Victorian Review invites submissions for a special cluster of essays on clothing and cloth. Eager to support exciting work on the sartorial lives of Victorians and on the textiles they created and collected, we plan to fast-track publication of accepted articles, which will appear in our Spring 2022 issue (48.2). Essays might address any aspect of Victorian clothing or cloth, from studies of specific makers and designers and artifacts, to analysis of the fabrics and fashions depicted in the literature and art of the period.
Queries can be addressed to Submissions Editor Kristen Guest at vreview@unbc.ca. Submissions are due no later than May 15, 2022 to vreview@unbc.ca and should conform to the requirements of the journal (5,000-8,000 words, MLA style).
At first glance, it may seem counterintuitive to pair fin de siècle Victorian author George Gissing’s novels of lower middle class urban life with French sociologist Emile Durkheim’s writings on social theory. After all, not only are they separated by disciplinary context but also national borders. Upon closer examination, however, bringing these two figures together reveal surprising convergences about novelistic modes and sociological thought at the end of the nineteenth century.
I first encountered Durkheim’s writings on social theory and sociological methodology during my graduate studies, via an interdisciplinary seminar that prompted us to explore various social scientific disciplines and query their potential for literary studies. When I read Durkheim’s discussion of social facts, which he defines in The Rules of Sociological Method (1895) as “any way of acting, whether fixed or not, capable of exerting over the individual an external constraint” (59), I couldn’t help but be reminded of late nineteenth-century realist form. Durkheim’s definition here emphasizes the notion of constraint, something external to individuals that exerts pressure on how they act, whether it be physical density limiting movement or internalized social norms restricting behavior. Yet how does one grasp, much less represent, social constraint? How does an author make legible what is presumably an internalized social consciousness into narrative form? Social facts, according to Durkheim, are mostly visible as traces, as aftereffects – they determine and constrain individuals, but are by nature hard to capture directly.
Social facts, that is to say, exist as an invisible collective consciousness that powerfully constrains individuals. For me, this description crystallizes Gissing’s abiding thematic interest in his novels, what he portrays so powerfully – the pathos of individuals caught within social structures and norms beyond that of their own choosing. Gissing’s fiction focus on those who experience economic and class precarity brought about by tremendous structural changes at the fin de siècle. In order to represent such changes, he must strategically craft his narration to show both the external structural constraints and their affective impact on the individual. Looking at Durkheim’s notion of the social fact allowed me to pinpoint exactly how Gissing’s novels so vividly render such pathos in textual form: by deploying what I call a “constrained omniscience” as a narrative strategy in New Grub Street (1891) and The Odd Women (1893). This narrative mode, especially in characterization, points to social constraint by performing it.
By looking at Gissing and Durkheim together, my essay reinscribes them into their respective traditions and asks, more broadly, what this comparison reveals about Victorian narrative realism and the development of sociology at the fin de siècle. Through emphasizing the parallels between Gissing’s narration and Durkheim’s concept, this essay treats both as symptomatic of a broader interest in the fact, pointing to resonances between realist narrative technique and the longer history of disciplinary reorganization that emerges over the nineteenth century.
Julia Ames, c.1880, photographer unknown. Image Courtesy Wikimedia Commons
By the time my article about W.T. Stead’s often-overlooked spiritualist periodical Borderland found a home at the Victorian Review, it had already been a graduate seminar presentation, a semester-end essay, a VSAWC conference paper, and a guest lecture. Navigating its research rabbit holes and shifting formats, I sometimes wished I too had a collaborator, as Stead had had Miss X (Ada Goodrich Freer) and Julia for Borderland. Stead openly acknowledged his collaborators in the pages of the work, recognizing Miss X as a prolific spiritualist writer and co-editor, and Julia as the spirit of American journalist Julia Ames, dead more than a year when the periodical launched.
