using the spice of sensationalism in
her works: to sell her works and to reflect upon those sections, parts, and events of
the Victorian culture that the society would rather they remained obscure instead of
treating them to their root causes and look for long-term healing.

The sensation novels were therefore considered an extension of realism. And

as such writers would go through great lengths to prove highly outrageous plots as

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probable. Examples would be quoted by them to prove how at such and such a time
real-life figures engaged in similar criminal activities. The character of Lady Audley
herself appears to have been inspired by similar figures of history. The Central
Criminal Court in 1863 found itself recording the story of Mary Payne who slit the
throat of her baby due to strains of motherhood. Even more preposterous than our
fictional Lady Audley, she chooses to end her life by throwing herself from the
balcony. Then there is Ms. Madeleine Smith, who, when asked why she possessed
the arsenic used to poison her lover, replied that she used it to improve her
complexion (Wynne 110). There have been instances in the novel, where Lady
Audley too, caught in seemingly innocent preoccupations, betrayed undertones of
perfidy and some sinister conspiracy brewing. Here is one such example of Lady
Audley engaged in a seemingly innocuous engagement rendered more and more
obscure in its effects as Braddon continues to elaborate.

Surely a pretty woman never looks prettier than when making tea. The most
feminine and most domestic of all occupations … a witchery to her every
glance. The floating mists from the boiling liquid in which she infuses the
soothing herbs; whose secrets are known to her alone…. At the tea-table she
reigns omnipotent, unapproachable (Braddon 343).

The passage is one of many that draws sensationally on home being a

feminine dominion, but its supervision under the female care does not automatically
imply sanctity, safety, or purity of purpose. The fact that crimes under the garb of
seeming innocence were already becoming rampant produces the exact mix of
Gothic and realism that sent shockwaves down many and served to understand and
reevaluate public and private spheres.

Undoubtedly, the blend of realism and sensation allowed Braddon and other
writers of Sensational fiction a chance to use entertainment with social education.
Both Braddon and in much greater measure Read, were sympathetic to the
discriminating plight of female victims whose rights were often undermined under
the guise of treating their inherent insanity or weakness of disposition. While Read
was ostensibly more tolerant of female transgressions and suffered great criticism for
what appeared like his lack of moral judgement, Braddon had been operating in a
more covert manner. This was important because as a woman writer of the
sensational fiction, Braddon had already come under the scathing criticism of the
Victorian critics who did not approve of women speaking on subjects that were
considered outside of their appropriated scope (Pykett 33). Matters such as bigamy,

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the conversations of men in exclusively male settings, and murders were considered
subjects too preposterous to be engaged into by female writers of fiction (Fantina 24-
27). It makes sense that Braddon would ostensibly condemn Lady Audley for her
violent transgressions, gruesome secret, and unmistakable cunning. But while she
does so, it is almost always compounded with some sort of justification.

Her eager marriage to George Talboys has been justified on account of her
earlier poverty and state of sheer destitution. There was nothing in her demeanor or
in the reflections of Talboys, as he was happily aboard the ship heading back to
England, that betrayed a disagreeable feeling of aversion for her bad ways. After
successfully finding his fortune in Australia, George wastes no time in boarding the
ship back to his wife. While his eagerness to unite with his wife and family suggests
that regardless of the temporary desertion, he had the family’s best interest and
remained a faithful husband in his own right, it also reflects on the goodness of Lucy
Talboys (Lady Audley) as a wife. It is obvious that before the abandonment, Lady
Audley did not give any reason, in the capacity of a spouse, for George Talboys to
persist in his abandonment. On the contrary, George remembers her as his “gentle,
innocent, loving little wife” (Braddon 26) and subsequently makes an admission of
his desertion. His account should surely dispel a certain degree of alarm and disgust
over Lucy Talboys’s eventual mechanism to cope with the abandonment. To make
matters worse, Lucy was at the time a mother of an infant and without any financial
support.

While Braddon never makes a case of Lucy Talboys’ despair, at least not in
her own narration of the woman’s career in housewifery, George’s incessant
infantilization of his wife seems to be something of a muted discourse based around
the haplessness of a woman in such a perilous situation. Readers cannot denounce
the bigamy of a woman with the same ferocity when she brings with her a rueful
story of abandonment without any hope of her husband’s return and a social cul-de-
sac that denied woman most of the respectable means to sustain herself or her family.
We likewise see a muted discourse on the part of the author that accompanies Lady
Audley along every course of her transactions. This is important because the entire
edifice of the sensation novel is predicated on what has been described as her
madness, mono-mania or moral insanity. In hindsight, Lady Audley seemed to have
been motivated by what appeared a social and financial cul-de-sac. What her gender

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truly determined for her was not a biological and mental frailty, but social and
economic strictures. As researcher Jill Matus puts it, her truly real crime was to not
choose to settle with these limitations (Matus 335).

If Lady Audley’s marriage to Mr. Audley was backed exclusively by

financial reasons, her redemption here lies in the fact that she does not keep this a
secret from her about-to-be-husband. When proposed by Sir Audley, Lady Audley
makes it clear to her suitor that she is not in a position to put the proposal down, and
that this acceptance had less to do with love and more to do with her determination to
avoid the trauma emerging from destitution in the past. One cannot make the
argument of Lady Audley’s duplicity in marriage with Sir Audley, when she made it
clear, to her own husband first and foremost, that her reasons for marriage were more
economic than emotional. And it was completely up to Sir Audley to take her as his
wife despite knowing where her affections actually lay. It is equally true, that if it
were not for Robert Audley’s interventions and her eventual subjection to the threat
of getting exposed, Lady Audley might have continued to live as a docile and
dedicated wife and mistress of the Audley estate. After Robert’s interventions,
however, Lady Audley was subjected to incessant threats from around three pursuers
who all happened to be male and therefore quite devoid of any real understanding or
sympathy for her predicament. The three pursuers happened to be the detective
Robert Audley, her husband who made a sudden return into her life George Talboys,
and her blackmailer Luke Marks.

Her only confidante is her servant Phoebe, while the only other women,
Alicia Audley and Clara Talboys, who possess any considerable depth of character
remain incapable of extending sympathy to the nature of her circumstances, her
crime and the due punishment on account of the class divide, driving home the fact
that even within the female culture, questions of class remain as significant as in the
general culture and it is one of the determinants for understanding the ways,
motivations and natures of women. But Phoebe Marks, having come from a working
class, is a different story altogether. Lady Audley’s well-planned and almost
perfectly executed duplicity could not have been brought about without her close ally
and companion Phoebe Marks. Phoebe is one woman in whom Lady Audley has
confided her most atrocious secrets. Her relationship with the female servant almost
parallels that between Margaret and Bessy Higgins. On several occasions, Phoebe

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becomes Lady Audley’s emotional bulwark and partner in crime. Like Lady Audley,
Phoebe bears a promising comportment and doesn’t appear weak of nature. Robert
Audley surmises as much when he chances to run into her at her husband’s inn.
“That…is a woman who could keep a secret” (Braddon 208), says Robert to himself
and adding later that it would take a “clever lawyer to bother her in a cross-
examination” (Braddon 210). Once again the woman who possesses the excellent
wits that can potentially outsmart a clever lawyer in the courtroom is portrayed as a
threat to the social and moral well-being of the society. She is depicted as stringent
and inflexible. The type that the Victorian society perhaps found the most
problematic. Clever and duplicitous, Phoebe Marks is a person who is “silent and
self-constrained”, taking “no color from the outer world” (Braddon 208). It is
imperative to note that Phoebe’s stringency and self-containment are a threat to the
Victorian social structures created for women because they immunize her from the
moral disciplining that the Victorian women were subjected to.

