Domesticity, Imperialism, and Emigration in the Victorian Novel (review)

Was Victorian domesticity too fragile for export? A provocative vision of immobile homes forms a central premise of Domesticity, Imperialism, and Emigration in the Victorian Novel. Focusing on novels that take place in the white settler colonies and the United States, Diana G. Archibald argues that the femininity prescribed by domestic ideology rendered English women too physically and psychologically enfeebled to contend with the various exigencies of colonial life—moral, geographical, climatological, and cultural. Archibald argues that the novel was the discursive location of not only a realist, but a particularly realistic account of the vicissitudes of English domesticity abroad.

In the first and most powerfully argued chapter, Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) and Cousin Phillis (1864) are usefully read as a continuous narrative of the clash between the needs of industrialization and those of imperialism, subtly describing Gaskell's failure finally to harmonize the apparently conflicting demands of domesticity and the domestic economy with the exigencies of empire. Although the possibility of a pastoral utopia in Canada shapes Mary Barton's conclusion, in Cousin Phillis, Canada is the place to which Phillis's hope of happiness—Edward Holdsworth—departs. He goes to supervise the laying of railroad tracks; like Jem Wilson the instrument maker, he takes industrialization with him, and will destroy the very qualities that have made Canada, however fictively, an idyllic alternative to England.

In the second chapter, Anthony Trollope's Australian novels—The Three Clerks (1858), Harry Heathcote of Gangoil: A Tale of Australian Bushlife (1873), and John Caldigate (1879)—are read against Victorian theorists of and propagandists for Australian emigration and colonization. Archibald describes the novel of emigration as correcting the optimistic distortions of pro-emigration writing. The idea of specific discursive functions for the novel is potentially rich, but a certain representational slippage undermines it. For example: "Though some of Trollope's contemporary colonial readers criticized the inaccuracies and prejudices of all three of his Australian novels, much of what he wrote accurately reflects the realities of colonial life..." (102). Archibald contrasts "myth" and "stereotype" with realist discourse as if the realist, the realistic and the real are one. Nonetheless, her important point about divisions of textual labor deserves attention.

Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872) and Erewhon Revisited (1901) occasion fascinating research on the South Pacific: this chapter and the preceding one are notable for the care with which the colonial histories and literary representations of Australia and New Zealand are detailed and differentiated. In Butler's life and fiction, New Zealand (where two utopian communities were actually founded in the nineteenth century) was an escape from the worst features of modernity, and a fitting place to set utopian fictions if not a utopian life. With an apparent willingness to abandon English domesticity, Butler claimed that he would marry a Maori, if only they didn't "all smoke and carry eels" (117). (One wonders: is carrying an eel like carrying a purse, a gun, an amulet?) Archibald rightly reads Butler as both rejecting English cultural imperatives and being inexorably drawn back to them, as a happy and then an unhappy colonist who celebrated the virtues of indigenous women in problematic ways. This confusion remains confusing: the analysis of the representational fate of these conflicts is insufficient.

In the last chapter, Charles Dickens, Charles Reade, Trollope, and W. M. Thackeray read America with variously jaundiced eyes. In Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44), The Bloomer (1857), The Wandering Heir (1872), The Way We Live Now (1874-75), Henry Esmond (1852), and The Virginians (1859), American women are too tough and capable ("masculinized") to achieve the English version of domesticity. Curiously, this masculinization makes them very attractive to English men; the angel of the house, by contrast, seems alarmingly unsexy, not to mention short-lived. The author's understandably enthusiastic descriptions of American anti-angels prevent her from tackling the implications of this apparent...