Of course, if I had found even one such collaborator – allowing us to eschew both Zoom and email in favour of telepathy or automatic writing – our results would have raised the same issues Stead’s did more than a century ago: as amanuensis, how would I be able to mediate between my collaborator’s thoughts and my own, or indeed discern one from the other? How would we signal on the page who had written what? And, inevitably, would anyone even take me seriously if I co-authored with a spirit, or would my friends and colleagues tell me I had taken a career-ending misstep onto the fringes of acceptable behaviour?
Stead contended with all these concerns as he and Freer launched Borderland in 1893. He had already established himself as a cultural figure, an author/editor with connections and media clout to be reckoned with, albeit also one with a reputation and a prison record from his years of investigative work. Using multiple pages of the first few editions of Borderland to reprint letters of support and criticism, where activist Josephine Butler, biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, and newspaper editor T.P. O’Connor appear alongside Members of Parliament, regional clerics, and obscure academics is typical of Stead’s social reach and willingness to court public comment (“The Response to the Appeal” pp.10-23; “Some More Opinions on the Study of Borderland” pp.103-113, etc.). Stead’s version of the New Journalism was, by his own publicized assertions, one which strove to influence audiences into action more effectively than any other communication platform. For Stead, the journalistic author was an embodied force on and off the page, present abstractly in their printed byline and voice, and more materially in their public self as a gatherer of information, “at once the eye and the ear and the tongue of the people,” and the means by which those people were represented in print (“Government by Journalism” par.7).
Given his imagining of the journalist’s role as an informational relay – a body simultaneously present and absent in the process of textual transmission – it seems to me hardly surprising that Stead accepted the role as Julia’s amanuensis with little qualm (“My Experience” pp.41-4). Wielding his familiar tools from the New Journalism, he expanded his readership into the spiritualist community by foregrounding Borderland’s collaborative ethos, printing rather thrilling tales of first-person accounts of the uncanny, and recurrently featuring a female voice as an authoritative speaker on the afterlife. On those levels, the project seems entirely in keeping with the savvy journalist Stead had long been. But resolving just how to present these dual-authored messages on the page, and how to attribute the words of each speaker when both he and she were, by his own account, writing as a single being with two consciousnesses… that proved more difficult, and indeed challenged the very tenets of the New Journalism Stead had so long championed.
James Gilray, Farmer Giles and His Wife Showing Off Their Daughter Betty to Their Neighbours on her Return from School, 1809. Image Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
At first glance, James Gillray’s satirical depiction of a farmer’s daughter displaying her genteel accomplishments, Farmer Giles and his Wife shewing off their daughter Betty to their Neighbours, on her return from School (1809), seems far afield from George Eliot, the most intellectually ambitious and morally serious of all the great Victorian novelists. However, Gillray’s print captures the social ambitions of families like Eliot’s as well as the derision to which their aspirations were subjected. Growing up in rural Warwickshire as the daughter of a carpenter-turned-estate manager, Eliot was–like Betty–sent off to school to acquire the gentility that was the hallmark of the rising middle class. One consequence of Eliot’s early training in gentility was a lifelong self-consciousness, a morbid sensitivity to the opinions of others, that was intensified by her later move into London’s elite intellectual circles, where her rustic roots led to frequent accusations that she was insufficiently ladylike. Eliot’s sensitivity has long been noted by scholars and assumed to be a character trait, part of Eliot’s essential psychological makeup. In “Class Affect and the Victorian Novelist,” I suggest that we consider Eliot’s self-consciousness as a class affect, or what Raymond Williams refers to as a structure of feeling.