Clara Talboys, on the other hand, serves as a foil to Lady Audley and it
would do the study some good to draw some parallels between the two women for
what insights it may give regarding the prescribed roles of women. On one hand the
novel features Clara, the silent sufferer, the angel in the house, and the source of that
compassionate influence which the Victorian novels would go to great lengths to
idealize, uplift, and document. Clara Talboys is drawn somewhat in the image of
Virgin Mary, emblem of self-sacrifice and female nurturing. She is tasked with
ensuring the machinery of the house, no matter how rusty with outdated and
oppressive administrations, keeps running. What is most fascinating is the effect
Clara has on Robert Audley. What many may find exaggerated when compared with
the standards of realism, Robert’s meeting with Clara casts a spell of complete
character alteration upon him. Once incriminated always for leading a life rife with
the genteel class’s worst attributes: lethargy, smugness, and purposelessness that
comes with too much privilege, Robert Audley instantly transforms into a man of
action. And it’s Clara Talboys who brings about this change in him within a single
meeting when the year-long service of Robert’s cousin Alicia could bear no fruit.
And yet, the qualities in Clara that Robert so expediently detected and seemed to
have fallen for were not very different than those exhibited by Alicia Audley. Why
then, one must wonder, should one woman be able to goad a change of heart the likes

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of which other women could never bring about? The writer recalls Clara’s effect on
Robert in the following way.

…but Clara Talboys was beautiful. Niobe's face, sublimated by sorrow, could
scarcely have been more purely classical than hers. …"Miss Talboys," said
Robert, after a pause, "your brother shall not be unavenged. He shall not be
forgotten. I do not think that any professional aid which you could procure
would lead you as surely to the secret of this mystery as I can lead you….She
left him half bewildered by the passionate energy of her manner, and the
noble beauty of her face (Braddon 310).

It is unlikely that it is beauty alone that moves Robert Audley so

disproportionately. If it were so, Robert would have been taken by her at first sight.
But it is only after she goes into long and passionate speeches about finding the
woman responsible for her brother’s disappearance and leaving no stones unturned in
this pursuit that Robert is suddenly receptive to her charms. Clara directly implores
Robert to lead her “to the murderer of my brother, and let mine be the hand to avenge
his untimely death.” Her emotions in this case are not any less wild than those of
lady Audley for having already rendered similarly wild desires for execution. But
where they verge on signs of moral insanity and monomania in Lady Audley, they
become perfectly understandable, even noble in Clara Talboys. Moreover, it is
unlikely to believe that most readers would dispute Braddon’s assessment of Clara’s
nobility.

Lady Audley herself seems to be a woman of the same metal as her, living
similar emotions of vengeance on her enemies and ready to pay any price in order to
suit her desires. But while these traits, other than being classified as immoral come to
be labeled as symptoms of her insanity, the same come to be celebrated in Clara
Talboys. Braddon’s novel is rife with passionate woman. Alicia is passionate in
choosing a husband of substance and not just settle. Her passions, however, are
simply seen as the whims of a woman too headstrong for her own good. Clara
Talboys on the other hand is suffering from the agony and fire of vengeance but her
passions are understandably treated with sympathy making her both beautiful and
noble, the reincarnation of Niobe. Lucy Audley’s desperate desire to escape poverty
and the accompanying shame and her subsequent rage over having found herself the
victim of various male’s relentless pursuit of hers classify her insane. There is then
an undertone of the Victorian era’s hypocrisy when it came to the treatment of
women’s roles, feelings, and ambitions. Earlier it was described how the Victorian

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society in general was distasteful of female passion. They seemed to be emanating
from bodily malfunction and were often discarded from being steeped in
irrationality. Braddon’s female characters reveal in their own ways how that is often
not the case.

Each of the female character populating the novel exhibits a certain trait of
defiance and to a certain extent there is a justification for each one of their actions
regardless of whether they are classified as morally insane, headstrong, or beautifully
noble. Alicia’s aggression against Robert’s lethargy is justified in the light of
Robert’s self-admission of this trait of weakness in him. What then lends weight to
Alicia’s perpetual berating of Robert’s ways, his lack of any practical work and real
pre-occupation for the exercise of the mind is that every time Robert is met with
these allegations from Alicia, he is genuinely met with compunction. Robert’s
awareness of his professional inaptitude is what ultimately saves Alicia from the
harsh criticism that would otherwise come to her for her passionate outbursts and
outspoken ways. The readers are further given the assurance of another male
counterpart, the noble and hopeful suitor Sir Harry Towers, who admires Alicia’s
qualities of social awareness and maturity deeming them to be the right
constituencies for a woman of caliber. Male approval then becomes the prerequisite
that gives validation and legitimacy to the unconventionally meddlesome ways of
women like Alicia. This is a subtle but important message that undercuts the
apparent themes of the novel. Even notions of madness in women had come to be
exclusively defined and treated by men during the later half of the nineteenth
century. Showalter notes that “at the same time as doctors established a monopoly on
the treatment of the insane, women were denied access to medical education….
Matrons, female nurses, and attendants… were regarded as less reliable” and “any
effort to equalize their status encountered intense opposition” (Showalter 54).

It was undoubtedly the case for women to be understood for their actions,
feelings, and emotions based on how they were exclusively perceived by the men
around them not only within their own family but also in the important social
institutions that defined legitimate passions against bouts of insanity. This is one
reason why Clara’s adamant insistence on avenging the death of her brother is cast in
a completely different light. In her case, the person to determine the nature and origin
of her grief and anger was cast in a similar predicament as hers. Robert Audley was

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as keen on finding the murderer as Clara. With that, the two become allies with the
same goal in mind. He is obviously not threatened by Clara’s rage, nor is he the
recipient for it. Seeing Clara so fraught with grief and riled with the speech of
vengeance gives Robert a reason to continue his expedition, something that he had
lately been inclined to call off seeing the possible repercussions the discovery would
have on the family name. But once goaded by the tormented mind and heart of
George’s sister, no scruples about family, name, or reputation can keep him from
exposing the truth.

So while Clara is likened to Niobe for her passions of rage and vengeance,
Lady Audley’s crime was as much embedded in the fact that she failed to find a male
endorsement for her actions from the beginning as much as the actual series of
actions by her.

This is where the question of sexual and moral policing of women by men
comes in. The sensation novel indeed depicts how women, despite their cunning and
wit, run a greater risk of getting policed and controlled than their male counterparts
due to the many social cul-de-sacs designed for them while the same restrictions also
bring greater opportunities for male exploits.

