A Room of His Own: A Literary-Cultural Study of Victorian Clubland

Epilogue: A Room of Her Own

 &Epilogue A Room of Her Own The Modern Woman with her clubs, her debates, her freedom of action and costume, is forming a public opinion of her own at an amazing rate; and seems to be preparing to “spank” and even thump the Middle-class Man in real earnest. —Edward Carpenter, Love’s Coming of Age For much of the nineteenth century, conventional wisdom deemed women intractably unclubbable. The standard arguments in circulation at the time often began by pointing to women’s “natural” inclination not to be social. As shy creatures, they did not possess the savoir faire that men embodied . Furthermore, women did not value solidarity; they were not capable of a wider view and, therefore, had little sense of class, or group, allegiance. Even more damning, conventional wisdom saw women as inherently competitive . One anonymous reviewer in the Saturday Review in 1874 announced that “[t]he very dress of women is a non-clubable element” (“Last New Club,” 775), leading the author to conclude that the ugly but “democratic” clothing of men ensured their native right to clubbability.1 In 1859, George Augustus Sala wrote confidently, “I may say that it is a subject for sincere congratulation that there are no ladies’ clubs. We have been threatened with them sometimes, but they have always been nipped in the bud” (Twice, 213). An often-told clubland story recounts how a club that was considering the dreaded concession to women as a means of increasing the subscriptions was spared when a member at the general meeting implored, “Another guinea a year, gentlemen. Isn’t it worth that to keep women out?”2 Writing in 1903, Bernard Darwin begrudgingly admits the inevitability of women’s clubs, even as he recycles the old arguments against their likelihood: a room of his own  & Clearly such clubs have supplied a much felt want, but at the same time it may be suggested that women are not, or perhaps it is merely that they have not yet had time to become, quite as clubbable as men. It may be merely that they are less fond of good things to eat and drink, and less given to sitting on their shoulder blades in deep armchairs. It is almost certain that they are as a whole more economical in the matters of solid, lazy comfort. Whatever the cause, the male visitor is apt, very ungratefully, to find something of aridity in a ladies’ club and to miss the atmosphere of his own jealously guarded castle. (33) Even before the boom time of women’s clubs in the 1890s, anxiety about female encroachment on clubland was rampant. Two cartoons, Sir John Gilbert ’s “Miss Bicknell’s Plan for the Garrick Club Smoking Room” (1870) and George du Maurier’s “Female Clubs v. Matrimony” (1878), articulate the key fear about clubwomen: women’s clubs would radically alter the pattern and social habits of women’s lives (figs. E.1–E.2). Clubs would allow women to be alone in the city; they would provide the place for women to assemble in the city (the opposite nightmarish possibility but equally unsettling); and they would liberatewomentobefreeinthecity(perhapsthemostfrighteningconsequence of all). And so the exchange between two figures in du Maurier’s Punch cartoon Figure E.1. “Female Clubs v. Matrimony,” by George du Maurier. From Punch’s Almanack for 1878. Epilogue: A Room of Her Own  & “Female Clubs v. Matrimony” is telling: having no trouble at all luxuriating in the lazy comfort of her club chair (despite what Bernard Darwin says), the foregroundedfigure,whomweassumetobethepassionatelynamedMissFirebrace , is inviting her club sister, Mrs. Bolingbroke Tompkins—burdened with a matron’s name—to stay for dinner with their chums. This Victorian wife confesses that she must decline the invitation because her father-in-law has left, leaving her husband pining for her company, and she is expected at home. All she can do, in this psycho-cultural battle between homosocial pleasures and heterosexual obligations, is sigh in memory of the delights of single-sex life. Sir John Gilbert, the illustrator of the second cartoon, imagines a far darker outcome, were women permitted into his club. He draws, as he admits, “with feelings of terror, alarm, and indignation,” and his inscription reads, in part, “The Gentlemen would be driven away, back into drafty corners, anywhere in fact. The tendency of the age, the alarming encroachments on all sides, makes Figure E.2. “Miss Bicknell...