"A Track to the Water's Edge": Learning to Suffer in Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins

She said, "And, of those that come first, some are swept away, and are heard of no more; their bodies do not even build the bridge?"

"And are swept away, and are heard of no more—and what of that?" he said.

"And what of that—" she said.

"They make a track to the water's edge." . . . And she said, "Over that bridge which shall be built with our bodies, who will pass?"

He said, "The entire human race.

Olive Schreiner¹

"Is that how you interpret her?" he said. "One who holds herself well in hand, bent upon enjoying every moment of her life and all the variety of it, perceiving that it is stupid to narrow it down to the indulgence of one particular set of emotions, and determined not to swamp every faculty by constant cultivation of the animal instincts to which all ages have created altars! Best for herself, I suppose, but hardly possible at present. The capacity, you know, is only coming. . . . She will have the perception, the inclination; but the power—unless she is exceptional, the power will only be for her daughter's daughter."

"Then she must suffer and do no good?"

"She must suffer, yes; but I don't know about the rest. She may be a seventh wave, you know!"

Sarah Grand²

Critics from the 1890s onward have remarked on the flaws and failures of New Woman novels. Even the most sympathetic have accused the novels of sacrificing artistic merit to polemics, or vice versa. I argue, however, that these "flaws" must be read as integral to the political and aesthetic project of many New Woman novels: to fashion new women (and men) through the very process of reading New Woman novels. Thus, Olive Schreiner's claim, in her feminist allegory "Three Dreams in a Desert" (1890), that the path to the "Land of Freedom" lay "Down the banks of Labour, through the water of Suffering" (pp. 76-77) can be interpreted, in part, as signifying the intellectual labor and suffering of reading. Not only do New Woman novels like Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins (1893) represent women for whom reading becomes a painful labor of self-fashioning, but the novels themselves force a similar kind of suffering on their readers. In other words, the novels offer to their readers the possibility of activism through reading. By promising utopian alternatives that collapse into dystopian narrative breaks and (fore)closures, the novels demand from their readers that they suffer for the benefit of future generations, that they become part of the "track to the water's edge."

One of the problems in criticism of the New Woman novel has been the difficulty of defining the genre, and this difficulty has produced conflicting accounts of the political efficacy versus the artistic merit of texts. Critics such as Ann Ardis, Jane Eldridge Miller, Lyn Pykett, and Rita Felksi stress the "newness" of the New Woman.³ They have underscored the genre's innovations and its connections to modernism, highlighting, in Ardis's words, its "intertextual dynamic" and "def[iance of] formalist assumptions about the 'unity' of literary work" (pp. 3-4). Conversely, scholars such as Marilyn Bonnell and Ann Heilmann emphasize the "womanliness" of the New Woman, arguing that the New Woman writers' political commitment to converting readers conflicted with modernist and decadent experimentation.⁴ Often critics articulate the genre's difficulties as its "falling short" of a feminist, political goal. As Sally Ledger writes, for example, of The Heavenly Twins, "Whilst it is undoubtedly a transgressive novel, residual elements of Victorian sexual ideology mark it as a transitional text, caught, like the New Woman of the 1890s herself, between the old and the new, the Victorian and the modern."⁵ We can trace this sense of the New Woman's insufficiency to the rhetoric of the Edwardian women's suffrage movement. As Lisa Tickner explains in her impressive account of this movement, The Spectacle of Women, Edwardian activists needed to distance their own political aims from the sexualized and psychologized versions of femininity presented in the fiction of the previous decades.⁶ Maria DiCenzo notes that the militant campaigners in particular tended to "dismiss the nineteenth-century origins of the movement, to focus on recent events and to present the militant movement as a significant break from the past."⁷ I would suggest, however, that this Edwardian view of the New Woman has also informed current feminist scholarship of the suffrage campaign. Tickner, for example, describing New Woman literature as a product of "the 'doldrum years' of the suffrage campaign," writes that New Woman authors not only fell short of the political ideals of the movement, but actually "did the suffragists an unwitting disservice by associating women's emancipation with sexual emancipation, and with heroines whose principled independence leads them back into domesticity, or to a stickier end" (pp. 183-84).⁸

Even late-twentieth-century and twenty-first-century critics who have worked to reclaim New Woman fiction from the "doldrums" have tended to reinforce a sense of its deficiencies. One thing about which most critics of the New Woman seem to agree is that the work of analyzing these novels lies in explicating the texts' semi-articulate expressions of desire. That is, the critic's job is to realize what is inchoate for the heroines (and in some cases the authors) themselves—whether it be sexual desire, desire for excitement and freedom, or desire for fulfilling work—and thereby mine the "hidden" pleasures of the New Woman texts. As Ledger writes of Grand's hysterical heroine in The Heavenly Twins, "Evadne has to repress her sexual desire in order to take up a 'pure' position, and it is in the articulation of this repressed desire that the pleasure of the text resides."⁹ Similarly, Teresa Mangum notes that Grand's cross-dressing heroine Angelica "alone possesses the potential for resistance" through her gender-bending masquerade.¹⁰ Yet, this focus on finding desire and fulfillment creates a kind of narrative logic in which the dissatisfactions depicted in New Woman novels are rewarded by critical analyses that reveal their subversive pleasures. In these accounts the politically or sexually subversive kernel must be winnowed from the conservative chaff that "spoils" so many New Woman novels like The Heavenly Twins.