4.3. Female Sexuality and Male Exploits in the Sensation Novel

In the sensation novel, female sexuality is invariably linked to the commercial

male exploits. As stated earlier, in a way Lucy is exploited by at least three men that
she voluntarily and involuntarily surrounds herself. More often than not, these
exploits have a sexual undertone. The first of these is George Talboys. Although
Lady Audley’s exploitation by George is more subtle and really requires one to look
beyond conventional ways of looking at the question of gender roles and
abandonment, George’s actions still remained commercially motivated and
performed at her expense. Talking to a fellow passenger on the ship, George narrates
how it was three years ago that he had “deserted” his wife leaving behind nothing
more than a “few blotted lines” (Braddon 26) explaining why her faithful husband
was leaving her. Despite the abandonment, he hoped to be received by his wife upon
his arrival in England without any suggestion of a possibly induced acrimony. Lady
Audley may have committed the crime of bigamy in his absence, but it must be
unfair to think that she would sit around waiting and hoping that her husband, now

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off to another continent in the pursuit of something that was highly unlikely to
happen, would return to her miraculously someday brining all the fortune she could
hope for.

In fact, George Talboys’ return after finding his fortune is already one of the
biggest twists in the novel’s plot although this is where the story only begins
unfolding. Right from the onset of the plot, the reader is possessed by a subtle feeling
that Lady Audley is in fact the wife of George and now that the husband has returned
his past actions of abandonment will cease to matter in any significant way leaving
Lady Audley in a very difficult position. Hence, there is hardly any talk of why Lady
Audley would commit the crime of bigamy in the first place by characters who are
after the relentless pursuit of hers. George’s rendezvous in Australia is one of the
first instances of male commercial exploits that takes place at the expense of women.
George is easily able to justify his abandonment in the name of saving his family
from a financial predicament, but does not realize that had he not lucked out, like the
many in a similar pursuit as his, his desertion would have left and for some time did
leave, his wife in extreme financial duress, to escape which, she would have had to
go to great lengths of tragedy and humiliation. Had Lady Audley chosen to suffer so,
instead of taking on a benefactor in the guise of a second husband, the woman would
have been both the object of everyone’s pity and one of the truest specimens of
femininity. When suffering in silence becomes the primary role ascribed to a woman,
her defiance and rejection of such a fate becomes a transgression in its own right.
Nevertheless, as Richard Fantina puts it, it is clear that Braddon created Lady
Audley’s character “to be admired” to a certain degree (Fantina 129).

Historically, women who showed defiance in matters of social, economic or

sexual oppression were treated as mentally unstable by mostly the male dominated
social institutions around her condemning her to treatment for insanity in mental
institutions that were again dominated by the men. In his book The Victorian
Sensational Fiction, Richard Fantina depicts how laws and legislation were
customarily designed to suppress the working class, the brunt of which eventually
fell on the women. He writes

…The new legislation emerged out of sociological studies by Henry Mayhew

and, earlier, G.C. Stonestreet and became a weapon used primarily against the
working classes. One need only note the Criminal Law Amendment Bill of
1885. Labeled as “an Act to make further provision for the Protection of
Women and Girls, the suppression of brothels, and other purposes,” the bill
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 continued a trend begun with the Offences Against the Person Act of 1861
and the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869, all of which
imposed new penalties for specific sexual offences including abortion,
bigamy, prostitution, and male homosexuality, or any “gross indecency”
whether “private or public.” (Fantina 3).

In other words, while the transgressions of the working class were openly and
publicly reprimanded and punished, this was not the case for the rich. The study
titled Enclosure Acts: Framing Women's Bodies in Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret
by Marlene Tromp, Pamela K. Gilbert, Aeron Haynier depict how, ironically, public
display and social enclosures went hand-in-hand in the Victorian era amongst the
genteel classes. On one hand, it was important to display the intrinsic wealth of the
establishment by holding public gathering at the house, loading the private chambers
of the rich houses with the most exquisite finery available and parading the inmates
of the house as perfectly in charge and control of a cabal of servants that overlooked
the management of the house. These public gatherings, ostensibly expensive
decorations, and a string of servants was a way for the upper classes to profess
dominance and power but the paradox arrived when women were required to
somehow remain private despite the apparent public show of wealth and prestige.
According to Elizabeth Langland, while the house, the apparent symbol of safety and
enclosure became a public site, it was women’s bodies that became the site of
enclosure (Langland 8). This took place by undermining their social, sexual,
economic and moral autonomy. In the previous analysis on the industrial novel, it
was explained how working class women enjoyed greater social and sexual
autonomy than woman from the upper classes. Seeking an independent lifestyle and
possessing unconventional views on marriage, bachelorhood, and love were treated
as off-limits much more for privileged women than women form the working
classes. Consequently, it was the working classes that came under fire for tarnishing
the respectability of the English Bourgeois.

Richard Nemesvari in his essay, “‘Judged by a Purely Literary Standard’:

Sensation Fiction, Horizons of Expectation, and the Generic Construction of
Victorian Realism”, notes how in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Victorian
novel was on the verge of “an epistemological crisis” (15). This was the time when
the bourgeois emerged as the dominant class and began with a carefully construed
system of moral, permissible, and non-permissible fiction groping towards ways of
accurately and artistically depicting themselves in literature. For the middle class, the

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bourgeois became the self-proclaimed carriers of the English values that served as an
apogee of civilization. Then initiated a process of convincing both others as well as
their own selves of their superiority in art and literature to communities from other
civilizations past and present, and their immediate predecessor in the eighteenth
century. Their followed a strict policing and regulation of the arts. For the bourgeois,
the new realism detailing lives with an adequate amount of censorship became the
highest form of art to which any nation must aspire and the rise of the sensational
fiction with its uncensored frankness, debatable moral messages, and unconventional
thematic concerns began to plant holes in this venture. In the study titled, “Victorians
and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent”, Patrick
Brantlinger quotes how “the development of the sensation novel marks a crisis in the
history of literary realism” (27). And Walter M. Kendrick in The Sensationalism of
The Woman in White goes a step further in declaring that one of the major
significances of the sensational fiction was the demonstration that novels could be
successfully, even brilliantly written according to principles which seemed to
contradict those of realism” (19). According to Richard Fantina in Victorian
Sensational Fiction, decades of “rapidly expanding literacy, revolutions in the
publishing industry, and a series of debates over intrinsic merit versus popularity,
idealism versus realism, and the proper function of art and literature in general, what
is now known as Victorian realism emerged triumphant in the closing years of the
nineteenth century” (12).