This essay explores the traces of Eliot’s class affect that can be discerned in Felix Holt: the Radical (1866) and through the trajectory of its heroine, Esther Lyon. Esther not only shares Eliot’s humble background and boarding-school education in gentility, but she is also singled out in George Eliot’s Life (1885) by Eliot’s late-in-life husband, John Cross, for her resemblance to Eliot on account of her sensitivity to class rank. While Felix Holt is ordinarily discussed in the context of debates about the extension of suffrage to working men, my analysis places middle-class gentility at the center of the novel, of equal importance to the issue of working-class voting rights, and contends that Eliot uses the trope of sugar to represent both as parallel threats to the moral advancement of the nation. Moreover, while the titular hero, Felix Holt, has no success convincing his fellow workers to embrace education rather than electoral politics, he does reform Esther. Under Felix’s rough tutelage, Esther unlearns the lessons of her schooling in fine-ladyism and comes to understand that true distinction, at least in Eliot’s moral universe, arises from renouncing middle-class gentility in favor of sympathy. In doing so, Esther forgoes the self-consciousness of gentility and embraces the reparative double consciousness of Eliotic sympathy, as she ceases to worry about what her neighbors think of her and begins to think with Felix in mind. Thus, by carefully attending to Esther’s narrative, I argue that Felix Holt offers readers an origin story for Eliotic sympathy by recapitulating its development out of the self-consciousness that was a by-product of Eliot’s own instruction in gentility. Eliot transforms the excruciating sensitivity that was gentility’s affective legacy into her most distinctive moral concept, and thereby betrays the obscured class underpinnings of her own investment in sympathy.
To read more, see Susan Zlotnick, “Class Affect and the Victorian Novelist: George Eliot’s Gentility and the Origins of Sympathy in Felix Holt.” Victorian Review, vol. 47 no. 1, 2021, p. 115-133. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/vcr.2021.0012.
Often seen as prim and repressed in the popular imagination, the Victorians are not usually known for their frank discussions of excrement. In nineteenth-century agriculture, however, excrement was a constant topic of public interest and debate. By the mid-nineteenth century, British farmers had become increasingly dependent on supplies of South American guano (accumulated lodes of bird and bat feces), which they praised as a potent fertilizer. At the same time that farmers scattered guano over their fields, speculators sought to revitalize an older practice in which human excrement, euphemistically termed “night soil,” was used to return fertility to exhausted agricultural fields. In public debates about these fertilizers, the contrast between guano and night soil took on outsized meaning. Critics denounced farmers’ guano dependence for implicating Britain in extractive, international trade, while praising night soil schemes for ensuring a sustainable recycling of nutrients within the British nation.
title page for “Prospectus of the Metropolitan Sewage Manure Company.” Metropolitan Sewage Manure Co., 1845.
As I show in my article, “Night Soil and Nation Building: Trollope’s The Prime Minister, the Guano Economy, and Sustainability,” the novelist Anthony Trollope responds to this agricultural debate by contrasting guano with older agricultural methods. Trollope’s 1876 novel follows Ferdinand Lopez, an arriviste adventurer who speculates in extracted guano. Lopez marries Emily Wharton, the daughter of a wealthy family who characterize Lopez as a suspicious foreigner; this marriage amounts to an extraction of Emily from her family and friends, the Whartons and Fletchers. While the novel does not directly reference excrement recycling schemes, the novel’s marriage plot contrasts Lopez’s implication in guano extraction with the Whartons’ and Fletchers’ promotion of intranational agricultural sustainability. Arthur Fletcher, who had long courted Emily, promotes older agricultural reforms that return benefits to the nation. As Trollope contrasts the Whartons and Fletchers with Lopez, he also contrasts older and newer methods of agriculture, and extractive international trade with intranational sustainability.
Trollope is typically seen as a writer interested in cultural mores and political machinations (particularly in the Palliser series, of which The Prime Minister is a part). But I suggest that Trollope’s engagement with the guano economy positions him as an environmental writer, one who is both keenly aware of attempts to achieve agricultural sustainability, and of the ways in which nationalist sentiment inflected these attempts.