This emphasis on discovering the pleasures of the New Woman text tends to elide the politics of reading that developed in and around the New Woman novel. A close look at the politics reveals more continuity between Victorian and Edwardian activists than the Edwardians claimed. In fact, many of the activist writers who condemned the "somnolence" of previous generations of women and who felt the need to distance themselves from the New Woman were the same women who had ushered in the New Woman in the 1880s and 90s. Both Grand and Schreiner, for example, were original members of the Women Writers' Suffrage League. As Sowon Park notes, "The belief in realism and the anticipation of a women's literature that would effect social change also reflected the experience of the WWSL's core members, mainly women in their forties and fifties who had lived through the 1890s and indeed had written the 'woman question' novels that had had an immediate and considerable impact."¹¹

What is even more important to recognize, however, is the extent to which New Woman authors themselves anticipated the misapprehension of their work by future generations. This factor, perhaps, is what most sets the New Woman authors apart from the rhetoric of traditional "long-suffering" femininity: the sense that what they do alienates them from their own world and from the future world for which they sacrifice. As Schreiner wrote to an imagined future audience for Woman and Labour:

You will look back at us with astonishment! You will wonder at passionate struggles that accomplished so little. . . . You will marvel at the labour that ended in so little;—but, what you will never know is how it was thinking of you and for you, that we struggled as we did and accomplished the little which we have done; that it was in the thought of your larger realisation and fuller life, that we found consolation for the futilities of our own.¹²

The political activism of the fin-de-siècle New Woman does not look like the pageantry and militancy of the Edwardian suffrage movement, but it is activism nonetheless. The revolutionary potential of the New Woman novel lies not in the possibilities for self-realization, liberation, or satisfaction for its characters or readers, or even in the possibilities for community-building through shared experiences, but rather in its complex theorizing of the self-sacrifice that it moves its readers to perform.

Reading Activists Reading

Their lyrical force, the imaginative woof and warp of their parables and the dignified cadence of their language had impressed me in my youth so that I read them many times for sheer emotional joy, but their meaning had evidently not penetrated to me. . . . The words hit out a bare literal description of the pilgrimage of women. It fell on our ears more like an A B C railway guide to our journey than a figurative parable, though its poetic strength was all the greater for that.

Lady Constance Lytton¹³

I want to turn briefly to a militant suffrage text that highlights the New Woman's connections to her activist successors. Like many first-person accounts of conversion and activism in the women's suffrage movement, Lady Constance Lytton's 1914 autobiography, Prisons and Prisoners, details her transformation from somnolence to activism and describes the humiliation and torture of imprisonment and forcible feeding after her arrest for participation in militant political demonstrations.¹⁴ Barbara Green has argued evocatively that Lytton's reading of her own suffering body provides a way of understanding the "ways in which the suffragettes' self-representations negotiate and combine the analysis of subjection and the activity of resistance" (pp. 99-100). But I want to add one more layer to this analysis and focus on Lytton's reading of herself reading, especially her description of hearing Schreiner's "Three Dreams in a Desert" recited by fellow suffragette prisoner in Holloway Gaol, Emmeline Pethick Lawrence. Indeed, the chapter in which Lytton describes Lawrence's recitation is titled "A Track to the Water's Edge" in homage to Schreiner. As Lytton says, "Olive Schreiner, more than any one other author, has rightly interpreted the woman's movement and symbolised and immortalised it by her writings. Now after even so short an experience of the movement as I had known, this 'Dream' seemed scarcely an allegory" (p. 156). In this account we see Lytton, the imprisoned suffragette, caught in the present—allowing her body to be one of "'thousand times ten thousand and thousands of thousands'" (p. 158) who will make "a track to the water's edge"—and dreaming of the future, that distant Land of Freedom, which she and her contemporaries will never live to see. Committed to enduring the horrors of prison for a utopian vision of the future, she interprets her own activism through her reading.

The relationship between reading and activism becomes especially vivid when Lytton describes the after-effects of the communal "reading" experience: "We dispersed and went back to our hard beds, to the thought of our homes, to the depressing surroundings of our fellow prisoners, to the groans and cries of agonised women—content. As I laid my head on the rattling pillow I surrendered my normal attitude towards literature, and thought 'There is some point, some purpose in it after all'" (p. 158). Here Lytton revises the Edwardian suffragette's standard view of literature as something purposeless, divorced from political action through her interpretation of her own reading and its relationship to her politicized suffering. Her prison experience is, in some sense, legitimized by (and legitimizes) her reading—her suffering is the "point" of Schreiner's parable. Moreover, Lytton's analysis of her affective and critical attachment to Schreiner's parable here, I would argue, is emblematic of the reading experience offered by the New Woman novel. With her interstitial position, caught between material reality and utopian allegory, the suffragette represents a particular kind of reader: an activist who is brought into being not only through her sympathetic experience of suffering but also through her critical appraisal of the political efficacy of that suffering.

The question, then, is how does a novel teach its readers to suffer, to make "a track to the water's edge"? Schreiner offers us a starting-point for answering this question when she writes in Woman and Labour:

[A]gonising moments must arise, when the individual, seeing the necessity for adopting new courses of action, or for accepting new truths, or conforming to new conditions, will yet be tortured by the hold of traditional convictions; and the man or woman who attempts to adapt their life to the new material conditions and to harmony with the new knowledge, is almost bound at some time to rupture the continuity of their own psychological existence.

(pp. 269-70)

It is because of this "rupture," she argues, that "the art of our age tends persistently to deal with subtle social problems, religious, political, and sexual, to which the art of the past holds no parallel" (p. 270). If we are to accept Schreiner's characterization of her age's art, it does much to explain the troubled reception of New Woman novels by feminist readers from their initial publication to the present day. They are premised on the reader's "tortured" interstitial position between the insufficiencies of the present and the vision of the future.¹⁵ They are, by definition, caught in the "agonising moments" between the old and the new because they produce such moments as a function of their being read.

In presupposing a contentious relationship with their readers, New Woman novels imagine, paradoxically, a readership that must be educated and transformed before it can read the "new" fiction. New Woman novels, therefore, are predicated on an a priori failed narrative project. In eliciting their readers' emotional responses, they play off of the structures of feeling that govern the world from which they emerge. Simultaneously, though, they perform a kind of negative conditioning against that training, punishing the desire for romance, sensation, happy endings. As one admiring critic of George Gissing wrote: "The Odd Women, is to me the most successful thing ever written with which to make one's self entirely miserable."¹⁶ The structure of "reflective reading" upon which the reader's relationship to New Woman novels is based—a relationship in which suffering is both identified with and interpreted—provides a possibility of "strategic" sensationalism in the service of social evolution. To read the New Woman novel, therefore, is to suffer in the service of future generations, but it is also to render one's service obsolete. Like the woman in Schreiner's parable, whose body will be "swept away, and . . . heard of no more," the New Woman reader must acknowledge that those future generations will not be able to understand her sacrifice.¹⁷

Jennifer Burwell's description of the mental disjunction produced by utopian critique does much to explain why the goals of New Woman novels require an essentially unsatisfying reading experience:

