Fictions of Dissent: Reclaiming Authority in Transatlantic Women’s Writing of the Late Nineteenth Century (review)

Many late nineteenth-century women refused to occupy the role of passive muse and demanded to control their own images and their representations in art and literature. In doing so, they often challenged the authority of the masculine artist and aesthete. This inversion of gender roles within the artist/subject relationship comprises what Sigrid Anderson Cordell terms the “muse’s revenge” narrative—a construct that underpins her study of transatlantic women’s short fiction (p. 1, passim). In Fictions of Dissent: Reclaiming Authority in Transatlantic Women’s Writing of the Late Nineteenth Century, Cordell explores this trope in both British and American women’s fiction, arguing that literary depictions of the struggle for artistic control have broader implications for the debate over the woman question that raged on both sides of the Atlantic during the closing decades of the nineteenth century.

Following her opening presentation of the “muse’s revenge” tale, Cordell lays out her theoretical framework, which draws on feminism, transatlantic studies, and narrative theory to support the subsequent literary analysis. The overview of transatlantic studies will be particularly useful for scholars across various fields, as Cordell establishes both the problems and benefits of this approach, noting “there is no consensus about what we mean when we say ‘transatlantic’” (p. 3). However, she also convincingly argues for why late nineteenth-century women’s fiction should be studied in this context through her explanation of the importance of “a transnational reading public” and exchange of ideas during this period (p. 2). Fictions of Dissent focuses on works of short fiction, and Cordell rightly suggests that this genre was particularly suited to women writers during this period because it became a vehicle through which they could “explore the possibilities for women to gain control over their own image by moving from a passive object of the artist’s gaze to an expressive, authorized subject” (p. 9).

The following chapters each focus on one or two authors and vary in the scope and depth of the fiction they discuss. The first chapter is devoted almost entirely to Mabel Wotton’s 1896 story “The Fifth Edition” and Constance Fenimore Woolson’s strikingly similar tale “Miss Grief” (1880). Using Wotton’s story as a central point, Cordell branches out to a fascinating excavation of late nineteenth-century discourses on plagiarism and the related ethical debates. An extended close reading of Vernon Lee’s “Lady Tal” (1892) and its unflattering portrait of Henry James comprise the second chapter as Cordell demonstrates Lee’s problematic participation in fin-de-siècle dialogues about art. Here, Cordell situates Lee’s work alongside that of her contemporaries such as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, further underscoring the importance of questions about inspiration and artistic invention to the late-Victorian aesthetic world. Cordell then moves to America in the third chapter to consider a handful of Edith Wharton’s early short stories. For Wharton, Cordell argues, artistic creation was bound up in commodification and questions of ownership—specifically, ownership of women. Particularly interesting is the reading of “The Front Yard” (1888), which Cordell sees as Wharton negotiating between aestheticism and American literary regionalism. The final chapter demonstrates how the narrative of the “muse’s revenge” has broader implications, signaling “a related struggle over narrative control” (p. 93). Cordell demonstrates this struggle through parallel discussions of Ella D’Arcy’s “The Pleasure Pilgrim” (1895) and Mary Wilkins Freeman’s “A Church Mouse” (1889), arguing that much women’s writing from this period has a perhaps unintentional, but nonetheless potent, feminist consciousness.

The scope of Fictions of Dissent is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Focused on a handful of short stories by a handful of writers, many of whom have been ignored by the academic mainstream, this study may be too narrow for scholars working outside of this specific period and genre. Indeed...