Illustration by Charles Kerr in Rider Haggard, Maiwa’s Revenge; or, the War of the Little Hand (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1888)
In 2017, children’s author Katherine Rundell published The Explorer, a modern-day adventure novel that would go on to win the Costa Children’s Book Award. The novel follows a group of four children whose plane crash-lands in the jungle after the pilot suffers a fatal heart attack. They stumble upon the ruins of a magnificent ancient city, deep in the heart of the Amazon. Its guardian is a former explorer who has taken it as his life’s mission to protect the ancient city. He has built a jungle canopy to shield it from ‘people surveying the land from the air […] From people looking for El Dorado. From people looking to pack places like this into parcels of stone and sell them to curious ladies and gentlemen in Chelsea for the price of a bus driver’s yearly wages. From people exactly like me’.[1] He is determined to keep the magnificent ruins a secret until human society relinquishes its obsession with dominating and plundering the environment: ‘The time will come, I hope, when the world values people as much as it values land. But for now, we do not need more men in pith helmets marching through the jungle towards us.’[2]
We can read Rundell’s story as ‘writing back’ to the adventure novels of the later nineteenth century, often grouped under the genre ‘imperial romance’ and featuring an all-male band of heroes who venture into the unknown – usually darkest Africa or South America – stumble upon a lost city and escape its inevitable booby traps and hordes of avenging ‘savages’ in order to regale a Victorian reading public with tales of their derring-do. Rundell offers a clear counter-narrative to such tales, with her gruff explorer condemning the activities of colonialist soldiers and the havoc they wrought upon the forest ecosystem. At the end of the novel, its young protagonist Fred grows up to become what the newspapers call ‘A new kind of explorer’ – one who, it is implied, is respectful of the landscape he traverses and aware of his potential impact.[3]
The Explorer situates itself firmly in opposition to what it implies to be the single narrative of exploration that dominated the late nineteenth century: masculinist, colonialist, anthropocentric. It is a narrative often brought to life in the fiction of renowned Victorian adventure writers such as Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad, with recent scholarship devoted to identifying the problematic environmental ideologies of these novels in addition to their noted racist and misogynist tendencies. Destruction of animal and plant life is rampant in many of these texts, but gathers relatively little critical attention, overshadowed as it often is by the gratuitous slaughter of native peoples that is also often a key plot feature. Yet it struck me, while reading Rundell’s novel for the first time recently, that the counter-narrative she offers is not a new one, and in fact exists as a haunting sub-text within many of the novels themselves.
Recently, scholars have begun to identify more ambiguity in these texts, and I have attempted to continue this conversation in my article for Victorian Review, ‘“The Game has Gone”: Animal Fantasies and Environmental Realities in H. Rider Haggard’s Imperial Romance’. I argue that we ought to pay close attention to the frequent, detailed depictions of the animal body and native flora and fauna in Rider Haggard’s novels, as these offer clues to a fundamental anxiety that underpinned his depictions of colonial adventure. In Haggard’s writing we can identify a paradox that inflects a large proportion of nineteenth-century imperial romance: adventure relied for its thrills on tempting travellers into the ‘blank spaces’ of the map, but simultaneously acknowledged that those spaces could only retain their appeal if left uncharted. This tendency is evident in multiple examples from the genre – novels by Frank Aubrey, J. Provand Webster, R. D. Chetwode and James Cobban, among others – all of which close with a dramatic incident or accident that sees their explorers unable to return to, or map, the lost worlds at their hearts. We might actually trace the seeds of Rundell’s counter-narrative back to these novels, which, even as they promoted anthropocentric, violent adventure in exoticised locales, were simultaneously haunted by the guilt and anxiety that they might be contributing to the irreversible disappearance of such places. There is little difference, in actual fact, between the stern warnings of Rundell’s explorer and the sentiments of Haggard’s Henry Curtis, over a century earlier:
I have no fancy for handing over this beautiful country to be torn and fought for by speculators, tourists, politicians, and teachers, whose voice is as the voice of Babel […] nor will I endow it with the greed, drunkenness, new diseases, gunpowder, and general demoralisation which chiefly mark the progress of civilisation amongst unsophisticated peoples.[4]
To learn more, see McCausland, Elly. “”The Game Has Gone”: Animal Fantasies and Environmental Realities in H. Rider Haggard’s Imperial Romance.” Victorian Review, vol. 46 no. 2, 2020, p. 235-254. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/vcr.2020.0021.