Utopia implicitly critiques existing conditions by explicitly thematizing a set of wishes and hopes for an alternative society; critique implicitly draws upon the utopian impulse to establish the "outside" of existing conditions upon which our notion of critical distance rests. . . . The more the utopian impulse in general and the subject in particular is understood to be embedded and implicated in existing conditions, then, the more dire become the predictions for the possibility of moving beyond these conditions toward a positively transformed society.¹⁸

I would argue that the activist reading provoked by a New Woman novel like The Heavenly Twins offers a way for us to imagine a subject "embedded" in its own culture but nonetheless capable of maintaining social critique and utopian idealism simultaneously. Furthermore, I would suggest that any utopian narrative, theoretical or fictional, depends implicitly for its effectiveness (and affectiveness) on its own "embeddedness" in its culture. It depends, specifically, on suffering—not only or necessarily within its narrative structure, but as an effect of its being read. For, how else can a utopia be a utopia without the melancholia produced in the reader by the realization that "here and now" is impossibly distant from that ideal world?

Utopia is lost before it is gained—or, to put it another way, it is always for the future generations and never for "me" or "you," never for the reader. Yet as Slavoj Žižek explains,

the utopian future is neither simply fully realized, present, nor simply evoked as a distant promise that justifies present violence. Rather, it is as if, in a unique suspension of temporality, in the short circuit between the present and the future, we are—as if by grace—for a brief time allowed to act as if the utopian future is (not yet fully here, but) already at hand, just there to be grabbed.¹⁹

Thus, in a sense, the rewards of a utopian/dystopian text like The Heavenly Twins reside precisely in its refusal to offer rewards; or, to put it another way, suffering is its own reward. As Schreiner writes in Woman and Labour, "For her . . . who sees beyond the present, though in a future which she knows she will never enter, an enlarged and strengthened womanhood bearing forward with it a strengthened and expanded race, it is not so hard to renounce and labour with unshaken purpose" (p. 142). In other words, for Schreiner the perception of one's imprisonment in the dystopia of the present is the very thing that allows the activist subject to enjoy, however masochistically, the vision of a future utopia.

Judith Butler's work in The Psychic Life of Power offers a way to think through this "utopian paradox." She theorizes the subject's relation to power as simultaneously subordinated and in excess of that subordination, which, she writes, "is not to be thought of as (a) a resistance that is really a recuperation of power or (b) a recuperation that is really a resistance. It is both at once, and this ambivalence forms the bind of agency."²⁰ Butler's insistence on the ambivalence of agency, which always provides the potential for resistance in whatever conditions of subordination, is exactly the utopian impulse at work. As she writes,

We might reread 'being' as precisely the potentiality that remains unexhausted by any particular interpellation. Such a failure of interpellation may well undermine the capacity of the subject to 'be' in a self-identical sense, but it may also mark the path toward a more open, even more ethical, kind of being, one of or for the future.

(p. 131)

If, as Butler suggests, the subject is both a product of the process of subjectification and also "something more," then, surely, the New Woman activist, whose activism is premised on her own failure to reach the future, provides us with an ideal model through which to theorize this "bind of agency." She understands herself as forever in process—always subjugated but always moving toward a "more ethical, kind of being."

Although The Heavenly Twins is a feminist conversion narrative, it is also a meditation on the insufficiencies of the conversion narrative genre. That is, in its representation of consciousness-raising manqué, it provides a venue for its readers to experience their own (in-process) conversions. The novel offers the stories of three women. Edith, the "lovely specimen of a well-bred English girl" (p. 155), who is too pure and innocent to see her husband's vice, contracts syphilis, goes mad, and dies. Evadne, a great reader, acquires the knowledge and discernment to avoid Edith's fate; however, trapped in a celibate marriage to a similarly vicious man in which she can neither exercise her intellect nor exert herself for the public good, she becomes hysterical and suicidal. Angelica, one of the "Heavenly Twins" of the novel's title, avoids the terrible fates of Edith and Evadne and manages to "escape" her gender altogether in a cross-dressing "Interlude." Her struggles against the societal constrictions placed on women provoke a prophetic dream in which she calls out to the women of the world: "I am not Esther, most decidedly! But I am Judith. I am Jael. I am Vashti. I am Godiva. I am all the heroic women of all the ages rolled into one, not for the shedding of blood, but for the saving of suffering" (p. 296). Yet the dream prophesy turns on Angelica when she sees that the women don't understand her: "'I see,' she said; 'I shall have to save you in spite of yourselves.' But when she had looked a little longer, and seen men, women, and children crowding like loathsome maggots together, she was disheartened" (p. 296). Instead of embodying heroic womanhood, Angelica ends up married to a much-older man whom she calls "Daddy." This is, at best, a mediated happy ending.

In reading the novel's tripartite structure critics have tended to highlight a kind of "three caskets" structure,²¹ in which the first two heroines' failures are superceded by Angelica's "triumph." Mangum notes, for example, "the fate of the other protagonists, [the] two New Women figures, depends on their ability to 'read' the implications of Edith's melodrama" (p. 90). I would like to suggest instead that in fact all three narratives fail, not just because their heroines do not find happiness, but because they represent affective and generic investments on the reader's part that are incommensurate with the ethical project of the novel. The novel critiques even as it acknowledges the pleasures of the "wrong" kind of reading—that is, sentimental and sensational reading. As Evadne describes her experience of reading the story of Lancelot and Elaine,

When you first come across the poem or the picture which perpetuates the sentiment that slew the girl, and beautifies it, you feel a glow all over, and fancy you would like to imitate her, and think that you would deserve great credit for it if you did. But when you come to consider, there is nothing very noble, after all, in a hopeless passion for an elderly man of the world who is past being benefited by it, even if he could reciprocate it. . . . I think it a sin to make unwholesome sentiments attractive.