Consequently, extremely popular writers from other genres such as Charles

Reade, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Rhoda Broughton, Sheridan Le fanu and Wilki
Collins were sidelined and some of them even blended in relative obscurity when
compared with other Victorian writers included in the academic and popular literary
circles. The policing of female sexuality then began with a scrutiny and censorship of
the authors in whose hand was the key to explore questions around women’s biology,
function and moral capability. Like Braddon, Charles Reade and Wilki Collins
received open criticism for producing the kind of literature that was ostensibly
tolerant of sexually active and morally deviant women (Fantina 82). Collins with his
sympathy-inducing characters of Anne Cathetrick and Laura Fairlie, who were both
unfairly confined to mental asylums against their wills at some point and suffered
from visibly debilitating effects, makes a case in point. Charles Reade, another

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famous writer of Sensational fiction in his time, received even more backlash for
what appeared a great degree of tolerance for the sexual aberrations in his female
characters. Reade himself laments this fact taking sides with Thackeray’s views in
the preface to Pendennis (1851) in which he writes, “Since the author of Tom Jones
was buried, no writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost
power a MAN. . . . Society will not tolerate the Natural in our Art (Fantina 82).

Nevertheless, the writers of the sensational genre continued to show

increasing preoccupation with women and associated with them strong titillating
elements. At the same time, the works of such writers are redeemed from accusation
of sexism or base carnality because of their overt and covert endorsement of greater
autonomy for women and their activity. Reade’s women, just like Braddon’s, show
traits of passion and corporeality that would directly undermine the Victorian
emphasis on the angel in the house. What Michael Hammet had to say about Reade’s
portrayal of women in Plays by Charles Reade can be directly applied to the
characters populating Braddon’s novel since her characters, just like Reade’s, “are
not represented as morally perfect, indeed they can be suspected of falling short of
perfection in sexual matters,” but none of them “are incompetent, while some of his
men are” (34). Braddon’s writing also contains the “laudatory judgment of women
and pejorative judgment of men” (Hammet 74). Eventually, the sensational writers
came to admire women who were competent, adventurous, and assertive. At the
same time, the men populating their novels also defied the Victorian standards of
what it means to be a man.

Now the male exploits spoken of earlier, showcase the same laudatory traits
of self-service in women while the men come off as dependent in hindsight. The
greatest example of this anomaly is the character of Luke Marks. The orthodox
caricature of the manly man from the working class whose visceral engagement in
blue collar jobs, unusually robust form, and uncouth mannerisms make him a prime
example of what manhood without the effects of gentility looks like, is only able to
erect some kind of a financial foundation for himself by exploiting Lady Audley’s
weaknesses. It’s not so much as his uncouth manner, greed, and lack of compassion
and respect for women around him that makes him such a rueful character, but the
fact that despite being an able-bodied man of traditional values, he does not feel
emasculated by taking advantage of a woman financially. According to Mangham in

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Violent Women and Sensation Fiction, even the readers, instead of feeling sympathy
for his murder in the arson scene, almost applaud his death (90). But to admit such a
sentiment is admitting an interesting fact about our so called standards of morality
for men and women. The horror of his murder is somehow assuaged by the fact that
he extorted money by blackmailing the mistress of his wife. This lack of manhood
and self-sufficiency appears a bigger crime on his part than the crime of arson on the
part of Lady Audley. Like women, men too must adhere to a certain standard of what
is truly moral for a man and failing to subscribe to those standards become the
greatest aberration they can perform.

If violence and insanity were the private battles of women’s biology, then the
pressures of successful financial excursions were those of the males. It is true that
Braddon subscribes to the Victorian assessment of there being some latent insanity
and unnaturalness in women that must be checked and reigned in all times. That
women who failed to keep their hereditary flaws of biology under check were prone
to becoming something akin to a monster and thus capable of injecting harm beyond
rationality. But then Braddon was subscribing to any notion that would make her
novel a friendly read for all classes. In her letter to Edward Bulwer-lytton, Braddon
once writes how she is struggling to please two masters. ‘I want to serve two
masters’, she admitted to Bulwer in 1863, ‘I want to be artistic & to please you. I
want to be sensational, & to please Mudie’s subscribers’ (Mangham 86). Her
passages that allude to the possibility of secret insanity verging on monstrosity then
seems to be in tow with her struggle to make her piece both sensational in the
common understanding of the term and artistic in the literary understanding at the
same time. Here’s a passage from the novel depicting and thereby reinforcing female
carnality, rage and insanity as one example where the author chooses to ride the
wave of popular assumptions about female biology and female sexuality and
reworking them into a highly sensationalized imagery for her novel.

The red blood flashed up into my lady’s face with as sudden and transient a
blaze as the flickering flame of a fire, and died as suddenly away, leaving her
more pale than winter snow. […] With every pulse slackening, with every
drop of blood congealing in her veins, […] the terrible process […] was […]
transform[ing] her from a woman into a statue. […] An unnatural crimson
spot burned in the centre of each rounded cheek, and an unnatural lustre
gleamed in her great blue eyes. She spoke with an unnatural clearness and an
unnatural rapidity. She had altogether the appearance and manner of a person
who has yielded to the dominant influence of some overpowering excitement
(Braddon 482).

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 But, as Mangham puts it, on one hand she leaves the notions about the
intrinsic link between insanity, unnaturalness, and female biology unchallenged, then
she also makes a point of exposing the relationship between this link and the
commercial exploits of men. What she appears to be advocating is the notion that
fortunes built upon such distorted foundations are “doomed to be as pathological as
the women they exploit” (92) and Mangham even goes so far as to state that this was
the theme she was more or less preoccupied with before delivering her bestseller.

The dilapidated inn of whose master Luke Marks becomes through the
extortion of Lady Audley appears run-down and doomed for destruction. When she
describes the establishment, there is an air of dejected misery which cannot go
unnoticed past the reader. One can almost predict the disaster that awaits Luke as
owner of the unfortunate establishment. Similarly, George Talboys’s fortune, having
derived at the expense of abandoning his wife does not come to the kind of avail the
adventurer was hoping for. The fortune that he hoped would help him begin a fresh,
financially stable lifestyle with Lady Audley is only useful in aiding his departure
from England forever. Just as how the passions of women are not validated unless
endorsed by the male judgement, similarly, the financial endeavours of men do not
amount to much when not endorsed by the women around them or were the result of
exploiting women. This, in a way, evokes the complementarity of cultures that is the
essence of a balanced and mutual coexistence between males and females.

This is one reason why Robert suffers a much different fate from his
counterparts in the novel. In a way Robert’s pursuit of the truth behind George’s
murder and lady Audley’s secret serves as another instance of male exploits at the
expense of women. This is not because Robert wishes to avenge a wrongful death
per say. As George’s friend he possesses every right to do so but there are other
factors motivating him in this pursuit. Clara Talboys is one of them. The moment he
is too afraid to come at the truth and tries to vaguely discard responsibility by calling
his obsession with Lady Audley’s secret a fragment of his monomania, he is
beckoned into unraveling the mystery in a sanctimonious vow of vengeance extorted
by Clara Talboys.

Moreover, it’s as much his successful unraveling of Lady Audley’s secret as

it’s Clara noble influence that catapults his career as a barrister. In fact, it was not
until Robert had begun to take an uncanny interest in the mystery of his friend’s

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disappearance and Lady Audley’s questionable ways, that he ever seriously began
pursuing a career in crime investigation. What’s interesting is that any scruples that
Robert had over inadvertently bringing down the family reputation are quelled when
Clara enters the picture.

