Sisters and the English Household: Domesticity and Women's Autonomy in Nineteenth-Century English Literature by Anne D. Wallace (review)

For Anne D. Wallace's Sisters and the English Household: Domesticity and Women's Autonomy in Nineteenth-Century English Literature, the unmarried adult sister in the house is "powerful, provocative, disputed, dangerous—and essential" (173). She disturbs the marital home with her independence and her status as feme sole, which entitles her to own property and keep her earnings; yet she has been scarcely noticed by critics and historians. Plenty of real-life examples are cited, including Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Lamb, and even more fictional ones, among them Fanny Price, Jane Murdstone, Mary Barton's Aunt Esther, Alice Wilson, George Eliot's Gwendolen Harleth, Hans Meyrick's sisters, and Mirah Lapidoth. Many more could have been drawn from Charlotte Yonge alone, and as Wallace convincingly argues, in Eliot's fiction and Dinah Craik's, feminized brothers, like Seth Bede and Phineas Fletcher (not a blood brother, but similar in other respects) assume the unmarried sister role.

Two other terms are crucial to this argument: "corporate" and "industrial domesticity," as experienced in nineteenth-century households. Corporate domesticity refers to the case of unmarried siblings who live in a spousal household, contributing their labor or economic support: a model less common today, with the dominance of the nuclear family, prefigured by the industrial model, which is characterized by the separation of the home space from the working environment. Under these regimes, unmarried adult siblings become anomalous and problematic, even if contributing household work or financial support; though as Wallace argues, the two models often overlap, or, as she aptly puts it, "were in complex conversation with each other, appearing in proliferating variations marked by shifting mixtures of elements of each" (28). This is surely correct, the variations further pressurized by the notorious Marriage with Deceased Wife's Sister (MDWS) controversy, explored here in detail. Wallace's discussion of Craik's little-known novel Hannah (1871), which culminates in a couple's marriage in France, in order to legalize their relationship, brings home the wretched reality of this barrier to marriages deemed incestuous by the law's equation of a sister-in-law with a blood sister.

As Wallace explains from the outset, her approach to the often-strange condition of nineteenth-century sibling cultures differs significantly from that of her predecessors in the field. Her main objection to these is their basis in what she calls "universalizing theories about self and family that have been so strongly challenged in other contexts": in other words the mutual psychological and emotional dependence of nineteenth-century real-life and fictional siblings, especially brothers and sisters, which to modern observers seems obsessive, even unhealthy (6). In opposition to this flawed model, Wallace's recurrent term is "alternative domesticities," but in reality it could be argued that sibling households of all kinds and mutual dependencies seem alternative to twenty-first-century Western cultures (17). Wallace is nevertheless right, after twenty years of scholarly refocusing on the sibling bond, to revitalize the field by posing new questions about this endlessly fascinating relationship.

If her choice of focal texts and authors seems slightly unbalanced (for example, the Wordsworths and Lambs spread across two chapters, unlike Charles Dickens, whose relationship with his sisters-in-law, Mary and Georgina Hogarth, goes unmentioned), her rewarding analysis of canonical texts, such as The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Daniel Deronda (1876), and the less familiar Hannah, enables us to approach these sibling stories via a fresh perspective. Despite the presence of old-fashioned sibling households and fantasies of future living arrangements (such as Tom and Maggie Tulliver's, or Anna and Rex Gascoigne's), the Eliot chapter demonstrates the decline and collapse of corporate domesticity. If only, Wallace muses, Maggie had eloped with Stephen Guest when she had the chance. Notwithstanding the narrator's apparent moral approval of her decision to...