(p. 35)

Evadne is undoubtedly thinking of Tennyson's "Lancelot and Elaine," from Idylls of the King (although "The Lady of Shalott" is also a version of the story) in which Elaine, the "lily maid of Astolat," falls in love with a physically and morally battle-scarred Lancelot, who of course does not return her love because he loves Guinevere. Elaine dies of her unrequited love for Tennyson's tortured "bad boy," a self-sacrifice that Tennyson renders appealingly.²² Evadne acknowledges the powerful affective appeal of Tennyson's tragic love story but insists on reflection as the remedy or counteragent for the dangerous sensations produced by a highly emotional response to reading. In examining the three heroines' interwoven plots, we must focus not on how the protagonists succeed or fail in articulating desire or achieving happiness but on how they present different opportunities for the reader to sympathize and, at the same time, to question those sympathies. I want, therefore, to examine several episodes in the novel that offer affective temptations but that simultaneously render those temptations suspect.

Reading between the Texts: Edith, Melodrama, and French Naturalism

"By-the-way," he said after a pause, "have you read any of those books I got for you—any of the French ones?"

Her face set somewhat, but she looked up at him, and answered without hesitation: "Yes. I have read the 'Nana,' 'La Terre,' 'Madame Bovary,' and 'Sapho.'"

She stopped there, and he waited in vain for her to express an opinion.

"Well," he said at last, "what has struck you most in them?"

"The suffering, George," she exclaimed—"the awful, needless suffering!"

(Grand, p. 221)

In this passage from The Heavenly Twins, George Colquhoun has given his new bride, Evadne, a reading list that he hopes will overcome her objections to consummating their marriage. Her reaction to the French novels presents to Grand's readers the "correct" response to narratives featuring the sexual degradation of women. Like Evadne, one should read over the so-called eroticism and see the narratives for what they are: stories of death, pestilence, and decay. Conversely, Edith, the traditional woman, provides a picture of the sentimental reader—all feeling, no thought—an example of how not to read things and people. She belongs to a long tradition of "pure-minded" women who "thought less of this world, even as they knew it, than of the next as they imagined it to be. . . . They neglected the good they might have done here in order to enjoy their bright and tranquil dreams of the hereafter" (pp. 155-56). Edith's spirituality and innocence make her vulnerable to the predatory Mosley Menteith. Thus she presents a spectacle of suffering, from which the other characters can build interpretations and formulate plans of action for their own lives. In this way her story seems easy to interpret: through the melodramatic tale of an innocent victim who falls prey to a corrupt villain, she provides a focal point for the reader's indignation.

But if Edith is "pure-minded" and "spiritually minded" (p. 156), her pure spirituality is inseparable from bodily sensation. Rather, Edith experiences her adoration of God as "love purged of all earthly admixture of doubt and fear, which is the most delicious sensation human nature is capable of experiencing" (p. 157). As Grand shows Edith satisfying her burgeoning appetites with prayer, she redefines the terms she uses to describe Edith's religious devotion:

She sank on her knees before [Christ's] image . . . and felt herself filled with the serene intensity of his holy love. She recalled the faultless grace and beauty of his person, and revelled in the thought of it, till suddenly a deep and sensuous glow of delight in him flooded her being, and her very soul was faint for him. She called him by name caressingly: "Dear Lord!" She confessed her passionate attachment to him. She implored him to look upon her lovingly. She offered him the devotion of her life. And then she sank into a perfect stupor of ecstatic contemplation.

(p. 169)

Religion for Edith, and presumably for the "pure-minded" women from whom she is descended, is sensational. Prayer is an orgasmic fantasy, and spirituality is passionate enough to be indistinguishable from the physicality of vice. Grand provides a reading of "innocence" through the lens of French naturalism that transforms the moral poles of Edith's melodrama.

Meegan Kennedy has argued recently that Edith's plot represents Grand's attempt to "clean up" the graphic naturalism of Émile Zola's Nana. Grand's reticence about the physicality of the syphilitic body, Kennedy writes, ultimately "reproduce[s] the cultural fascination with the hysterical woman and re-inscribe[s] oppressive stereotypes about women's intellectual and emotional instability."²³ I would argue, however, that Edith's similarities to Nana involve more than the "bowdlerized" version of syphilis's ravages.²⁴ In physical appearance the two are alike: both are fair, vigorous, beautiful, and larger-than-life with long, long blond hair. They are described in iconic terms: Edith is like "Saxon Edith . . . seen in a picture" with hair "the colour of burnished brass [that] fell to her knees in one straight heavy coil without a wave" (p. 71). Nana is "Amazonian," "Venus rising from the waves with no other veil than her hair."²⁵ In both novels, moreover, early scenes feature the women awakening in bed and adorned by abundant, loose hair. In Zola's novel Nana is asleep "in the damp, drowsy air of [the] bedroom"; she is "on her stomach with her bare arms around the pillow in which her face, pale with fatigue, was buried" (p. 31). The narrator describes her waking, moments later, in dishabille: "Her nightgown had slipped down and her loose, tangled hair hung over her shoulders" (p. 33). Likewise, Grand presents Edith asleep in an aestheticized and eroticized bedroom scene:

She had flung her left hand up above her head with the pink palm outward, and the fingers half bent; the right lay on the sheet beside her, palm downward, spread out, and all relaxed. Her whole attitude expressed the most complete abandonment of deep and restful sleep. . . . Her warm bright hair, partly loosened from the one thick braid into which it had been plaited, fell from off the pillow to the floor on her right, and the sun, looking in, lit it up and made it sparkle.

(p. 155)

Edith's attention to her hair after she awakes is fetishistic and masturbatory: "[She] put her hands under her hair at the back of her neck, and then raised them up above her head and her hair with them, stretching herself and yawning slightly. Then she brought her hair all around to the right in a mass, and let it hang down to her knees, and looked at it dreamily; and then began to twist it slowly" (p. 157). Nana, likewise, "plung[es] her fingers into her tousled hair" and "stretch[es] her arms with her back arched" (pp. 34-35).

Edith's similarity to Nana begins with an eroticized bodily description and ends with physicality turned corrupt: the beautiful girl—all sleepy sensuality—becomes, in both novels, the horrifying diseased body. In the famous passage describing Nana's smallpox-ravaged corpse:

The pustules had invaded her whole face, touching one another; and, faded and sunken, with the grayish hue of mud, they already seemed to be a moldering of the earth on that shapeless pulp in which her features were no longer recognizable. . . . And above that grotesque and horrible mask of death, the hair, the beautiful hair, still blazed like sunlight and flowed in a golden stream. Venus was decomposing.

