Feminine Subjects in Masculine Fiction
Also by Meredith Miller THE HISTORICAL DICTIONARY OF LESBIAN LITERATURE
Feminine Subjects in Masculine Fiction Modernity, Will and Desire, 1870 1910 Meredith Miller Senior Lecturer in English, Falmouth University, UK
Meredith Miller 2013 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-0-230-35518-7 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6 10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-34691-2 ISBN 978-1-137-34104-4 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9781137341044 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13
For my mother and for my father, who both taught me to think and ask questions
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Contents List of Figures Preface Acknowledgements viii ix x 1 Introduction 1 2 Wilkie Collins and Narrative Containment 27 3 Anthony Trollope: Gender, Law and the Psychological 59 4 Density, Will and Desire: Henry James, Aesthetics and the Subjective Turn 89 5 Emily s Will: George Gissing, Wage Labour and Aesthetic Desire 120 6 Sexuality and National Containment: E.M. Forster 148 7 Aim, Object and Fictional Strategy: Freud and Case Study Narrative 177 Coda: The Burial of The Dead 202 Bibliography 210 Index 217 vii
Figures 2.1 Illustration for The Law and the Lady, The Graphic, 24th October 1874 50 2.2 Illustration for The Law and the Lady, The Graphic, 26th December 1874 53 2.3 Illustration for The Law and the Lady, The Graphic, 5th December 1874 55 3.1 Advertisement for Mappin and Webb, The Fortnightly Review, 1871 61 5.1 Advertisement for The New Gallery, The Illustrated London News, March 1895 142 5.2 Echo, The Illustrated London News, March 1895 143 viii
Preface This book is concerned with the role of central female characters in the work of male authors in the later nineteenth century. These gendered characters, in their position as semi-distant subjects, locate a particular late-nineteenth-century structure of feeling at the intersection of discourses of gender, law, aesthetics and economies of desire. The approach here is cultural materialist. It is often the practice for critics to rely on first, or sometimes second, volume editions of fictional works. These have usually been corrected by the author after a novel s first serial run. If one s critical approach assumes the author as the origin of meaning for a work, this reliance on early corrected editions makes good sense. If however, as a cultural materialist, one is concerned with the full ideological complexity of the material context in which a work of fiction is produced and received, an examination of the initial serial run is also essential. Throughout this work, therefore, I have often framed discussion of novels, and of Forster s story, Other Kingdom, as they appeared in periodical context. Forster s early novels and Joyce s The Dead first appeared in volume form. For ease of reference for those who do not have access to archives and subscription databases, page numbers cited are from first, or earliest available, volume editions. Once or twice I have silently corrected, from the periodical version, obvious errors in the volume editions. Where quotations differ in the two versions in any other way, this has been noted. ix
Acknowledgements I d like to thank the kind friends (and daughter) who have shared their subject knowledge, their libraries, their research and proofreading skills, as well as their generous interest: Tom Akehurst, Cathy Bergin, William Greenslade, Rupert Loydell, Shamira Meghani, Adrian Mills, Maia Pollio, Bryony Randall, Angela Sherlock and Diana Wallace. Malcolm Edwards, Christina Lake and other colleagues at Tremough Campus Library have been more than generous and helpful throughout the project. English and humanities departments at the universities of Brighton, Glasgow and York, and the University of the West of England and Université Charles-de-Gaulle Lille III, all kindly hosted presentations of various parts of this work. Colleagues in each of these places shared valuable insights with me. Any misapprehensions are my own. I would like to thank professors Phil Stenton and Mike Wilson for helping me to secure generous funding for teaching relief from Falmouth University so that I could complete the manuscript. My thanks to Ben Doyle and Sophie Ainscough at Palgrave, who were a genuine pleasure to work with. Thanks also to Cherline Daniel and Kate Boothby, who took extraordinary care with the manuscript. Permission to reprint the advertisement for Mappin and Webb in Figure 3.1 was granted by Aurum Holdings, where members of staff were wonderfully enthusiastic about the project. All other image permissions were granted by the British Library. Staff in the Rare Book Room at the British Library, especially at the Reference Enquiry Desk, were very kind and generous with their time. x