Women, Portraiture and the Crisis of Identity in Victorian Literature: My Lady Scandalous Reconsidered (review)

The question of how professional women in the nineteenth century negotiated between their public and private lives is one that is necessarily grounded in the everyday lived experiences of individual women. While the public/private divide formed the basis for a pervasive cultural construction of norms of masculinised work and professionalism and feminised leisure and domesticity, these categories proved to be anything but stable in the period. They comprised, instead, a framework within which professional women, in their individual processes of negotiation, ranged widely. Colleen Denney explores this process in the efforts at self-representation made by four women professionals: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Emilia Dilke, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, and Sarah Grand. Denney looks specifically at the way in which scandal created what she calls a "crisis of identity" that each of these women experienced. Denny primarily examines what she argues are the four key portraits of these women because they were painted at critical moments of scandal and publicity in each woman's life. Noting how having one's portrait painted signalled the establishment of a certain level of social respectability, Denney argues that such portraits can be read as autobiographical texts, efforts to write one's own public identity through the careful and motivated manipulation of an image of the private self. She contends that one of the reasons these women "became scandalous was because they boldly 'mapped' their own alternative discourses across public and private realms simultaneously" (15).

Denney divides her book into two sections. In the first, "Victorian Scandals and Visual Tools of Persuasion," she looks to the lives of Braddon and Dilke in order to explore the way portraiture could act as an attempt to claim respectability despite what was seen as a scandalous private life. As a former actress, live-in mistress of John Maxwell, and very successful sensation novelist, Braddon makes an obvious choice for an exploration of the way scandal affects the public perception of the professional woman. The self-image that Braddon constructed, in part through William Powell Frith's 1865 portrait, was one that interestingly sought to mitigate the scandals of her private life through the association of the private with the professional world of work. Frith's portrait shows Braddon in her home standing next to her writing desk upon which work in progress can clearly be seen. Denney notes that the portrait's conflation of the public and private worlds, the space of the home and the professional work conducted there, represents the ways the scandalous—the unconventional, the disruptive, the professional—could be contained and, in certain respects, kept clean.

But Denney also shows how Braddon's portrait simultaneously makes clear the way the woman professional could also invert this process, using work to contain and make clean the private life. In this portrait, the domestic setting, which, as the place of cohabitation with Maxwell, was the site of Braddon's most scandalous act, is made more respectable through the representation of Braddon as the "steadfast, sober, working writer rather than the strong-minded, independent thinker" (57). The professional identity, which should, in terms of separate spheres ideology, represent Braddon's most blatant departure from domestic femininity, is used here to project an image of private respectability. The danger of such association, however, was the limitation of the professional within gendered expectations of conventionality. Citing Braddon's refusal to append her name to a complimentary review of the work of Emile Zola, Denney argues that Braddon's "disavowal of this new, more masculine voice suggested not so much that she was the one who suffered from the conflict of these many voices, but rather that it may have been . . . her public audience who could not reconcile this more bold voice with her image of respectability" (67).

In this chapter Denney finds further support for the location of Braddon's private respectability in her public profession in...