The Feminine Political Novel in Victorian England (review)

The index of Barbara Leah Harman’s perspicacious new book contains a double entry on the enduring subject of its concern: the distinction between private and public and the collapse of that distinction. The second category has twice the references of the first: for writers of fiction, anything with boundaries invites boundary crossing, and boundary-crossing plots display the unstable fictiveness of distinctions even when the plots appear to confirm or restore them. In the plots Harman studies, restless “flaneur” heroines move into public spaces on consciously or half-consciously political business: those penetrations, and the responses to them by world and heroine, undo the private/public distinction in the very act of illuminating it.

To question whether these fictional dismantlings of a social fiction actually effect material change, in the novel’s society or the social text the novel addresses, is to invite a reductive Foucauldian answer untruthful to the experience of reading, Harman argues. It took an enormous effort to imagine a space for female public behavior, let alone feminist political thought, in a culture of fetishized female “purity.” Harman settles into readings of Shirley (1849), North and South (1854), Diana of the Crossways (1885), In the Year of Jubilee (1894), and The Convert (1907), in order to watch five writers with some stake in the progressive political and intellectual movements of their time display, and betray, this effort. Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell, George Meredith, George Gissing, and Elizabeth Robins, male and female novelists alike, shift uneasily within their own construals of their female protagonists, who discover that their personal histories, their own private bodies, may be construed to speak a political narrative or misconstrued to speak a sexual one.

The Feminine Political Novel in Victorian England is a book attentive to different struggles within different texts and sympathetic to partial achievements: it does not press a new theoretical argument. For many readers, the book will be most useful for local insights—a complex argument for a more proto-feminist reading of the master/slave language in Shirley, for instance, or a tracking of the “palpable connection” between the way Meredith’s “houseless” Diana hungers for the House of Commons and her hunger for other kinds of housings (85–87). But the most interesting illumination emerging from these five readings, in my view, is the mediating role of covert and overt blackmail, as Victorian writers strive, like progressive elements in their culture, to convert the paralyzingly open secret of female sexuality to the more mobile, and eventually mobilizable, if risky, currency of the public woman, and the female public.

As Harman argues it, Shirley Keeldar and Margaret Hale gain “unmediated knowledge” from on-the-spot visits to scenes of class war, Brontë’s protagonist watching the scene unseen in order to continue the deliberate “bafflement” (39) of her watchers, Gaskell’s heroine rushing onstage, her body at once boundary between classes and incitement to boundary crossing. Marriage proposals from the embattled mill masters follow almost immediately: though the contexts are very different, the men enact the social instinct to reconfine the knowing woman—especially if she is known to be knowing—in the domesticity that emerges “pure” from the blackmailing shadow of the public woman, that is, the fallen woman. Harman’s careful reading of the scene in Diana of the Crossways where the brilliant hostess receives and recirculates knowledge of a major change in the political direction of the country, highlights the way in which the sharer of the secret expects an exchange of carnal for political knowledge, an extortion which the woman short-circuits by opening her secret to the more promiscuous but less intimate gaze of the newspaper-reading public.

Harman draws attention to Meredith’s curiously insistent reconstruction of the “purity” of his heroine after each “spotting” (86) act in the public eye, and to a similar process in Gissing’s novel, which a decade later is done with paens to purity but which substitutes for...