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  • Devoted Sisters: Representations of the Sister Relationship in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature
  • Susan Fraiman (bio)
Devoted Sisters: Representations of the Sister Relationship in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature, by Sarah Annes Brown; pp. ix + 177. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2003, £40.00, $79.95.

Declaring that "sisterhood is powerful," second-wavers took the sororal tie as a figure for feminism—women's blood loyalty to one another organized and multiplied to make a revolution. In calling on this trope they echoed Victorian feminists and abolitionists who, believing that the bonds of womanhood could supercede distinctions of class and race, exhorted ladies of privilege to have compassion for their "fallen sisters" or, in antebellum America, for their "sisters in bondage." No wonder that feminist literary critics since the late 1970s have been drawn to images of "sisters," whether literal or figurative, and have found these aplenty in nineteenth-century domestic novels. Until the late 1980s, a critical focus on sisters typically served to decenter the heterosexual plot of courtship and marriage by [End Page 177] attending to what historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg called "the female world of love and ritual" ("The Female World of Love and Ritual," 1975). Nina Auerbach's Communities of Women (1978), a prime example of scholarship in this vein, compared Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) unfavorably to Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868), contrasting the riven and dispirited sisterhood of the first with the homespun homosociality of the second. By the 1990s, however, an eagerness to celebrate female solidarity yielded to concern lest differences and divisions among women be glossed over. Feminists had learned the hard way that naturalizing female community too often meant ignoring disparities of power, conflicts of interest, and diverse forms of femininity. This loss of confidence in positive sisterhood was reflected by books such as Helena Michie's Sororophobia (1992), in which what was once a symbol of female connection was now associated with disjunction and rivalry.

Sarah Annes Brown's Devoted Sisters follows loosely in this tradition of feminist attention to sisterly relations in nineteenth-century English and American novels, and though James Fenimore Cooper, Wilkie Collins, and other male writers are usefully included alongside George Eliot and Catharine Sedgwick, Brown's emphasis remains on work by women. Indeed, its poise around the issue of gender specificity is one of the things I appreciate most about Devoted Sisters, for Brown neither assumes clear differences between male and female writers in their handling of sisters nor hesitates to point these out when they exist. Despite what might be seen as a slightly retro topic, the lightness and deftness of Devoted Sisters in this matter evince the maturity of a critical approach to gender now in its fourth decade. Brown is similarly flexible when it comes to her archive. While focusing on Anglo-American fiction of the Victorian period, she also considers the French novel Corinne (1807), makes passing reference to Victorian pornography, and ranges from the Bible to film noir. Certainly this makes for a rich discussion; at the same time, it dilutes the historical claims implicit in Brown's title but never very strenuously developed in her text. Brown gestures toward the relevance of "social conditions" in nineteenth-century depictions of sisters (vii), and she also offers to graph fluctuations in female types from the Regency through the Victorian era in the shape of a "parabola" (9, 73–74). Yet none of this is substantiated at any length, and even the chapter named for a piece of Victorian legislation, The Deceased Wife's Sister Act (1835–1907), is more concerned with the psychosexual logic of this act than its social or historical significance. Devoted Sisters thus works best not as a historical argument about nineteenth-century England and America, but as a set of subtle, well- informed, thematically kindred readings, illustrating our ongoing psychological investments in sisters as well as the uses of sisters as a structural device for realist writers.

Brown shows, for example, how the conceit of sisters is used to dramatize opposing feminine ideals and divergent trajectories for women. Corinne is paradigmatic in that it presents readers and the hero alike...

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