[1] Katherine Rundell, The Explorer (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), p. 299.
Left: Rudyard Kipling, “The Cat That Walked by Himself,” in Just So Stories for Little Children, 1902. Courtesy of the British Library Board, MS 59840 f118r.
What is your very first memory or impression? Is it your mother’s holding you? Your father’s singing to you? An avenue of trees? I hope yours is positive. Rudyard Kipling’s certainly was. Born in Bombay to Anglo-Indian parents, he recalled: “My first impression is of daybreak, light and colour and golden and purple fruits at the level of my shoulder” (Something of Myself for My Friends Known and Unknown, 1). After being nurtured by loving parents and a devoted ayah for his first five years, Kipling suffered a traumatic childhood when he and his younger sister “Trix” were abruptly taken to Southsea, England and left behind with paid guardians to start a British education. For the next six years he suffered cruelty and bullying. Kipling’s deep love for his own children, Josephine, John, and Elsie emerges throughout his writings, from his address to his “Best Beloved” Josephine in Just So Stories to numerous later illustrated letters from across the globe. One can only imagine the horror he and his wife felt upon burying their first daughter at age six and losing their only son at eighteen on the Western Front.
Yet what does any of this have to do with muteness, speech or survival in Kipling’s animal worlds, the topic of my recent ‘animal studies’ essay in Victorian Review? In re-reading his fiction and poetry over the last decade, I have increasingly come to question inflexible theoretical lenses used to interpret his works. Ideologies stressing binaries, including animal/human, repeatedly fail to account for the complexities, ambiguities, and ironies of his corpus.
The most acute readers of Kipling, such as Daniel Karlin or J.M.S. Tomkins, have sought in various ways to complicate binary thinking. Moreover, numerous scholars, usually focusing on the Mowgli stories, have studied his representation of animals and humans, but few have explored Kipling’s lifelong fascination with animal language or his complex depiction of muteness. Begun as an MLA talk in 2017, this essay draws upon relevant theoretical contexts to examine differing language/muteness relations among animals and humans. I argue that Kipling’s frequent reliance on muteness carries a variety of meanings and values: the silencing of non-human animal sounds by instinct; silent yet communicating animal gestures and movements; a chosen human quietude; the muting of sounds by sleep or by caresses and lullabies; the silence that follows individual deaths, mass killings, and extinctions.
I purposely begin with three of the non-Mowgli stories that were collected in the 1894 Jungle Book: “The White Seal” and “Toomai of the Elephants,” and in the 1895 The Second Jungle Book: “The Miracle of Purun Bhagat.” Each dissolves human/non-human binaries in different ways. Kipling continues to explore how and why creatures communicate in his brilliant image/text collection Just So Stories for Little Children (1902). As he still investigates language and silence, across species, years later, he creates in Thy Servant a Dog,Told by Boots (1930) an animal mind, akin to a toddler’s, trying to process human speech. Rudyard Kipling cares deeply for children, animals, and, above all, for sameness within difference—that survival matters, that we all suffer, that we all die.
Frederick Courteney Selous, Travel and Adventure in South-East Africa (London: R. Ward & Co, 1893), 65. Image source: The British Library, via Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons License.