Robert Audley had been torn between his allegiance to the good name of the
Audley establishment and his loyalty to his dear friend George Talboys. At some
point, Robert is overwhelmed by the idea of stripping the case of his friend’s
disappearance down to its barest bones. In reality he suspects the truth and realizes
the shame, bewilderment and heartache it will case to the occupants of the Audley
estate. As he begins to weigh the pros and cons of seeing the case to its conclusion,
Robert weighs in favour of letting the mystery be. The hints of male inaptitude
become transparent when he begins second guessing himself accusing his own lack
of judgment and “monomania” to be responsible for horrific parallels he continues to
draw between Lady Audley’s maneuvers. A number of times he even appears
thwarted by Lady Audley’s wits. At one time, as he spots her taking a coach in a
questionable setting, he feels considerably overwhelmed by what cunning she could
be brewing with her mysterious visits. Between his admiration for Lady Audley’s
beauty and his worries for the secrets she is withholding, Robert Audley betrays the
sentiment of self-doubt and low self-confidence. There’s also the danger of
defamation that his pursuits may bring on his own extended family and relations. All
of these fears however get assuaged as soon as Clara walks onto the scene. Robert
realizes his newfound admiration of Clara is stronger than both his self-doubt and the
fear lurking in his self-conscious. Hers becomes the hand that, according to him, had
been beckoning him to unravel the mystery all along. Here we see Clara playing a
role akin to the one played by Margaret Hale in North and South and the titular
character Jane Eyre. Just as how Margaret reforms Mr. Thornton of his
uncompassionate and prudish ways and Jane Eyre guides Mr. Rochester to find a
purpose and new way of life, similarly, Clara Talboys assumes the role of the guide,
the caretaker, and the reformer.

Under Clara’s positive influence, Mr. Robert Audley restructures his life
around newer, more noble purpose. His investigative exploits of pinning down Lady
Audley’s sexual and moral transgressions, which he had almost shunned halfway
owing to his self-doubt and innate fears, are perhaps the only male exploits in the

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novel that do not perish away without bearing fruition. Not only does Robert Audley
successfully unravels the mysteries of Lady Audley’s ignoble past, he is also able to
found a thriving and respectable career for himself on account of this exploit of his
that started as an amateur’s persistent curiosity.

There is almost a set pattern with the male exploits and the pathological
failures these are accompanied with. Both Luke Marks and George Talboys meet
unprecedented disasters of great proportion because they were too androcentric both
in their aims and goals as well as the mechanisms to achieve them. In a way both
disregarded how their financial exploits would affect the women around them.
Luke’s treatment of Phoebe fails to internalize in her the obligatory sense of
wifehood needed for the machinery of family to operate glitch-free. Luke’s coarse
dismissal of Phoebe’s happiness or concerns remain responsible for the fact that her
sympathies always lay with her mistress instead of her husband. And however
unknowingly, Phoebe has had a hand to play in bringing ruin upon their house in the
climactic arson scene of the novel. In the same way, George Talboys insistence on
finding a way to come into fortune no matter how great the cost completely
disregarded the burdens of misery it would cast on the family he was leaving behind.
When the wife comes into her own, the fabric of the family falls apart.

In contrast, the endorsement of Robert’s exploits by Clara makes them

happily commensurate. And it is in this endorsement that we see a complementarity
of the male and female cultures. At least in the Victorian society, where the male
culture predicated itself on an honest employment of one’s faculties in the public
domain, while the female culture comprised of sustaining the foundations of the
private sphere providing the men a safe haven to fall back on, the rise of the happy
bourgeois family was heavily indebted to a mutual co-existence of men and women
participating in their separate spheres with an understanding that these were bound to
overlap more often than not, proving that one was not a sub-culture embedded within
another but remained a distinct field of operation in itself. The Sensation novels,
such as Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret did go above and beyond in driving home
the idea of the chaos that ensues when both men and women choose to usurp,
exploit, and undermine the fundamental tenets of one another’s fields of operations
with an orthodox, androcentric dismissal of the complementarity of these fields.

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 CONCLUSION

The study examined three novels, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, North and
South by Elizabeth Gaskell, and Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon in
the light of Showalter’s gynocritical theory to find answers to the intrinsic questions
related to the depiction of women and women’s culture in three distinctive
subgenres, namely, the bildungsroman, the industrial novel, and the sensation novel.
Related to the first question of women’s culture was the need to analyze how the
three different genres allowed the afore-mentioned women writers to negotiate the
roles of women and promote a changing attitude towards their freedom. Examining
the three novels in the light of the gynocritical analysis has uncovered some
recurring patterns in writings by women that seemed inextricably linked to both the
representation of women as well as a movement for their greater autonomy. The
study shed light on the accepted Victorian norms and its contrasts to the female
culture; it scrutinized the expected beliefs around female activities, the public and the
private spheres and females’ role in the Victorian family and public setup.

Since the questions that the study concerned itself with pertained to women’s
culture, roles and expectations, Showalter’s theory of gynocriticism was employed to
determine the specific attributes and dynamics of women’s culture and women’s
writing. Showalter had professed in her theory centered on women’s culture and
women’s writings in her essay “Towards a Feminist Poetics”, as well as other works,
that there was a need to incorporate within writing representations of women’s
language, women’s body and women’s psyche. The study was predicated on
Showalter’s premise that the Jacksonian and Elizabethan models of separate cultures
of men and women admitted of no overlap between the two and women’s culture
was seen as subordinate. According to Showalter, this was obviously not true and the
shift happened when cultural critics and anthropologists like the Arderners and
Gerda Lerner began to argue for both the documentation as well as the admission of
a female culture that is not subordinate to the general culture but overlaps it and
whenever the subordination appears to encroach on women’s autonomy, the latter
devises new models and ways of integration and expressions.

The study discussed how the three novels portrayed this integration of the
female culture into the general Victorian culture and how women negotiated and

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adapted to these social restrictions in a way that was favourable to them and the
general Victorian society.

To identify these patterns the study had to review how “women's beliefs find
expression through ritual and art, expressions which can be deciphered by the
ethnographer, either female or male, who is willing to make the effort to perceive
beyond the screens of the dominant structure”(Showalter 200). In other words, the
study was cognizant of the prevalence of a muted group and by corollary a muted
discourse that could be found by reading between the lines. This was the discourse
that allowed women to express themselves in socially approved mannerisms and
structures. The focus of the study then was on the unveiling of the muted discourse,
and revealing the underlying messages that were part of the writers as well as the
women’s subconscious, or suppressed consciousness during those times. The study
landed some interesting findings and recurrent patterns through the application of the
theory on the three novels North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, Jane Eyre by
Charlotte Bronte and the Sensational Novel by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Each of the
three novels belonged to a separate genre and were marked by their distinctive traits.

