The Angel out of the House: Philanthropy and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England

Conclusion

Name /V2007/V2007_CON 12/19/01 06:03AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 216 # 1 Conclusion As I was finishing the manuscript for this book, our university’s theater department staged a production of the English playwright Sarah Daniels’s The Gut Girls (1989).1 This play, which is set in turn-of-thecentury Deptford, indicates the continuing relevance of my investigation of representations of women philanthropists. The protagonists are four working-class girls employed in the gutting sheds of a large meatprocessing operation who are ‘‘rescued’’ by a woman philanthropist who finds them jobs as domestic servants when the sheds are shut down. Literally mired in blood and guts, the ‘‘gut girls’’ work in the worst imaginable conditions and fulfill all the nineteenth-century stereotypes about mill girls: they are loud, vulgar, and aggressive; they wear ludicrous hats but no underwear; they swear and drink; and even men are afraid of them. This late-twentieth-century feminist play makes heroines out of these unlikely characters. Their independence, individuality, streetwise intelligence, and bawdy sexuality are what make them appealing, rather than appalling, to a twentieth-century audience. The end of the play, which shows all the girls reintegrated into more ‘‘proper’’ and passive domestic roles, is meant to provoke a sense of loss and sadness, if not outrage, from the audience. Name /V2007/V2007_CON 12/19/01 06:03AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 217 # 2 In Daniels’s hands, the philanthropist Lady Helena, unlike the sympathetically portrayed gut girls, becomes almost villainous.2 Although she is made to appear well-intentioned, Lady Helena is mocked for her naive, snobbish, and self-interested attempts to ‘‘help’’ the working-class heroines . While she does visit them in their horrifying workplace and tries to see them as individuals, her goal is to remake them into a version of respectable middle-class womanhood by teaching them to be ‘‘ladylike’’ and fitting them for the role of domestic servants. The audience, of course, immediately recognizes that to remove the girls from the gutting sheds, however horrible the conditions, is to take from them their autonomy and place them in a subordinate position where their every movement is subject to surveillance. Not only their individuality but also their lively working-class cultural rituals and relationships must be suppressed as they learn to conform to genteel middle-class values. Daniels’s view of the woman philanthropist is, of course, different from the perspective of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women writers I have been discussing. Her play does, however, show how philanthropy offered a sense of usefulness and power to middle- and upperclass women. For Lady Helena, one result of her efforts to retrain and mold working- class women is to enhance her own sense of accomplishment and importance. The play does acknowledge her altruistic intentions and her oppression at the hands of men of her own class, but it portrays the woman philanthropist as (unwittingly) abusing the power she holds over other women by virtue of her class position. Daniels is right that the personal gains of women philanthropists were in some ways achieved at the expense of working-class women—and men. My point is, however, that despite the power dynamics of such relationships between charitable women and the less fortunate people they aided and patronized, philanthropy did accomplish something for women even of the working classes. Aside from its specific effects—monetary or material aid or providing jobs (and historically these were often more appreciated than in Daniels’s play) for working-class people and affording a sense of power and fulfillment for the female philanthropists—women’s philanthropy contributed to British culture a new sense of what women of all classes, cultures, and races desired and were capable of attaining. The sadness one feels at the end of a play such as Gut Girls is for the potential Conclusion 217 Name /V2007/V2007_CON 12/19/01 06:03AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 218 # 3 missed in the women of all classes. This is a regret generated by the underlying belief that most contemporary viewers, both women and men, have that women do want and need and can achieve success and happiness outside a narrowly defined domestic existence. This assumption, which has come to be self-evident at least among most late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century viewers and readers, was in large part created and naturalized by...