During the period of the New Imperialism, c. 1870-1930, animals intruded upon the society and culture of European empires and particularly the British empire in new ways. Animals came to play a prominent role in art, literature, and ideas, but they were also physically present, and shaped discussions about class, justice, economics, imperialism, religion, and anthropology. The animals of indigenous societies from Oceania and Australia to British Columbia to Africa to India helped shape anthropologists’ ideas about those societies and cultures. That cattle, sheep, and pigs thrived across the British and Irish countryside became a question of land reform and in debates over how to feed an expanding population; that they successfully adapted to new habitats from the Americas to Australia and New Zealand furthered colonialization. The animals of Africa became a justification for British presence there, whether to save, feed, or study the indigenous people, or to study and protect the animals themselves. Beautiful, dangerous, sympathetic, delicious, promising increased health, facilitating or threatening the expansion of “civilization,” marking off “wild” territories and people, decorating hats and baronial halls, animals were omnipresent, and their presence affected relations with humans and among humans.
In particular, the question of eating and killing became a point of debate and an important point through which imperialists marked the divide between “primitive” and “civilized.” Anthropologists heatedly debated the meaning of eating and worshiping totemic animals among the hunter-gatherer peoples in the Americas, Oceania, and Africa then under (or coming under) European control, understanding these peoples (or at least their cultures) as mostly doomed to extinction, and in terms of set stages of social evolution. But even in seemingly unrelated cultural arenas, such as in the vegetarian movement or among big-game hunters, we see people applying similar logics about animals, identification, and consumption. Anthropologists, vegetarians, and hunters debated and defined “civilized” and “primitive” relationships with animals around questions of ingestion, relation, and prohibitions around what constituted allowable “meat” and what was prohibited (or sacramental) “flesh.”
The idea that animals are “good to think [with]” has become a truism in Animal Studies; scholars on both sides of the animal-agency divide, or debating various questions of social and cultural construction, have often used this declaration by Claude Lévi-Strauss as a foil for their own theories or arguments. But few in Animal Studies have considered the original context of that statement: Lévi-Strauss’ deconstruction and rethinking of the Victorian theory of totemism. This article considers how that theory was part of not only changing ideas about animals and human-animal relations at the height of British imperialism, but how those ideas were in fact responses to this growing presence of animals and animal products through imperial trade systems. In the shadow of Darwinian natural selection and new theories that connected animals to humans in radical ways, and surrounded by and dependent on animals and animal products, the late Victorians were constantly pushing animals and the “primitive” away even as they tried to understand all of history and biology on the spectrum of evolution. Animals were crucial to their own societies and systems of thought; they were both “good to eat” and “good to think,” and not just for “primitive” societies.
To read more, see Woodson-Boulton, Amy. “Totems, Cannibals, and Other Blood Relations: Animals and the Rise of Social Evolutionary Theory.” Victorian Review, vol. 46 no. 2, 2020, p. 211-233. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/vcr.2020.0020.
‘Bram Stoker,’Mörkrets makter, trans. A_e, Dagen, (10 June 1899). Image Courtesy of National Library of Sweden.
Recently, the field of translation studies was shaken to its core. The Icelandic Makt Myrkranna (Powers of Darkness, 1901), long believed to be a faithful translation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 original, in fact contains serious deviations from the source text, creating a radically different work. Researcher Hans Corneel de Roos initially suggested that Stoker may have collaborated with the translator, Validimar Ásmundsson, to produce an alternate version of the classic vampire tale. Yet that supposition was quickly overturned by the discovery of an even earlier “translation,” the Swedish Mörkets Makter (Powers of Darkness, 1899), with striking links to the Icelandic text. De Roos now believes that both these texts and their prefaces — signed by a “B.S.” once assumed to be Bram Stoker — are in fact fantastic forgeries.
This blatant co-opting of textual bodies, and their ability to remain hidden for over a century, are just the most recent in a long history of the vampire’s connection to fraud, plagiarism, and literary piracy. As these creatures began to embody contemporary anxieties regarding origin and authenticity, nineteenth century authors began to freely use vampiric literature as a cover to engage in faux-translations, misattribution, literary piracy, and outright forgery.