Findings from the analysis of north and south

Unravelling the muted discourse within the novel North and South by Gaskell
brought forth newer revelations of the mental toll that the expectation of being the
“angel” in the house took upon women. By creating the character of Margaret Hale
as a quintessentially dedicated woman of domestic affairs, Gaskell managed to keep
much of the critique against her not-so-conventional actions at bay. In fact, her most
public actions were also described as acts of instituting the domesticities of the
female culture in the public sphere by researchers like Whitney Womack, such as the
public intervention during the riot and protection of Mr. Thornton against the mob,
thereby mitigating the possibility of disapproval from the genteel circles. Within the
domestic boundaries too, Margaret exhibited qualities of self-sacrifice and self-
denial. She took on the role of the protectress and supervisor by taking over the
affairs of relocation and house management, shielding her parents from the
additional freight of social obligations when they were troubled by affairs of their
own. Margaret remains a bulwark for the family when her deported brother risks his
life by coming back to England. Gaskell’s portrayal of Margaret is both in tow with

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the expected Victorian attitudes, as well as brimming with an underlying message of
its own. This way North and South becomes one of the best examples of literary
documentations of women’s culture working in complementarity with that of their
male counterparts.

The industrial novel and documentation of women’s culture

With regards to the question of how the genre helped in both representing as
well as advocating the ways in which women negotiated through the inhibitions and
served the society, the research explored the societal elements that germinated the
Victorian industrial era.

It was determined how one of the more unprecedented effects of the rise of
the industrial age was a greater autonomy for female workers. As in the words of
Simmon Richards, working class women were afforded more social freedom and
financial independence than their upper-class counterparts (414). This resulted in the
normalization of certain attitudes which most definitely helped in advocating greater
social and political freedom for all women. The representation of the Higgins family
was a simulacrum of what lives for the under-privileged looked like during the
Victorian times. But this plight of the working class people was documented through
the eyes of Bessy Higgins and Margaret Hale who, through their own communal
sisterhood perpetuated the cause of the entire working class. The analysis had
established how the documentation of females had been marginalized,
underrepresented or simply ignored for the longest time. Gaskell, through her novel,
casted the much needed light on the role of women during the Industrial Age, the
effects of industrialism on women of different social classes, and the ways the
attitudes and beliefs regarding women began to undergo a shift.

The industrial novel, therefore allowed room for certain experimentation with
female participation in the public field that novels from other genres would have
struggled to capture. The analysis established how the friendship between Bessy
Higgins of the working class from the North and Margaret hale, the genteel middle-
class lady of the South, paved way for a deeper connection and understanding
between the master and workers for at least a single industrial setup. The novel North
and South became a metaphorical middle ground where the feminized South with its
emphasis on the values of gentility, decorum, and propriety tasseled with the

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masculinized values of self-fulfillment, individualism, and social competition
promoted in the North. In another way, the South embodied the values sympathetic
to the female culture while the North’s was predominantly a masculine one but it was
the overlap between the two that germinated the blissful happenstance of social
equality and rectitude of long-prevailing problems of class and gender.

The analysis made clear how Gaskell’s writing advocated a need for greater
women’s participation in the public sphere, since the female culture, with its sisterly
communality of values, institutions, relationships and methods of communications,
served greater good for the general Victorian culture. It was through one such sisterly
relationship between Bessy Higgins and Margaret Hale that the questions of class
and gender became more fluid. As the analysis began to draw certain parallels
between male and female cultures, it was found how women negotiated questions of
class somewhat differently than men, and the difference, however subtle was one that
resolves the novel’s main conflict.

One of these differences had to do with the relationships that men and women
of the upper and middle class households fostered with the working classes. Being an
intricate part of the public sphere, both Mr. Thornton and Margaret’s father Mr. Hale
found themselves forging relationships predicated on either service or obligations
with the people of the working order. There appeared an unsurmountable divide
when upper and middle class men tried to associate with men from the working
class. The stringent divide and lack of compassionate intimacy was obvious between
Mr. Thronton and his relationships with his employees whom he reffered to as
“hands” (Gaskell 55) but it was also prevalent when the philanthropic Mr. Hale tried
reaching out to the Higgins. According to the narrative of North and South, a certain
sense of obligation and duty kept even Mr. Hale from thoroughly immersing himself
in the lives and ways of people like the Higginses who embodied the values and
attitudes of the lower class. This invisible divide appeared to have been the roots
cause of much that was warped between the workers and the masters.

On the other hand, the women from the middle class appeared to have
completely differently dynamics when it came to forging relationship with their less
privileged counterparts. The analysis established how mistresses were less stringent
about the class difference between themselves and their female servants and were
more involved with their subordinates than their male counterparts. Men, it was easy

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to assume from the actions unfolding in the novel, could never admit the kind of
intimate connections with their subordinates as the women were wont to do.
Mistresses were more likely to confide, trust, and share time and space with their
female servants. The novel depicts it to the point where the housemaid Dixon is let in
on secrets by Mrs. Hale even before Margaret is and the protagonist has to fight her
way against the female servant to claim her spot as the closest associate to her
mother. It seemed as though a greater indulgence of the female servants by their
mistresses was a part of the women’s culture during the Victorian times and might
have been rooted in both the mistresses as well as their servants’ dependence on the
male provider. The reason why this became an important finding was because it is
the same tenet of greater indulgence that results in the resolution of the simmering
conflict between the masters and working class in the novel.

When Margaret befriends Bessy Higgins, there’s no reservations stemming

from formalities of obligations and decorum. In a way a dependent herself, Margaret
easily understood and sympathized with the plight, toil and troubles of Bessy
Higgins. She could not only sympathize but also identify with Bessy’s dual difficulty
of supplementing the family income as well as looking after the domestic affair.
Working long hours in the factory and poor conditions along with the mounting
domestic troubles ended up afflicting her with an incurable lung disease. Both
Margaret as well as her mother exhibited similar traits of debilitating health due to
the unavailability of any emotional social outlet for the piling anxieties. Margaret’s
close affinity with Bessy however, became an important plot device because it is
through these periodic meetings of Margaret and Bessy that the former learned about
the true nature of duress that the working order was under. One reason why this
revelation was not possible, or at the very least, difficult to attain for Margaret’s male
counterpart was because of the inability of the former to look past the role of the
“master” or the “employer” and bring themselves on the same footing as their
workers. The intimacy of Margaret and Bessy’s relationship worked wonders in
surfacing the intensity of the workers’ situation and as soon as Margaret learned of
these she resolved to do whatever it takes to improve the situation between the
workers and Mr. Thornton the factory owner. This resulted not only in the blissful
happenstance of improved conditions for the workers towards the end of the novel
but also in the education of the Victorian audience simultaneously.

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 The readers learn to grow with Margaret, who undergoes an impressive
transition from reserving prejudice against the hardcore social values of the self-
made middle class families to valuing the ability of paving one’s own fate of greater
autonomy, financial independence, and self-service through hard work and use of
intelligence. The analysis therefore established how, in promoting the cause of the
working order through a female agency, Gaskell simultaneously promoted the cause
of greater female participation in the public sphere. Since the novel North and South
belonged to the industrial era, Margaret’s private and public triumph became a
triumph of women’s culture and roles in both of these spheres simultaneously.

Findings from the analysis of jane eyre

Charlotte Bronte’s classic novel Jane Eyre comprised the second novel that
underwent a gynocritical scrutiny in this study. Jane Eyre has long been deemed as a
quintessential female bildungsroman by writers such as Sarah Stickney Ellis and the
study revealed how the genre once again served the cause of heightened female
activity in the public sphere in its own ways.

