Feminine Subjects in Masculine Fiction: Modernity, Will, and Desire, 1870-1910 by Meredith Miller (review)

Meredith Miller’s Feminine Subjects in Masculine Fiction: Modernity, Will, and Desire, 1870-1910, indirectly takes aim at Virginia Woolf’s tongue-in-cheek identification of December 1910 as the approximate moment when all human relations changed.¹ Miller’s study argues that both the formal innovations and the feminist ideologies sometimes seen as originating in modernism actually emerge in Victorian fiction. Taking a cultural-materialist approach, she recovers the original publication contexts of a range of novels by representative male authors from Wilkie Collins to E. M. Forster to chart the ways in which “female consciousness becomes the signal location of the unstable experience of modernity” in the late-nineteenth-century novel (2). Her work calls for a rethinking of standard narratives of literary history, particularly those that might turn a blind eye to the formal innovations and ideological subversion of Victorian fiction by casting the Victorian novel as the relatively simple, comparatively tame forerunner of the modernist novel. With critical sensitivity, Miller foregrounds the intersections between “discourses of gender, law, aesthetics and economies of desire” (ix). Her narrative argues that the cultural problems of female agency and subjectivity are, in fact, central to the aesthetic development seen in the late-nineteenth-century novel. She tracks this development and designates an “emblematic modernist moment” when Gabriel Conroy beholds Gretta on the stairs in “The Dead” as a distant, aesthetic object (2). Overall, Miller argues for opening new conceptual points of intersection between Victorian and modernist fiction.

Miller’s narrative begins with Collins’s The New Magdalen and The Law and the Lady.² Her fascinating exploration of the illustrations that accompanied The Law and the Lady in the Graphic foregrounds the tension between the female character as aestheticized object and interiorized subject. Her study of Collins sets up several premises for her work, which explores the ways in which male writers “use romance narrative to work out the problem of the feminine subject in relation to embedded discourses of law, aesthetics, empire and finance” in response to the newly emerging feminine public sphere in the late nineteenth century (58). She expands this narrative with an analysis of Anthony Trollope, who, she notes, is often omitted from narratives of literary history that explain the elevation of the novel to the arena of high culture around the turn of the century. She recovers the contemporary reception of Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds and notes the unease with which critics greeted the novel’s moral ambiguity.³ This discomfort, Miller argues, arises from the novel’s morally unstable plot, which casts “woman as the disenfranchised subject of will and experiments with the effects of this innovation” (66). Feminine Subjects expands its study of the variety of male authors’ appropriations and reshapings of the romance narrative in ways that foreground female characters as the “fractured location of the unstable psychological self” in works by Forster, George Gissing, Henry James, and finally, Sigmund Freud, whose fictional strategies in “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” Miller reads in the context of Victorian fiction (73, 177).⁴ Throughout, Miller foregrounds intersections between cultural, ideological, and moral questions and literary form in the Victorian novels she studies.

Joyce plays a minor role in Feminine Subjects, serving to mark the end of its Victorian narrative and a transition to modernism. Important to Miller’s coda is the notion that Joyce embodies “the idea of Modernism as difficulty of access” (203), and she refers somewhat hastily to the Ulysses schema to support this claim without historicizing it (in the context, for example, of Joyce’s responses to his censors, which he discussed when he sent the schema to Carlo Linati⁵). Historical context, too, is missing from her discussion of “The Dead,” which culminates in the book’s narrative trajectory. Here, we see a fairly standard analysis of Gabriel’s aestheticization of Gretta without recourse to the story’s Irish...