The Woman and the Hour: Harriet Martineau and Victorian Ideologies by Caroline Roberts (review)

Laura M. Robinson Nipissing University Caroline Roberts. The Woman and [he Hour: Harriet Martineau and Victorian Ideologies. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002. Pp. 253. Cloth. $30.00. In 1855, convinced she was about to die, Harriet Martineau prepared her own obituary, began to write her autobiography, and waited for death to take her. It did not. Instead, Martineau lived for another 21 years, publish­ ing regularly on subjects as diverse as political economy, the 1791 Haitian revolution, and mesmerism; corresponding with Elizabeth Barrett, Jane Welsh Carlyle, and Florence Nightingale (among others); and campaign­ ing to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts, which legislated often brutal gynecological examinations for any woman merely suspected of soliciting in English port towns. “Female Industry” (1859), Martineau's trenchant argument for pay equity published in the prestigious Edinburgh Review, aptly describes not only the women’s work she enumerates in that article but also her own modus vivendi. Long neglected, Martineau’s industry has increasingly attracted scholarly attention, not only among Victorianists working in the disci­ plines of English and History, but also among sociologists, some of whom have recently claimed her as “a founding figure in the discipline” (Hill and Hoecker-Drysdale ix) alongside Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim. As Helena Znaniecka Lopata remarks, “Martineau’s recent ascendancy ... lags somewhat behind Martineau’s earlier popularity and fame among the literate public in England and America” (Hill and HockerDrysdale xv). Caroline Roberts makes clear, however, that Martineau’s “earlier popularity and fame” were always controversial. In her valuable new book, The Woman and the Hour: HarrietMartineau and Victorian Ide­ ologies, Roberts traces the controversies surrounding seven of Martineau’ s early publications, from 1832to 1851, ending her study just shy ofthe illness that prompted Martineau to pen her autobiography in 1855. Roberts reconstructs what she felicitously terms the “noisy reception” (4) of Martineau’s works, but eschews a strictly biographical focus. Mak­ ing use of historical analysis, exegesis, and theory, Roberts focuses on “Martineau’s texts and nineteenth-century culture rather than on her life” (6), “[situating] these texts historically in order to understand why they were controversial” (3). Given Martineau’s intellectual interests and commitBook Reviews | 239 ments, such historical contextualization entails a broad range of research, and Roberts cuts an admirable swath through nineteenth-century theories of political economy, the abolitionist movement, mid-Victorian medicine, and questions of historical representation and religious faith. Although critics have proclaimed the weakness of Martineau’s fiction (“Her fiction lacked personal commitment, she neither developed char­ acter nor evoked realism, her dialogues were wooden and didactic, and she relied upon the narrative to carry the action along” [38], states recent biographer Valerie Pichanick), Roberts is at her critical best on the novels. Her argument is most compelling in her chapters on Deerbrook (1839), a novel whose focus on its “apothecary-hero” (52) adumbrates Victorian fic­ tional representations of the medical profession such as Lydgate’ s medical career in George Eliot’ s Middlemarch (1871-72), and The Hour and the Man (1841), Martineau’ s novel about Toussaint L’Ouverture, the “self-proclaimed ‘Buonaparte of St. Domingo’(now Haiti)” (76). In these chapters, Roberts addresses previous criticisms, like Pichanick’ s, about the veracity of Martineau’s characterizations, reading these characterizations not as flat or inauthentic, but as strategic. Unlike critics who fault Martineau for failing to represent either historical verisimilitude or feminist possibilities for change, Roberts shows how Deerbrook’s “clinical perspective” (65) and The Hour and the Man’ s “description of Toussaint’ s crisis of identity and cultural dislocation” (89) actively disrupt early Victorian “middle-class ideological norms” (60). Historicizing both Martineau’ s language of char­ acterization and the genres of realism and historical romance, Roberts dem­ onstrates convincingly Martineau’ s serious engagement with contemporary issues—the increasing “professionalization of medical practitioners” and the status of “clinical medicine” (52), “the relation of women to medicine” (75), “problems surrounding the knowledge and representation of history” (77), and “the experience of history by the colonized subject” (77). Martineau s serious engagement with contemporary issues began in the early 1820s when she contributed regularly to the Monthly Repository, a politically radical Unitarian journal. The only paid contributor from 1829 to...