(Zola, pp. 440-41)

Grand's description of Edith is not nearly as graphic, as Kennedy notes (p. 262). Still, it emphasizes a similarly shocking juxtaposition of luxuriant, unfettered hair and wasted flesh: "Her yellow hair, all in disorder, fell over the pillow to one side. . . . Edith was lying on her back, with her face turned toward Angelica. There were deep lines of suffering marked upon it, and her eyes glittered feverishly, but otherwise she was gray and ghastly, and old" ( pp. 299-300). Just as the earlier scenes of Edith indulge in sumptuous, sensuous descriptions to arouse the reader's feelings, so the deathbed scene spares no sensational ploy to shock and horrify. One effect of this approach is to prevent any sentimental indulgence by the reader. Edith's pathos resides in her innocence, for she is a hapless victim. Yet, her very innocence and purity are so laden with sensuality as to constitute a vice in themselves. The implication is that she is complicit in her own destruction through her "spiritually minded" sensuality. Moreover, Grand's combination of melodrama and French naturalism points to the reader's complicity. If we focus only on Edith's seductive sensuality pre-syphilis, then we, like Colonel Colquhoun, miss the "moral of the story." If we refuse to see Zola's whore in Grand's angel—if we read her as only an innocent victim—then we risk being guilty, like Mrs. Orton Beg, of the "spiritually minded" willful ignorance that refuses to believe that "good girls" can possess sexual appetites.

"The Tenor and the Boy—An Interlude": Angelica and Aestheticism

[A]t the end of the fifth and beginning of the fourth century, when the womanhood of Greece had already internally decayed, there was indeed a brilliant intellectual efflorescence among her males, like to the gorgeous colours in the sunset sky when the sun is already sinking. . . . Increasingly, division and dissimilarity arose between male and female, as the male advanced in culture and entered upon new fields of intellectual toil while the female sank passively backward and lower in the scale of life, and thus was made ultimately a chasm which even sexual love could not bridge. . . . Xanthippe fretted out her ignorant and miserable little life between the walls of her house, and Socrates lay in the Agora, discussing philosophy and morals with Alcibiades; and the race decayed at its core.

(Woman and Labour, pp. 84-86)

In the twilight of Greek civilization, Schreiner tells us, the "abnormal institution" of male-male intellectual and sexual relationships provided an escape from the decay of heterosexual relationships brought about by the increasing parasitism of Greece's women.²⁶ In The Heavenly Twins, the "twilight" of heterosexual marriage, represented in Edith's death and Evadne's hysteria, also occasions a retreat into a homosocial fantasy space in which Angelica, disguised as "Boy," spends night after night sharing sensual and intellectual pleasures with the aesthete Tenor.

What does it mean for a novel of reform to have an "Interlude"? Amidst the accounts of Edith's and Evadne's suffering, an interlude might offer a welcome respite to the reader. We might say, with Mrs. Orton Beg: "Don't make me think about it. Surely I have suffered enough? Disagreeable to know! It is torture. If ever I let myself dwell on the horrible depravity that goes on unchecked . . . I should go out of my mind" (pp. 80-81). In fact, the relationship between the Tenor and Boy in the "Interlude" is instigated by just such a retreat from diseased femininity and "vice." The first meeting between them occurs because Boy literally recoils from the touch of a prostitute:

A tall, slender lad of sixteen or seventeen was standing on the edge of the pathway, just in front of the Tenor. He was the only other person about, and on that account the Tenor had looked at him a second time. As he did so, a young woman came suddenly round the corner, and accosted the boy. . . .

The Boy stepped back to avoid her, with an unmistakable gesture of disgust, and in doing so, he accidentally stumbled up against the Tenor.

(p. 375)

In avoiding contact with the prostitute, the boy becomes "Boy." His identity becomes fixed as it is divorced from the disease and despair of exploited femininity.

The most telling example of the reader's willingness to participate in this homoerotic escape has been, I think, the critical attention paid to the "Interlude." Critics have singled out the radical social critiques, the literary innovations, and the subversive performative acts in the "Interlude," in opposition to the rest of the novel. Ledger writes, for example, that the "cross-dressing and an interrogation of same-sex relationships" of the Interlude "give . . . the book its sexually radical edge" (The New Woman, p. 114). Similarly Mangum writes, "Though it is perhaps too optimistic a claim . . . the cross-dressing and ambiguous gendering of book 4 suggest that in the interlude world of the Tenor and the Boy a radical revision of gender roles would permit far more flexible human relations" (p. 138). Certainly, it is tempting to linger over the subversiveness of Angelica's masquerade. I would argue, though, that book four represents a far less utopian space for the novel than it does for its twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics.

Given Grand's commitment to a eugenicist vision of social uplift through healthy marriage, it is unlikely that she would have endorsed the "Dorianism" of the Tenor and Boy's relationship. And, as Ledger and others have noted, while the "Interlude" comes closest to the literature of aestheticism and decadence, Grand was deeply suspicious of the tenet of "art for art's sake." As Bonnell writes, "Grand's morality of caring forced her categorically to reject the solely aesthetic purpose of literature and to embrace instead literature as an instrument of social concern" (p. 124).²⁷ I would suggest that this is not merely because "art for art's sake" disdains the moral (or immoral) effects of literature, or because homosexuality short-circuits "healthy" reproductive sex, but because aestheticism offers a particularly tempting escape to the would-be activist who is faced with the pain and suffering of the "real" world. As Walter Pater articulated in The Renaissance, the aesthete eschews action in favor of inward reflection:

At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of our selves in a thousand forms of action. But when reflexion begins to play upon those objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like some trick of magic. . . . And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts still further: the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind.²⁸

The "Interlude" certainly stresses the attractions of aestheticism even as it critiques them. The dreamlike descriptions of flowers, violin music, and moonlight resemble the "unstable, flickering, inconsistent" impressions that Pater describes:

The Boy was associated in the Tenor's mind with many sweet associations; with the beautiful still night . . . with the music that was in him; and, further, with a sympathetic comprehension of those moments when gray glimpses of the old cathedral, or a warm breath of perfumed air from the garden, or some slight sound, such as the note of a night bird breaking the silence, fired a train of deep emotion, and set his whole poetic nature quivering, to the unspeakable joy of it.

