Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860-1900: Representations of Music, Science and Gender in the Leisured Home (review)

Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860-1900: Representations of Music, Science and Gender in the Leisured Home. By Phillis Weliver. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2000. [x, 330 p. ISBN 0-7546-0126-9. $79.95.]

Those chary of the Victorian novel should not be misled by the title of Phyllis Weliver's Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, for her book is about much more than novelistic fiction. Rather, it is an ambitious and wide-ranging study that explores the intersections between nineteenth-century discourses of science, gender, and narrative fiction, with music being the knot in that nexus. Indeed, it is the pivotal presence that music assumes in these other fictions that is the book's great insight.

The introduction, basically a series of literature reviews and overviews, is the weak link and betrays the book's origins as a thesis. Given that Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction reads as long as it does, I, for one, thought the overview of (and apology for?) feminist musicologies, for instance, gratuitous. Further, Weliver's discussion of theoretical matters often comes across as simplistic. For example, she considers "[o]ne main aspect of musicology's cultural study [to be] the gendered division between rational and emotional capabilities" (p. 5). This may well have rung true a decade ago, but I suggest that musicological inquiry now is most fruitful when it reveals the faultlines along which such binaries operate. Perhaps such bald statements have something to do with the book's likely readership: historians of science, Victorianists, students of gender, and also musicologists (perhaps an instance of theoretical complexity for-saken for the endeavour of clarity for non-specialists?). Interestingly, though, the body of the book eschews these types of glitches, and, with "plurality of meaning" being her guiding phrase, Weliver's readings are typically "complex"; this is a refreshing reversal of musicological practice where so often interpretation fails to live up to the claims of theory.

The first chapter is in part a continuation of introductory matters: "the background to the perceptions of music that the large middle- and upper-class readership in Victorian Britain brought to their reading of [the novel]" (p 14). This account of music's place in Victorian society serves to contextualize Weliver's readings of the Victorian novels' use of music. For instance, she begins with a meditation on that well-known phrase, "das Land ohne Musik" (the country without music), as a "gender-packed, class-based, nationalistic idea," exploring the by now commonplace that musical practice in nineteenth-century England was associated with "marginal figures"—that is, everyone who wasn't white, male, and English middle-class (p. 20-21). These ideas have been in circulation for some time now; I suggest that it would be more interesting to begin to explore the fissures in this monolithic myth. Here, Weliver leads the way. Recurring throughout the book is an interest in the use of music, typically by fictional and "real" women, as an agent of transgression: dominant definitions of the gendered self, class boundaries, "separate spheres," and more, were challenged through their entanglement with music. The conclusion, on George du Maurrier's Trilby (1894), brings these concerns together most spectacularly: Weliver reads the eponymous prima donna's vocal triumph as partially self-authored and explores the text's reworking of the Victorian idea(l) of domestic "angel" to incorporate that of the public siren. And if Weliver places Trilby somewhat too facilely alongside the "New Woman," the feminist point by the end of the book is well, but always subtly, made.

Perhaps the most rewarding sections of Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, though, are those that tease out the relationships between music, science, and gender. No doubt this approach is as novel to the history of science as it is to nineteenth-century music studies, and opens up the field to new interpretative...