Minding the Wheel: Representations of Women's Time in Victorian Narrative

Minding the Wheel: Representations ofWomen's Time in Victorian Narrative Elizabeth Campbell Oregon State University In this round world of many circles within circles, do we make a weary journey from the high grade to the low, to find at last that they lie close together, that the two extremes touch, and that our journey's end is but our starting-place? Charles Dickens Dombey and Son (495-96; ch. 34) We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. T. S. Eliot "Little Gidding" (lines 239-42) Of the many sweeping changes the Industrial Revolution brought to England, one rather small, but nonetheless interesting change was the re-invention of the wheel in Victorian iconography. Primarily becoming a potent symbol for speed and power, the wheel served as a highly appropriate metonym to suggest the accelerated motion of steam-powered trains and machinery—as well as to represent the new glut of urban traffic and of wheeled conveyances in general. By 1871, as Gustave Dore's Ludgate Hill suggests, Victorian London— and by implication, the modern city in general—had come to be defined by its wheels, whether horse-drawn or steam-powered. In the first half of the century, the wheels of trains had already been inserted into Biblical typology. As John Francis noted in A History of the English Railway (1851), the British obsession with the new railway system caused ministers to reinterpret Ezekial's vision as a prophecy of the nineteenth-century changes brought about by steamed locomotion—moving swiftly and powerfully to the farthest corners of England on "the chariot wheels of the Fire King" (139, 147). The many wheels on display at The Great Exhibition in 1851, 45 46Rocky Mountain Review as recorded in the Official Catalogue, further attest to their inextricable association with mid-century faith in "the progress of the human race." They were the means to the end that the Exhibition promoted, according to its royal patron Prince Albert: "we are accomplishing the will of the great and blessed God" (Gibbs-Smith 26). And all these métonymie and metaphorical wheels underlie Dickens' more fanciful and typically shorthand recording of the London inner city in 1852 as a Pantagruelian toy wheel: "the great tee-totum . . . set up for its daily spin and whirl" (Bleak House 275; ch. 16). In more prosaic economic terms, chapter 4 ("Competition") of Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England serves as a telling example of the Victorian wheel moving from metonym to metaphor. Wheels serve as a motif throughout the chapter to denote a new industrial age, characterized by "a great deal of wheeled traffic " (97); by "the wheels of industry" that metaphorically stand for the new steam-powered "factory wheels" (96, 102); and by the metonymical use of all the above examples to underscore Engels' theory of the English industrial trade cycle as "a continuous series of cycles of boom and slump" (97). In strictly economic terms, the wheel conveniently (and metonymically) denoted the power necessary for operating machines, just as it provided a convenient symbol for the newly created industrial rhythm of life. The wheels and cycles of industry defined a new economic theorem that affected nineteenth -century time more directly than the cycles of seasons or the wheel of the stars—thereby creating a new order of time and being that couched "felt" time almost entirely in economic terms. But the iconographie wheel also carried with it vestiges ofits classical and presumably pagan metaphorical significations. The frequent appearance ofFortune's wheel in Hogarth's engravings and in Fielding's Tom Jones suggests that the goddess and her symbol continued to be a composite, salient feature of the British imagination through the eighteenth century and into the Regency. In engravings like the Benefit Ticket for Spiller (ca. 1720), The South Sea Scheme (1721), and The Lottery (1724), Hogarth had depicted Fortune standing on her wheel or prostrate upon it, suggesting its association with a wheel of torture or a merry-go-round of chance and speculation (Paulson 68, 74-75, 122). Fielding appropriated...