(p. 405)

But aestheticism's privileging of inchoate impressions and inward-looking "reflexion" means that the Tenor and the Boy can only achieve their utopia if they are capable of eschewing "sharp and importunate reality" and action. Likewise, the reader's investments in the "Interlude" depend on suspending our painful attachments to the three heroines. This is particularly true, I think, since the narrative encourages us to read the Boy not as Angelica, but as her twin brother Diavolo up until the very end of the "Interlude."

Grand is too careful to emphasize the moral obligation of paying attention to others' suffering for there not to be an embedded critique of Angelica's actions. The initial encounter between the Tenor and the Boy underscores their supreme indifference to the prostitute's pain. When the Tenor "all unconsciously" begins to sing, and the prostitute responds with a cry of despair, the narrator tells us, "Her half-inarticulate cry did not reach the Tenor and the Boy, neither had they observed her distress, for just at that moment the city clock struck one, and both had raised their heads involuntarily in expectation of the chime" (pp. 375-76). While the Tenor and Boy are suspended in their attention to the chime, we see Grand's New Woman activist, Ideala, emerge from the shadows to take the French prostitute under her wing. Thus Ideala's willingness to sacrifice her own comfort to succor others serves as indictment of Angelica/Boy's indifference to the suffering of her fellow creatures.

This indifference is what prevents Angelica from becoming, as her dream prophesies, "all the heroic women of all the ages rolled into one . . . for the saving of suffering" (p. 296). In book five, "Mrs. Kilroy of Ilverthorpe," Angelica does become an activist of sorts, writing speeches for her husband to read in Parliament, although it takes the Tenor's death as a result of her selfishness and carelessness for her to change. As the narrator says: "a chapter of her life had closed with it forever; and when she looked up then, she found herself in another world, wherein she would walk henceforth with other eyes to a better purpose" (p. 540). The revolutionary potential of Angelica's epiphany is seriously undercut, however, by the closing lines of the section, in which she exclaims to her husband Mr. Kilroy, "Don't let me go again, Daddy, keep me close. I am—I am grateful for the blessing of a good man's love" (p. 551). It is important to note that although the Kilroys' marriage is the closest to an ideal match in the novel, it falls short in significant ways. First, it is childless, and thus will not help in the production of future generations. Second, it is the marriage of a "much older" man to a young girl, an inequality that is criticized elsewhere in the novel, most notably in Evadne's commentary on the Lancelot/Elaine story. Whatever activist potential Angelica does possess comes not with her entering her aestheticized fantasy space with the Tenor but in leaving it behind. Equally, the reader's activist potential can only be realized in abandoning her attachments to the surreal and homoerotic "Interlude" and returning to the pain of Evadne's narrative, which takes a terrible downturn with Edith's death in book three and picks up in a similarly grim place at the beginning of book six.

"A Miserable Type of a Woman Wasted": Evadne, the New Woman Novel, and the Romance

In looking back now, I am inclined to ask why we, Evadne's intimate friends, should always have expected more of her than we did of other people. That certainly was the case, and she disappointed us. We felt that she should have been a representative woman such as the world wants at this period of its progress, making a name for herself and an impression on the age; and it was probably her objection, expressed with quite passionate earnestness, to play a part in which we gathered from many chance indications that she was eminently qualified to have excelled, that constituted the puzzle.

(Grand, p. 556)

Often nothing is so true to nature as inconsistency of character; but it is fair to say that Evadne's inconsistency in this particular, as the heroine of a novel of reform, is a breach of trust with the reader.

Review of The Heavenly Twins²⁹

Evadne's plot in The Heavenly Twins offers two incongruous narratives, both of which invite the reader's sympathies, and both of which punish those investments. Evadne is a New Woman heroine, but she is also the heroine of a romance. The novel switches between these two narratives and reveals the insufficiencies of both.

From the beginning of the novel, Evadne is presented as an ideal reader: all of her activist potential, all of her "exceptional" qualities are tied to her reading. As the opening lines of chapter one tell us, "At nineteen Evadne looked out of narrow eyes at an untried world inquiringly. She wanted to know. She found herself forced to put prejudice aside in order to see beneath it, deep down into the sacred heart of things, where the truth is, and the bewildering clash of human precept with human practice ceases to vex" (p. 3). She has unusual powers of perception and strength of character that allow her to discern injustice in the social codes that endanger women and to resist the purveyors of those unjust codes—her parents, husband, friends, social institutions, the church, "traditional" literature and the educational system—at least for the first third of the narrative.

The first book of the novel, "Childhoods and Girlhoods," describes the process of her education, her self-taught habits of intellectual rigor, her "need to know," and the development of her reading abilities. It offers passages from her "Commonplace Book" as evidence of her remarkable character. If it shows her serious errors in mistaking physical attraction for love in marrying George Colquhoun, it also displays her strength in standing up to everyone by refusing to accept her marriage after the fact. As Evadne writes to her mother, "You say that no girl in your young days would have behaved so outrageously as I am doing. I wish you had said 'so decidedly,' instead of 'outrageously,' for I am sure that any resistance to the old iniquitous state of things is a quite hopeful sign of coming change for the better" (p. 92). Not only does Evadne's special insight allow her to critique the "beautified" suffering and self-sacrifice of women throughout the ages, but it also helps her read herself into that history as a vanguard, a reformer. Indeed, the second book, "A Maltese Miscellany," shows the fruition of Evadne's education. Although, out of compassion for her mother, she has consented to live with her husband to prevent scandal, she maintains her reformist ideals and acts upon them. She stands up for the rights of the falsely accused, she fails to be perverted by idle society or by French novels, she makes friends with other New Women, and she attempts to save Edith from marrying Menteith.

Ironically, on her deathbed even Edith experiences a moment of consciousness-raising when she finally understands that "'Evadne was right!' . . . 'The same thing may happen now to any mother—to any daughter—and will happen so long as we refuse to know and resist'" (pp. 303-04). When Evadne's aunt, Mrs. Orton Beg, writes to tell her of Edith's fate, she describes her own conversion: "I am telling you the state of the case exactly . . . because I did not agree with you when you were here. I had been so shielded from evil myself that I could not believe in the danger to which all women are exposed. But I agree with you now, perfectly. We must alter all this. . . . Put me into communication with your friends" (pp. 348-49). These revelations, Angelica's "revolutionary" dream, and the semi-public hue and cry raised against Edith's husband all validate Evadne's intellectual labor in the first third of the novel. Evadne is proven right by Edith's tragic death, which, though painful to witness, serves as an example and as a catalyst to impel previously detached women like Mrs. Orton Beg to action.

