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  • Subversive Heroines: Feminist Resolutions of Social Crisis in the Condition-of-England Novel
  • LeeAnne Marie Richardson (bio)
Subversive Heroines: Feminist Resolutions of Social Crisis in the Condition-of-England Novel, by Constance D. Harsh; pp. 203. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994, $55.00, £28.95.

The female protagonists Constance Harsh discusses in Subversive Heroines seem startlingly orthodox. And that is precisely her point. Because condition-of-England novelists recognized that the actual condition of England could not be ameliorated by the existing political system, they sought solutions within bourgeois domestic ideology and manufactured radical solutions from within this conservative realm. Harsh discovers a “covert feminism” in these novels (8), residing in the domestic heroine’s mediating consciousness. “Because these novels always see the public world in the context of the private world, women are able to extend their power to the sphere of public affairs to which they did not in actuality have such ready access” (21). By explicating the development of this “feminist myth of social salvation” (12), Harsh convincingly claims that women are, indeed, central to resolving the political crises these novels present.

Harsh argues that women are the prime movers in the condition-of-England novel because the increasing separation of spheres and the consolidation of bourgeois power during the 1830s and 1840s led “both middle-class women and workers [to take] on new roles in middle-class ideology” (15). Of these two groups, women are viable actors in these novels because a working-class man who can change the social system is too threatening to the novels’ bourgeois readership, too closely aligned with the radical politics of the Chartists. What Harsh calls feminocentrism (a narrative orientation that “puts women in central or decisive roles [. . .] and defines the world and the industrial threats in terms of female experience” [18]) dictates the feminist subtext in this genre. Despite the subordinate position of women within patriarchy, Harsh claims that “an incipient feminism lurks within this apparently oppressive ideal” (20).

While Harsh does concede that the domesticated woman “was in one sense complicit with efforts to limit the power and respect granted women in English society” (63), her argument does not address the concerns of skeptics like Karen Sanchez-Eppler, whose “negative view of domesticity as complicit with oppressive social power” is consigned to a footnote and never countered (183n13). In Imperial Leather (1995), Anne McClintock’s skepticism about women’s power within the patriarchy serves as an important counter to Harsh’s assumptions. “The invented distinction between the ‘natural’ sphere of the family and the ‘political’ sphere of civic society was indispensable to the formation of middle-class male identity because it was employed to restrict the liberal notion of sovereign individuality to European men of propertied descent. [. . .] The emergence of the rational liberal individual thereby took shape around the reinvention of the domestic [End Page 373] sphere as the realm of natural subjugation” (178). Because Harsh is making the anti-intuitive argument that domestic power in these novels radiates outward into the public sphere, she needs to confront the issue of complicity directly. Barring this, the reader is left questioning Harsh’s assumption that the condition-of-England novels’ concern for the domestic sphere constitutes an assertion of women’s power.

Harsh takes Carlyle’s essay Chartism (1839) as her starting point. In fact, she makes Carlyle’s analysis the basis for her definition of condition-of-England novels: “they locate the fundamental difficulty of the age in class relationships [. . .] they acknowledge the need for visionary solutions that will radically transform the face of English society [. . .] and they make use of a potential source of power that Victorian society commonly ignored and to which Carlyle would only allude: women” (7). As Harsh admits, this narrow definition necessitates “noticeable omissions from my list of condition-of-England novels—works that deal with contemporary difficulties but do not belong to the analytic community of which Carlyle and these seven novels are members” (7).

While Harsh’s seven chosen novels—Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855) and Mary Barton (1848), Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil (1845), Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna’s Helen Fleetwood (1841), Frances Trollope’s Michael...

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