The study analyzed how the primary tenets of the bildungsroman worked
wonderfully in normalizing certain events and plot developments that might have
been pronounced as too unrealistic had they been part of an entirely different setup
altogether. But the primary characteristic of self-help and self-education that is the
part and parcel of a bildungsroman plot, as explained by the work of Salmon
Richard, helped the study to determine both the possibility of growth for women, as
well as the ways in which they negotiated the social, cultural and economic
inhibitions thrown in the way of a woman who did not have family or finances to fall
back on.

The bildungsroman novel and the female culture

The gynocritical analysis of Bronte’s Jane Eyre lead to some interesting

findings that countered propositions by writers like Annis Pratt who claimed that the
female bildungsroman, instead of giving women models of growing up, gave them
models of “growing down” (Pratt 39). One reason for the denial of such a charge is
that Jane’s progress in the novel is far from a debilitating one. A more accurate
proposition would be that the genre highlighted vehemently the limited prospects of

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self-help for women than men in the Victorian society. At the same time, a woman’s
journey of self-help does not necessarily have to be one without the influence and
interventions of the men around her. Once again, the question arises of the
complementarity of culture as in the case of the male bildungsroman, and it was
found out how women’s culture was neither separate nor subordinate to the men’s
but one that overlapped worked the general culture and worked best alongside it.

One of the recurring patterns found in Jane Eyre early on in the analysis was
the prevalence of the sisterly communion such as the one forged by Margaret and
Bessy Higgins, and which was the source of the character development that could be
traced in the protagonist. In this case, the communion was forged between Jane, her
best friend at the Lowood establishment Helen Burns and her teacher Miss Temple.
This all-female, sisterly communion was essential because it served to reevaluate and
revise the embedded expectations of women in the general Victorian culture. Jane’s
friend Helen who suffered her humiliation silently at the hands of what the
researcher Sarah Maeir described as the “complicity of women” (321), obviously
took the toll of it all as her physical health worsens. On the other hand, the ingenious
and intelligent conversations between Ms. Temple and the girls symbolized the
potential among women to learn and aspire to know more, put their knowledge to
use, and participate in the general sphere. The most prominent contribution that the
bildungsroman novel like Jane Eyre made to women’s plight was reinforcing how
women’s aspirations and culture overlap with those of the men and therefore need to
work alongside rather than being subjugated.

The study determined how the genre of female bildungsroman made it easier
for women to reclaim suffering and transform “the duty of silent suffering into the
site of pleasure and passionate investment” (London 198). Eventually, Jane’s
sufferings, toils and tribulations elevated her into a more reformed and self-
substantiated being that was the perfect match for the temperamental and
adventurous Mr. Rochester. It was revealed how the genre of the novel, with its
intrinsic focus on the importance of self-help and self-culture, allowed Jane to
transcend the shortcoming of social status, family wealth, repute and prevail upon
her much more socially and physically formidable rivals such as Ms. Ingram and Ms.
Oliver. Both North and South by Gaskell and Jane Eyre by Bronte undermined the
excessive emphasis placed on physical beauty for women by the Victorian society. In

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carving their heroines out of planer features, the focus inadvertently shifted to their
mental aptitude and abilities. This was more vehemently the case with Bronte’s
novel where Jane was devoid of both the physical as well as social attractions.
However, thanks to the tenets of the genre, physical and social attributes were not
exhibited as the determiners of characters, rather, one’s character determined the
latter. This gave Bronte the room to experiment with the other qualifications needed
in a woman, elevating Jane Eyre into a woman of ambition, character, and self-
service thereby revolutionizing the idea of female aptitude. Like Margaret, Bronte’s
Jane may be a silent sufferer for some time but after she learned to invest her
energies into these suffering and train herself to turn her suffering into moments of
opportunities, she was met with new and better propositions.

The analysis depicted how Jane reclaimed her suffering transforming them
into sites of pleasure. Jane did this first with her unwilling departure to the miserably
regulated establishment of Lowood. Here she became more determined than ever to
go the route of self-help and self-culture and be the most accomplished teacher she
could be. With Ms. Temple’s removal she once again found herself on the road, this
time finding a flame that would ignite new passions and ambitions in her. When she
found herself unable to fulfill these on account of unsavory circumstances, Jane
learned to overcome temptations and set about looking for a new vocation for
herself, thereby finding herself a new family altogether and only came back to Mr.
Rochester when both Jane and Rochester had gone through the full cycle of self-help
and character development. Towards the end of the novel, Jane Eyre’s journey of
self-help and self-culture reached a newer level of elevation where she could choose
to decipher her religious vocations and injunctions without the intervention of male,
in her case, St. John. By refusing to assimilate her identity as a missionary’s wife for
a long and arduous journey of self-denial and religious commitment, and choosing
instead to devote her energies to the domestic affairs that calmed her anxieties and
gave her a sense of belonging, Jane Eyre once again shed light on how women’s
culture was not a subordinated culture to be erased or appropriated by the male or
general culture but a complimentary one. One did not have to necessarily assimilate
into another. As the analysis depicted, both St. John and Mr. Rochester had to learn
to continue on the path of life without necessarily submitting Jane to their whims.

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 Needless to say, Jane Eyre, propounded some revolutionary ideas of
women’s autonomy, women’s culture, and their role in the general Victorian culture
and this the novel achieve through the aid of its genre that sublimated the concepts of
self-help and self-culture above every other Victorian attribute for women.

Findings from the analysis of lady audley’s secret

Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s novel Lady Audley’s Secret was the final novel
given to study. The novel belonged to the genre of sensational fiction that predicated
itself on heightened suspense, exaggerated plots and melodrama intended to appeal
to the emotions. Just like the two novels discussed earlier, Braddon’s Lady Audley’s
Secret served a number of purposes under the garb of its plot conventions.

The study revealed how, by choosing to engage in the sensational genre,

Mary Braddon was already treading a precarious course of public disapproval.
Women’s involvement with sensational themes appeared indecent to the Victorian
public and Braddon often talked about trying to please the public and the connoisseur
of art at the same time. While this was not easy to achieve, the study revealed how
the novel is riled with the prevalence of a muted discourse that appears to counter
most of the surface arguments made in novel.

Women’s culture and the sensation novel

Like Gaskell’s North and South and Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Braddon’s Lady
Audley’s Secret also has the plight of women and a sisterly communion comprising
exclusively of females as its key variable for scrutiny. By focusing on the desires,
roles and expectations of women, the novel shed light on women’s culture in the
Victorian times, the social restrictions facing them, and the limited means to
overcome this. Out of the three genres, perhaps the sensational was the most
effective in dispelling some of the long-standing expectations of women due to the
fact that these exaggerated plot were often claimed to have been steeped into reality
and there came about the new concern of the genre of sensationalism mixing up
gothic elements with realism to create some kind of a distorted journalistic work as
depicted by Deborah Wynne in her works. Nevertheless, the genre allowed Braddon
and other writers of the Victorian times to reevaluate some of their common

163
assumptions about the roles of women as well as the implications of confining
women to a hyper-scrutinized set of values.