After this episode, however, the novel commits its "breach of trust" with the would-be activist reader. Evadne does not finally fulfill her promise—she does not avoid the pitfalls of "ordinary" women or exercise her exceptional talents to stand up to social injustices. Instead, she lets herself become trapped in her stifling domestic sphere; she becomes hysterical, delusional, and finally suicidal. If, as Mangum says, Edith's death is the "benchmark against which the other female protagonists define their ethics and actions" (p. 100), then Evadne's ethics and actions are retarded rather than matured by the crisis. In book three, which is called "Development and Arrest of Development," Evadne doesn't become an activist, but instead makes a rash promise to her husband that she will never, in his lifetime, involve herself in "questions of the day." She retreats from all public life, all aspects of the "Woman Question," and lets her remarkable intellect atrophy. She drifts into avoidance, escapism, and emotional frailty: "She gave up reading; and by degrees there grew upon her a perfect horror of disturbing emotions. She burnt any books she had with repulsive incidents in them . . . she would read nothing that harrowed her feelings; she would listen to nothing that might move her to indignation and reawaken the futile impulse to resist" (pp. 349-50).Whereas book two ends with Evadne's brave attempt to stop Edith's marriage, book three begins with the marriage having already occurred, and it ends with Evadne made "morbid and hysterical" by her promise to her husband (p. 350). This is the state of affairs that makes the "Interlude" of book four so appealing.

As I have already suggested, we are ready, and in a sense even gratified, to see Edith suffer. To represent her suffering as a classic case of a social epidemic was, after all, one of the main political aims of the book. But Evadne's defection at the midpoint of the novel undermines this politics of feeling. In fact, she rejects the kind of novel of which she is the heroine—a book full of "repulsive incidents" and harrowing to the feelings. Her escapism is a rejection of what Schreiner tells us is the most ennobling aspect of the women's movement: "the consciousness on the part of the women . . . that [their efforts] almost of necessity and immediately lead to loss and renunciation" (Woman and Labour, p. 124).

In the sixth and final book of the novel, "The Impressions of Dr. Galbraith," we leave Angelica's story and are given, for the only time in the novel, a first-person narrative of the doctor as he gets to know Evadne, first as a social acquaintance, then as his patient, and finally as his wife. If, in the opening lines of book one, the novel gives the interpretive key to Evadne's nature, "She wanted to know" (p. 3), then by the opening lines of the final book there is no such interpretive confidence. As the first sentence in the doctor's "Impressions" tells us: "Evadne puzzled me" (p. 555).

Likewise, the reader is puzzled—the abrupt shift from the omniscient third-person narrator to the doctor's voice is almost another "breach of trust." In fact, the original narrative voice undermines Dr. Galbraith's account with a prefatory note informing the reader:

The fact that Dr. Galbraith had not the advantage of knowing Evadne's early history when they first became acquainted adds a certain piquancy to the flavour of his impressions, and the reader, better informed than himself with regard to the antecedents of his "subject," will find it interesting to note both the accuracy of his insight and the curious mistakes which it is possible even for a trained observer like himself to make.

(p. 554)

The Doctor is an enlightened man, a philanthropist, and an advocate of women's rights. When Colonel Colqhoun dies, Dr. Galbraith holds out the possibility of a romantic (and reproductive) ending for our heroine. But we are also cued to be suspicious of him, for he makes "curious mistakes." As Ann Heilmann notes, the Doctor has more than a few disturbing similarities to the oppressively paternalistic doctor-husband in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," which was published the year before The Heavenly Twins (New Woman Strategies, p. 69).

What the final book of the novel shows, however, is the affective pull of the romance in spite of its obviously problematic insistence on "the sentiment that slew the girl." The sentimental story that Evadne deplores is exactly what develops between the doctor and her: the hopeless passion of an older doctor for his younger married patient and of an unhappily married girl for a romantic "knight." The whole of book six is a series of encounters between the two, which both encourage and critique the reader's investments in "unwholesome sentiments." When, for example, the lovelorn Doctor hears Evadne's name in the thrush's song, he wavers between love-struck sentimentality and harsh self-castigation for his indulgence.

A thrush on a bough below began to flute softly . . . in one clear call, . . . all expressed in just three notes . . . which shortly shaped themselves to a word in my heart, a word of just three syllables, the accent being on the penultimate—"E-vad-ne! E-vad-ne!"

Good Heavens!

I roused myself. Not a proper state of mind certainly for a man of my years and pursuits. Why, how old was I? Thirty-five—not so old in one way, yet ten years older at least than—stop—sickly sentimentality.

(p. 613)

The romantic appeal is convincingly rendered and then undermined by the Doctor's own foreclosure, which echoes Evadne's analysis that "there is nothing very noble, after all, in a hopeless passion" (p. 35).

Yet, in reiterating the Doctor's "love and longing," the final book makes it easy to forget, at least momentarily, the "but when you come to consider" part of reading. Day in and day out the Doctor sees Evadne doing needlework by the window, waiting for him to ride by, which, as he says, reminds him of Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott":

There she weaves by night and day A magic web of colour gay. She has heard a whisper say, A curse is on her if she stay    To look down to Camelot. She knows not what the curse may be, And so she weaveth steadily, And little other care hath she,    The lady of Shalott.

