George Gissing, the Working Woman, and Urban Culture (review)

Feminist readers have had a troubled relationship with George Gissing, whose relation to late-Victorian feminism ranged from self-protective to emancipatory. While most of his novels portray the modern woman with sympathy and understanding, Gissing deliberately avoids head-on discussions of crucial political issues such as suffrage. And although there is no expressed hostility toward feminism in the novels, Gissing (or the Gissing persona) often seems confused or exasperated by women's struggles—his progressivism is qualified by both a sceptical view of sexual relationships and by fin-de-siècle exhaustion. At times, Gissing's urban novels seem to have been written by an ardent social reformer, at others by a disappointed man who wishes women and their complaints would just go away.

Emma Liggins addresses this ambiguity with breadth and judiciousness in George Gissing, the Working Woman, and Urban Culture. In placing Gissing beside social investigators and naturalist writers, Liggins identifies common narratives surrounding the position of the working woman at the turn of the century, who became a flashpoint for debates about issues such as maternity, marriage, women's sexual freedom, and female bachelorhood, as well as questions of class and capital, including the exploitation of labor and obstacles to female professionalism. Liggins argues that journalism, government reports, statistical analyses, and feminist pamphlets published in the 1880s and 1890s profoundly informed the way novelists—both men and women—imagined the private lives of working women, whose increasing visibility on city streets and in commercial venues raised concerns about women's freedom and respectability. Transgressing the boundaries of the male-dominated public sphere, the working woman in her various incarnations—prostitute, barmaid, shopgirl, typist, factory worker, journalist—found herself engaged in the struggle to legitimize her presence in the new urban environment and to defend her right to work outside the domestic sphere.

Gissing's novels overlap with Zolaesque naturalists, East End novelists, and New Woman writers, all of whom take a sociological angle on the working woman's urban lifestyle. After reading Liggins's book, I am convinced that what makes Gissing's work distinct from others is the sheer scope of his research and social observation. Gissing is the Victorian realist par excellence. In an 1897 retrospective, the National Review claimed "there can not be a corner of the metropolis which, with his observant eye and quick ear, he has not explored, nor a phase of its varied existence that he has not studied" (xviii). Liggins points to Gissing's close friendship with the social investigator Clara Collet and his commitment to fact-checking as evidence of his scrupulousness; her argument is that Gissing's novels can be "traced back to the female investigator's mission" (xiv), an endorsement of the feminism she discloses in tight analyses of about a dozen novels, organized around different types of female urbanism. In her chapter on prostitution, for example, Liggins argues that in two early novels, Workers in the Dawn (1880) and The Unclassed (1884), Gissing's characterization of streetwalkers reflects middle-class disgust for women's "shamelessness" and sexual knowledge, while uncovering the "potential freedoms and sexual independence" (11) of prostitutes who adopt the role of the flâneuse. Liggins also sees provocative contradictions in Gissing's treatment of the sweatshop girl in Demos (1886), Thyrza (1887), and The Nether World (1889): although he avoids confronting working-class female sexuality and is uneasy about working-class solidarity, Gissing is exceptionally alert to the hardships endured by women factory workers, whose responsibilities included childcare, managing a household, and paid labor. Although the novels have their share of working-class viragos, Liggins usefully demonstrates how Gissing revises negative stereotypes of working-class women as degraded, sexually depraved, passive, and ignorant.

Readers who know Gissing chiefly from New Grub Street (1891) and The Odd Women (1893) will find Liggins's analyses of those texts illuminating. Liggins shifts the focus slightly from discrimination against women's white-collar...