The analysis revealed how the question of class and economy was as crucial
to women as the questions of ethics and morality. The age during which the novel
was written was the age that fervently supported the idea of female mental debility
owing to their biological functions. Biological female functions such as birthing,
menstruation and menopause became responsible for most mental illnesses identified
in women as explained by researchers such as Mulock Craik and Showalter. Most
importantly and unfortunately for women, immorality and mental perversion came to
be conflated so that morally corrupt women were seen as just a different kind of mad
women.

The study showed how Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret played on the same
beliefs about women in the Victorian age drawing the readers towards its content and
drove massive success. At the same time however, using the themes of female
madness and perversion in her novel, Braddon brought to light the fundamental flaw
in the Victorian understanding of women and women’s culture. The analysis made it
obvious how Lady Audley’s perversion was a direct result of the conflicts of class
and her precarious finances than any latent germs of madness. Any reader following
the novel closely will not fail to identify the incredible wit and cunning possessed by
Lady Audley, signs that deny the possibility of her crimes being the exclusive result
of her madness. Towards the end of the novel, the doctor’s refusal to make admission
of Lady Audley’s madness and then a vague subscription to this proposal at Mr.
Richard Audley’s insistence showed as much. Lady Audley’s real secret was that she
was not really insane but chose to present herself as such to escape a more
detrimental fate. So while Braddon never pronounced it in obvious terms, the readers
must come to the understanding that if Lady Audley was not insane, there must be a
reevaluation of what kind of palpable effects women’s passions and ambitions may
result in a society where being too passionate was seen as a sign of latent madness in
itself.

The novel therefore made a case of how questions of class and social status
were as intrinsic to women as they were to their male counterpart, and women,
owing to the social inhibitions, devised their own ways to achieve their aims. Since
the sensational genre valued the display of emotion, most of the women populating

164
the novel were passionate with a mind of their own. The analysis revealed how,
through characters such as Alicia Audley, Lady Audley, and Clara Talboys, Braddon
made transparent the hypocrisy of the general Victorian culture to label women’s
passions as noble or eccentric based on whether they aligned with the passions of
their male counterparts. This was the reasons why Clara Talboys’s desire for murder
and revenge of her assumedly dead brother resulted in her appearing noble and
beautiful but a similar passion was described as insane, unnatural and ignoble in
Lady Audley. Later, the analysis also explored the presentation of the bridled female
sexuality and the exploits of men in the novel. For all those commercial exploits that
took place at the expense of women, there seemed to be a social cul-de-sac. On the
other hand, the only exploits to meet success were the ones that were endorsed by
women, thereby advocating the need for women and men to work in a form of a
complementarity instead of a competition where one undermines the desires,
ambitions and expectations of the other.

It is safe to conclude that the women writers of the Victorian age were writing
in dual tones. The overt tone was the one in sync with that of the general Victorian
culture where women best fit the domestic roles, served as the angel in the house,
and did not compete against men for power or autonomy in the public domain. While
the covert or the muted tone was that which perpetuated contrasting ideas of greater
female autonomy and women’s ways of coping with economic and social oppression
by making women’s collective culture the focal point of their writing. By employing
various genres, these writers were able to advocate women’s liberation in various
fields of economy, biology, religion etc. For example, in Jane Eyre Helen Burns’
Christ-like perseverance and mute acceptance of her plight might be in sync with the
dominant narrative of female sacrifice but her ostensibly deteriorating health is a
representation of the havoc that suffering in silence wreaks upon the female sect.
Similarly, Jane finding newfound love in the domestic affairs of her new home at
Moor House is in tow with the concept of the private sphere as exclusively a
feminine place, but it also imparts her with the power to boldly declare her new
vocation and refuse St. John’s proposal of following him as his wife. Jane’s domestic
duties then become her gateway to an unprecedented level of freedom bringing her
greater autonomy and a different purpose. In this way, the differing subgenres helped
the writers to explore the contrasting natures of problems of women and the

165
shortcoming of confining women’s problems and roles to the domestic sphere. Most
importantly, by focusing on women’s culture and psychology, these writings
revealed how the culture of females intrinsically overlapped with the general
Victorian culture and that the overlap often resulted in positive and productive
consequence for the general culture.

The gynocritical analyses of the three novels revealed how, regardless of the
distinctions made and separations promoted made between the domestic and public
sphere, both were essentially interlinked making it difficult to operate successfully in
one when the other remained dysfunctional. Through these novels, women were
represented as more assimilated in the public sphere, albeit indirectly, than the
Victorian society or the history of women had ever been willing to admit. The first
two novels, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
both explored the freedom granted to women in the changing Victorian times.
Margaret’s public exploits in North and South were made digestible due to the
particular genre of the novel that was made compatible with the changing attitude
towards women in the public sphere. The novel established how industrialism,
through its emphasis on greater female mobility in the factories and advocacy for
human rights became a precedent of change for the plight of women. Similarly, It
was established how the bildungsroman, with its intrinsic focus on the concepts of
self-help and self-culture, allowed Charlotte to experiment with Jane’s public
exploits. Jane Eyre was surely a progressive character for her time, but any form of
incredulity or disbelief over Jane’s insistence on her own freedom and her prevalence
over more intimidating rivals by her suitors was suspended in the wake of the novel’s
genre that focused on qualities of self-help and grooming that was a tangent to the
prevalent attitudes towards women at the time. The sensation novel, Lady Audley’s
Secret, also explored the possibility of co-dependence between both the public and
the private sphere, or the male and the female culture, but where it stands unique is
that it did so through the caricature of the hollow English gentility which placed
disproportionate premium on outward beauty and overt accomplishments. By
highlighting the horror that lay beneath Lucy Audley’s beautiful and extremely
feminized outer façade, and drawing such passionate and strong women characters as
Alicia Audley and Clara Talboys, Braddon, it did much to disperse the unquestioning
association of outer female meekness with moral goodness. The three novels from

166
the three different genres then highlight the change that began to take place during
the first half of the nineteenth century in the attitudes towards women and may serve
as a backdrop to modern discussions on the dynamics between the male and female
cultures as they operate in the 21st century.

167
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TURNITIN REPORT

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185
 RÉSUMÉ

Name and Surname: Ziead Al-Khafaf

Education:
Degree Field University Year
Undergraduate English Language Al-Mustansiriya 2003
Graduate English Literature Pune 2007

Work Experience:
Work Place Position Year
Al-Iraqia University Instructor 2011-2016
Al-Farahidi University Instructor 2020-

Foreign Languages: English (very good), Turkish (very little) and Spanish (very
little)

Publications: The Catastrophic Consequence of the Psychological Obsession in Sons

and Lovers, 2014. The Dilemma of the Human Nature Hovering between
Civilization and Savagery in Lord of the Flies: A Psychoanalytic Study, 2015. The
Return of the Native According to Hegel’s Theory of Tragedy: Analytical Study,
2016. A Study of Hegemony and Class Conflict in Gaskell’s North and South, 2021

Date: 24/11/2021

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