(p. 586)

"But" the Doctor asks, "where was Camelot?" He answers his own question: Camelot is his house, of course. Indeed, in a strange scene, the Doctor, playing idly with a telescope, "accidentally" trains it on Evadne's house: "She was sitting in her accustomed place, with her work on her lap, her hands clasped before her, leaning forward looking up in my direction with an expression in her whole attitude that appealed to me like a cry for help" (pp. 586-87). These are very beautiful and evocative images: Evadne, in the role of lady of Shalott, is looking in Gailbraith's direction in a picturesque and wistful pose. It is hard to know if the reader is supposed to be disturbed by the Doctor's "idle" voyeurism, but certainly within the framework of Tennyson's poem, "looking to Camelot" means nothing good for the Lady of Shalott.³⁰

The Doctor's willingness to view Evadne through such a tragic-romantic lens bleeds into a textbook romance of transference/countertransference. This process is foreshadowed when Dr. Galbraith discusses the "extraordinary systems of fraud and deceit" that are perpetrated by a female patient "for no apparent purpose" (p. 573). Although the doctor professes not to know the cause of the patient's behavior, Evadne immediately recognizes it: "She was in love with you, and tried in that way to excite your sympathy and attract your attention" (p. 575). Evadne clearly also sees herself in this way in relation to Dr. Galbraith. As she tells him:

You have some mysterious power over my mind. All great doctors have the power I mean. . . . I used to long for you so on those days when you never came, and I used to watch for you and be disappointed when you drove past; but then I always said, "He will come to-morrow," and that was something to look forward to. . . . [B]ut then, when you never came, I gradually lost heart and hope, and that is how it was I broke down, I think.

(p. 635)

Evadne's appeal to the doctor's affection is couched both in terms of her poetic "Lady of Shalott" (or, perhaps in this instance, "Mariana") role and in terms of her mental illness.

The Doctor's erotic investment in "saving" Evadne depends on his reading of her as hysterical, helpless, passive. But, most of all, it depends on Evadne not reading.³¹ Book six reproduces, ironically, an earlier scene in book one. When the young Evadne finds medical books and asks permission to read them, her parents are too complacent to pay attention, and thus she gains the medical knowledge that is so crucial to her moral and intellectual development. In book six, however, when Evadne, the convalescent wife, attempts to read some of the Doctor's medical books on hereditary vice, the Doctor is much more alert in managing her reading. He takes them away from her "for her own good," remarking, "It is criminal to withhold knowledge from any woman who has the capacity to acquire it. But there is a time for everything, you know, my sweetheart" (p. 662). Seemingly, according to the doctor's "impressions," Evadne is not a "woman who has the capacity" to acquire knowledge—although it is not clear whether it is her role as hysterical patient or wife that restricts her capacity.

Yet, despite (or because of) his efforts, Evadne's mental state deteriorates until, finally, she tries to kill herself and her unborn child. So how are we to read Evadne's suicide attempt at the end of the novel? On the one hand, the doctor/patient dynamic of the marriage demands hysterical displays to appeal to the doctor's sympathies. On the other hand, the novel has told us that Dr. Galbraith makes "curious mistakes." Evadne is more than capable of understanding medical texts and putting her knowledge to good use. If she is hysterical—as she says: "Body and mind have suffered—mind and body. All that is not wrong in me is weak" (p. 636)—and she has read the "chief authority" on the heredity of vice, so she knows that her own children will be of a degenerate "type." Is not her suicide, then, a sacrifice for the future good of the race? She explains her logic to Dr. Galbraith, going so far as to compare her suicidal attempt to Christ's death: "You see, we have the divine example. Christ committed suicide to all intents and purposes by deliberately putting himself into the hands of his executioners; but his motive makes them responsible for the crime; and my motive would place society in a similar position" (p. 671). Evadne may shrink from others' suffering, but she is still able to theorize and, moreover, to politicize her own. As with the hunger-striking suffragette, her self-sacrifice is not just a response to personal pain but an indictment of society.

Evadne's case is never completely resolved. The closing lines of the novel are the Doctor's last impression of her: "She looked up at me in a strange startled way, and then she clung closer; and I thought she meant that, if she could help it, I should not lose the little all I ask for now—the power to make her life endurable" (p. 679). But this impression can't, perhaps, be read as the final word on the heroine. Her mental and moral faculties may not be as debilitated as the doctor believes. When Dr. Galbraith asks her to think of the consequences of her suicide, she describes such contemplation as a trigger of militant activism:

[D]on't ask me to think! . . . I can be the most docile, the most obedient, the most loving of women as long as I forget my knowledge of life; but the moment I remember I become a raging fury; I have no patience with slow processes; "Revolution" would be my cry, and I could preside with an awful joy at the execution of those who are making the misery now for succeeding generations.

(p. 672)

Evadne's assumption of traditional femininity is revealed to be as untenable a fantasy as Angelica's nocturnal cross-dressing: both actions offer selfish escapes from the real world and "knowledge of life." The suicide attempt, however, suggests that Evadne retains at least some of her powers of interpretation.

Still, the final conversation between Evadne and Dr. Galbraith is equivocal: is "Revolution" her cry, or does she "no longer perceive the utility of self-sacrifice" (p. 671)? Are we, the readers, to feel similarly that self-sacrifice is futile? Whether we are invested in the New Woman plot or the romance plot, the conclusion of the novel is a terrible letdown. Certainly, we must feel that Evadne's (and our) suffering has not been rewarded. Yet, this is, after all, the driving principle of the novel: the pay-off for suffering does not belong to the sufferers but to future generations, who will not understand the "passionate struggles that accomplished so little" (Schreiner, Woman, p. 29).

I began this article with two quotations that imagine women's activism striving to reach a distant shore. In the passage from The Heavenly Twins, Evadne is described as a "seventh wave." If we take the novel's claim seriously, we might think of Evadne's plot less as adhering to a structure than as imitating a movement; like the swell and crash of a wave on the shore, her story moves forward, gaining momentum before crashing and receding. Thus, the "failures" of The Heavenly Twins offer to the reader an enactment of the ebb and flow of New Woman activism. In agreeing to face the novel's painful nonresolution and to reflect upon it, therefore, the feminist reader may similarly feel herself part of a wave.

To look back on the utopian politics of The Heavenly Twins is particularly poignant in our own cultural moment, which has been alternately characterized as postfeminist or third-wave. We may indeed "look back with astonishment" at the self-sacrificial activism that the novel encourages. We may see in the novel's flaws its insufficient feminism. Or, we may imagine that we embody the "strengthened and expanded race" that justifies the suffering of New Woman feminists. Yet, perhaps what the novel shows us instead is how much, as for those women of the 1890s, the utopian future for us too is just barely visible on a distant shore.