Corrupt Relations: Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Collins and the Victorian Sexual System, and: Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form, and: Women, Power, and Subversion: Social Strategies in British Fiction, 1778-1860 (review)

130 the minnesota review ScuUy makes his reply to this charge, here leveled at him directly by his friend Arlene, indirectly by his contradictory, critical yet fond memory of Elizabeth Bishop: Ar, I do thrill to some poems I mean, the honest that open up looking right at us, opening us up, I enjoy the rhododendrons the pink more than the purple, they're so fresh they wiU never be accompUces, it's not that I can't feel for this or for Elizabeth or what made Brecht cold as leather, doesn't it get to most people? ("Rhododendron," p. 84) Nonetheless, I would not want to end by suggesting here that ScuUy has discovered or constructed some miraculous genius-style escape from the repressions and constrictions of the lyric mode. Indeed, one measurement of that mode's hegemony will be the extent to which its norms and values render Apollo Helmet inadmissible and/or unrecognizable by definition . As long as this is so, as long as lyric continues to rule the poetry roost within this country , some point wiU remain in seeking to transform and subvert the very terms and processes of such programmaticaUy organicist/formalist lyricism from within as weU as contesting it openly from without. One does not want to choose—not yet— between the tasks of poetry as defined by David McKain, Miriam Goodman, and James ScuUy. Such tactical forbearance, too, is what in poetry and elsewhere the notion of counterhegemonic struggle is about. FRED PFEIL Richard Barickman, Susan MacDonald, and Myra Stark. Corrupt Relations: Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Collins and the Victorian Sexual System. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. 285 pp. $25 (cloth). Penny Boumeiha. Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form. New Jersey: Barnes & Noble, 1982. 178 pp. $24.95 (cloth). Judith Lowder Newton. Women, Power, and Subversion: Social Strategies in British Fiction , 1778-1860. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1981. 202 pp. $15 (cloth). The three books under review He within the new terrain of marxist-feminist literary criticism. However, they are in large part close readings of familiar nineteenth-century novels, drawing for their theoretical orientation on established scholars Uke Terry Eagleton, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. The authors have written books which are in certain ways safe, in other ways exciting, for aU raise provocative questions about the relationship of fiction and ideology. Newton on the whole provides the most satisfying answers to her questions. Barickman, MacDonald, and Stark spend their energies in such close examination of dozens of novels that context and issues grow increasingly fuzzy. Boumelha's is the only book which offers substantial original research in the period, but it is not well related to her Uterary concerns. The other two books rely quite straightforwardly on accessible secondary material on the woman question. The interest therefore lies in the subtlety with which the authors show the novels both participating in and resisting the dominant ideology about women. 131 reviews In Women, Power, and Subversion Judith Newton focusses on only four novels, but she is so splendidly cogent in deUneating her concerns that one feds this is conceptually a "big" book which justifies its title. Her thesis is that as a consequence of rapid industrialization between 1740 and 1840, while middle-class men experienced increased power and autonomy, middle-class women, by contrast, experienced a loss. Her four women writers resented this new marginalization and resisted the emerging ideology of woman's separate sphere of influence, intended to compensate for loss of real power. Burney, Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and EUot redefine power as capabiUty in self-definition and self-rule rather than control over others; their Bildungsromane show protagonists exercizing this alternative power and gaining a measure of autonomy from the men who would rule them. However, these subversive writers are themselves subverted, for in varying ways they bend to social reality, to conventional fictional structures, and to ideology itself, deforming their initial "quest" plot in which the heroine has some efficacy to a traditional "love and marriage " plot or to the punishing ending of TAe Mill on the Floss. UnUke other studies of covert resistance in women's writing (most recently 7Ae Mad Woman in the...