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5 Hysterical Citizenship in Grand’s The Heavenly Twins With their independent views about marriage, Lyndall, Grace, and Rhoda typify the New Woman, that late Victorian social and sexual icon. While they suffer excruciating disappointments and, in the case of Lyndall, even death, their narrators nevertheless represent them as complex characters and render their struggles with varying degrees of compassion. Often, however, this social and literary figure of emancipated womanhood received far less sympathetic treatment in the late Victorian print world. As many scholars have noted, the New Woman was its own incitement to discourse, giving rise to numerous essays, editorials, literary reviews, and cartoons, mostly negative and often contradictory. Some contemporary critics claimed that the New Woman, whether in real life or as a literary character, was sexless and, because she violated the edicts of traditional femininity, unnatural, while others argued that she was too sexual and excessively feminine in her lack of self-discipline. However she was figured, the New Woman was often rendered both symbol and cause of all that was wrong in the fin-de-siècle— the degeneration of British masculinity across the social spectrum, from peasants to aristocrats, and the consequent erosions of traditional gender relations , the empire, and homeland security, rendering the unmanned mainland vulnerable to incoming native hordes. In the symbolic economy of late Victorian England, the figure of the New Woman was busy indeed. In this chapter, I examine Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893), a landmark New Woman novel, in the context of what I have identified as late Victorian state fantasy: the fantasy of the state as a heroic actor, imaginatively personified and endowed with the capacity to intervene in individuals ’ lives to help them achieve the good life. A bestseller, The Heavenly Twins was wildly popular in both England and the United States. It presented its readers with lurid spectacles of female injury, rage, and rebellion, setting off a steady stream of damning reviews that pronounced it not only obscene and unwomanly, but also badly written. Unlike The Odd Women, which was 131 132 Hysterical Citizenship in The Heavenly Twins published the same year, The Heavenly Twins is not interested in the economic deprivations of middle-class women. Instead, it attacks the social and political structures that endanger the physical and moral health of privileged women. Of all the novels I have discussed in this book, The Heavenly Twins is most explicitly a feminist protest novel. It self-consciously stakes out a critique of gender relations and provides a dramatic justification for what Grand advocated in her nonfiction journal articles: state regulation of male sexuality. In these writings, Grand argued that men ought to be subjected to physical examinations and certification requirements to make sure they are fit to marry and reproduce, in effect reversing the mode of state biopower sanctioned against prostitutes by the Contagious Diseases Acts. In my reading, the novel’s explicit desire to engage in a politics configured around a certain mode of state intervention accounts for the many contradictions that it has generated for contemporary and recent readers. Rather than locating these contradictions within the specific politics or aesthetics of The Heavenly Twins, I argue that they point to the complexity of this historical moment in liberalism: It is the very claim toward freedom achieved through the means of a masculinist and governmentalized state that constrains the liberal subject. Despite the novel’s statist sympathies, it nevertheless reveals how the more the liberal subject fights to be free through the aegis of state biopower, the more she upholds the structures that subordinate her. In what follows, I examine three primary contradictions in The Heavenly Twins. The first contradiction concerns the novel’s relation to publicity. Historically, because it exposes injustice and is credited with transforming ignorance into knowledge, publicity is liberalism’s antidote to abuses of power. The Heavenly Twins attests to the confidence that reform-minded, liberal Victorians placed in the power of publicity to eradicate social injury. It details the hardships faced by three women from Britain’s upper class: Evadne, daughter of the gentry and the novel’s failed feminist heroine whose self-repression results in insanity; Angelica, daughter of the aristocracy and one of the rebellious twins of the title; and Edith, daughter of the church and the novel’s primary example of how religious serenity anesthetizes women, placing them in harm’s way. Although the form of the novel...

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