Ouida the Phenomenon: Evolving Social, Political, and Gender Concerns in her Fiction (review)

In Victorian Wallflowers, Malcolm Elwin’s 1934 evaluation of “minor” Victorian fiction, the end of Ouida’s career is seen as “symbolic of the end of the Victorian era; she died in 1908, a tawdry, bedraggled scrap of derelict wreckage” (20). Ouida, born Marie Louise de la Ramée, was indeed a Victorian phenomenon whose work swiftly passed into obscurity with the onset of the twentieth century. Recently, however, she has reemerged as a significant popular writer. In Ouida the Phenomenon, Natalie Schroeder and Shari Hodges Holt argue against the widespread “underestimation of Ouida’s critical significance,” focusing on her preoccupation with “central Victorian issues” and engagement with a diversity of genres (26). Throughout a long career beginning in the early 1860s with English society novels, such as Held in Bondage (1863), Ouida went on to produce Italian-themed novels as well as making use of the female gothic, the novel of European society, and New Woman fiction. Always flamboyant and often controversial, Ouida gained considerable censure from reviewers. Her novel Moths (1880), for example, was reviewed alongside Emile Zola’s Nana (1880) in the North American Review, and both were condemned as “profligate fiction” (qtd. in Shroeder and Holt 173).

Schroeder and Holt’s book provides a useful introduction to Ouida’s work, offering detailed biographical information and extensive plot summaries with long quotations from the novels. For those unfamiliar with Ouida’s extensive oeuvre, this presents a good overview of the range and quality of her fiction; it is not, however, an approach that lends itself to sustained analysis. The book works best as a contribution to the project of recovery of underread popular women writers, and in this respect Schroeder and Holt’s careful outline of the novels offers students of Victorian women’s fiction an indication of Ouida’s achievement as a writer. Ouida the Phenomenon works less well in placing Ouida in context as a Victorian. For example, little is said about her engagement with major cultural developments, her relationships with publishers, magazine editors, or her readers, and few comparisons are made between Ouida and her contemporaries.

Schroeder and Holt aim to demonstrate the diversity of Ouida’s work by identifying “connections between Victorian, modern, and postmodern ideologies” (27), a project which unfortunately tends to oversimplify complex issues relating to Victorian commodity culture. There are repeated references to “a newly commodified consumer society” (57), with its “growing consumerism, commodity fetishism, and spectacle” (10), tending towards increasing “objectification in nineteenth-century capitalist culture” (81). These bald statements overlook much recent work in material culture studies demonstrating that commodity culture preceded the Victorian period. Furthermore, Schroeder and Holt see most objects in Ouida’s texts in terms of “commodities” and every owner of objects as a “consumer,” notions that fit uneasily with Ouida’s intense novelistic preoccupation with aristocrats and peasants, groups not primarily associated with the growth of nineteenth-century commodity culture. Ouida is not really critiquing “commodified consumer society” when she “delight[s] in sensuous descriptions of patrician opulence” (91). Admittedly, Schroeder and Holt do attempt to address Ouida’s ambiguities, but the argument they present does not use the best critical tools to explain the contradictions.

A similar problem emerges when Schroeder and Holt discuss Ouida’s preoccupation with the role of the artist. Here the authors’ views on art merge with those of their subject. In Puck (1870), Ouida presents the artist Carlos and his portraits of female subjects: one depicts a modest woman, the other an opulent Cleopatra (an idea of contrasting images of femininity that Ouida surely borrowed from Charlotte Brontë’s Villette [1853]). Ouida represents the modest image as “true art” (that is, spiritually uplifting art) and the Cleopatra image as merely a superficial commodity. Schroeder and Holt argue that Carlos’s favouring of the Cleopatra painting means he “turns his back on his true art...