“Dracula or Draculitz? Translational Forgery and Bram Stoker’s “Lost Version” of Dracula” examines how Makt Myrkranna and Mörkets Makter exploit this trend on both a thematic and formal level. Both texts are fascinated with the vampire as a symbol of the very forgeries their works carry out. Their version of Dracula, “Draculitz,” can concoct much more elaborate and ultimately more successful frauds, and his vampiric doubles no longer need to be turned by him one by one — they proliferate the text, swapping identities at will. What might these acts of forge/ing tell us about the role of the translator as vampiric creator? Do these adaptations suggest that the fake, the stolen, and the copy are necessary to assert, or may even need to precede, the concept of an original?
“Morning Prayer” by William Holman Hunt,1859, Photogravure of original oil on canvas Swan Electric Engraving Co. sc” — text beneath image Source: Pre-Raphaelitism, facing I, 60. Scanned image and text by George P. Landow from the Victorian Web.
The Victorians had strong opinions about the public expression of religious belief. Nineteenth-century Evangelicalism found sincerity in expressions that came straight, as it were, from the heart, unpremeditated and unprompted by the strictures of ceremony. High Church Tractarianism on the other hand rejected Evangelical outpourings as too solicitous of an audience. As Isaac Williams, author of the two tracts that formalized the notion of “reserve” into doctrine, put it, “A want of reserve, an artificial religious tone in conversation or prayer is…proof that the person is wishing to be, or wishing to persuade himself that he is, rather than that he really is religious” (“Tract 87” V: 8). Significantly, both religious traditions advocated unselfconsciousness as key to sincerity, but they had opposing methods for achieving it.
This unselfconsciousness was not only a religious but also an aesthetic mandate, one that women writers had a particularly conflicted relationship with. Literary unselfconsciousness appeared everywhere in the nineteenth century, from William Wordsworth’s claim that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” and John Stuart Mill’s assertion that “eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard” to John Ruskin’s notion that “the most perfect human artists” work “without boasting,” possessing “an inner and involuntary power which approximates literally to the instinct of an animal.” Within this framework, writers who embraced a more didactic style were often accused of egotistical moralizing. Women writers most often received such criticism, but didacticism had been thrust upon them, in a way, as the lesser of two evils. Properly domiciled within the home, middle-class women writers were required to have an overt moral stance in their fiction lest they be accused of unladylike self-display for venturing into the public sphere. An embrace of a quieter modesty always threatened to associate them, ironically, with the self-knowledge of moral vanity and even licentiousness.
Nevertheless, primarily concerned with their own relationship with God, Tractarian writers like Williams and John Keble looked to women as models of the reserved unselfconsciousness they aspired to. High Church women writers like Christina Rossetti and Charlotte Yonge found this association with reserve allowed them a particular authority as women to represent religious issues in their work. But an embrace of women’s “natural” passivity always had its drawbacks, of course. In The Experience of Life (1852), Tractarian novelist Elizabeth Missing Sewell examines the difficulties posed by reserve, which required a lack of consciousness of other people and oneself in order to become closer to God. Sewell confronts the criticisms of pretentiousness that her fellow Tractarians faced for attempting such a state of reticence. Whereas Williams in his tracts on reserve ignores the impossibility of ever becoming purely unselfconscious, Sewell is compelled to address this problem head-on, having been perceived, like other women authors of the time, as trying to be selflessly unselfconscious only to impress others. Sewell’s strong connections to Tractarianism keep her committed to the idea of reserve, but a reserve that recognizes the limits of extreme unselfconsciousness and that allows for the subtle role other people play in one’s relationship to God. Forgoing her counterparts’ preference for poetry as the ideal genre for cultivating reserve, Sewell finds that the novel, with its implied relationship between author and reader, achieves a more realistic mode of reserved self-consciousness. In doing so, Sewell reveals the nuanced motives shaping her didactic literary style.
