Jane Spencer

Afterword: Feminist Waves

There’s something seductive about the number three. Third time lucky. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. And we all want progress. Even Julia Kristeva’s famous essay ‘Women’s Time’ (1979), which divided feminism into three ‘attitudes’ or ‘generations’ while invoking the possibility of ‘the parallel existence of all three in the same historical time, or even that they be interwoven one with the other’ (209; emphasis in original), ended up strongly implying that third comes last and is best. First attitude: the pursuit of equality. Second attitude: the claim of difference. Third attitude: undermining the kind of fixed identity on which the first two have been based: ‘In this third attitude, which I strongly advocate -which I imagine? — the very dichotomy man/woman as an opposition between two rival entities may be understood as belonging to metaphysics’ (209; emphasis in original). It is this third attitude which the work collected here also imagines, and contests, and places in new contexts. Since Kristeva’s essay a new generation of women has grown up, and a new terminology of feminist waves has emerged. As she predicted, there has been a focus of struggle ‘in personal and sexual identity itself, a concentration on ‘the multiplicity of every person’s possible identifications’ (210), but the result has rather been a proliferation of identities than a deconstruction of identity itself.

Imagining the Woman Poet: Creative Female Bodies

As women poets grew in numbers during the years 1660–1750, the web of writing discussing the woman poet grew too, a necessary accompaniment, offering ways of imagining her existence. The poet had always been generally understood to be male, his muse or inspiration female. The Renaissance had emphasized the poet’s masculinity through his writing on the female beloved and the implicit femininity of the text he produced.1 The idea that poetic authorship was grounded in a hierarchical heterosexual relation remained strong in later periods, and made the notion of the woman writer problematic. One solution was to think of the muse as writer instead of inspiration. In 1700, when a group of women wrote poems to commemorate the death of Dryden, thus claiming for female poets a place in the national literary culture, they did so as ‘the Nine Muses’. Such attempts aroused some opposition. ‘Chagrin’, a fictional critic in a 1702 pamphlet, may have the Nine Muses’ poems in mind when he complains about women writing for the stage: What a Pox have the Women to do with the Muses? I grant you the Poets call the Nine Muses by the Name of Women, but why so? not because the Sex had anything to do with Poetry, but because in that Sex they’re much fitter for prostitution.

Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661–1720): Sorrow into Song

The very first lines of a poem Finch called ‘The Introduction’ deny that she is introducing her work to the world: ‘Did I, my lines intend for publick view,/How many censures, wou’d their faults persue’.1 Included in manuscript volumes of her work compiled in the 1690s, the poem attempts to enforce a distinction between manuscript circulation intended for ‘some few friends’ (62, p. 6) and the public existence that would incur censure. The first section of the poem is an eloquent, much-quoted complaint about the opposition faced by ‘a woman that attempts the pen’ (9, p. 4), while the central section invokes biblical authority to argue that ‘’twas not ever thus’: women’s words once acted powerfully in public. Three illustrations of this are offered. In the first, ‘holy Virgins’ are said to have joined in the celebrations greeting the return of the Ark of the Covenant, their voices acting ‘to soften, and refine’ Israel’s music (30–1, p. 5).2 In the second, the young David’s victory over the Philistines is greeted by a ‘bright Chorus’ of women, whose praise of him above Saul is an early indication that he will become king.3 In the third and most striking example, ‘A Woman here, leads fainting Israel on,/She fights, she wins, she triumphs with a song’ (45–6, p. 6). This is the prophetess and Judge Deborah, who rouses the people of Israel to fight against their Canaanite oppressors, and sings a song of triumph on Israel’s victory.4

Adapting Aphra Behn: Hannah Cowley's A School for Greybeards and The Lucky Chance

ABSTRACT Recent accounts suggest that eighteenth‐century women writers gained their respectability in part through a repudiation of Aphra Behn and what she stood for. Through an analysis of Hannah Cowleys A School for Greybeards, an adaptation of Behns The Lucky Chance, this article argues that Cowley, though embarrassed to name Behn, was far from repudiating her. She sought to develop a role for the female playwright in eighteenth‐century culture similar to Behns in the seventeenth century: as a theatrical entertainer and a social critic concentrating on marriage customs. Audience objections to A School for Greybeards, and Cowleys subsequent revisions, show the constraints put on such social critique in the late eighteenth‐century theatre. Comparison of the two plays also shows Cowleys development of theatrically dominant, sentimentalised roles for women in comedy. The article demonstrates the mixed effects of sentimentalisation on female roles in comedy and on female playwrights.

Improper Women: Ruth and The Life of Charlotte Brontë

‘I think I must be an improper woman without knowing it, I do so manage to shock people’, wrote Gaskell to Eliza Fox early in 1853. Now should you have burned the 1st vol. of Ruth as so very bad? even if you had been a very anxious father of a family? yet two men have: and a third has forbidden his wife to read it; they sit next to us in Chapel and you can’t think how ‘improper’ I feel under their eyes. (L 223)

Household Goodness: ‘Cousin Phillis’, Wives and Daughters

Towards the end of her writing career, Gaskell gained a new sense of confidence in her work. ‘Cousin Phillis’ (1863–4) and Wives and Daughters, the enchanting ‘everyday story’ which she had not quite finished when she died, display a new and dazzling sureness of artistic control. Edgar Wright explains this development in terms of a move from direct authorial commentary to more impersonal narrative methods. In ‘Cousin Phillis’ the narrator is a major character in the story, and in Wives and Daughters the omniscient narrator withdraws to the background, leaving Molly Gibson, in Henry James’s terms, the ‘fine central intelligence’ that gives the novel a unified viewpoint. (As Wright points out, James admired Gaskell’s final novel).1 This artistic development is sometimes assumed to entail a movement away from the social commitment of her earlier fiction.

Warring Members: Elizabeth Gaskell, Writer

There are many Elizabeth Gaskells. She has been described as a sweet, gentle, utterly conventional Victorian woman who happened unawares to write some good novels; and as supporter of the women’s movement whose writing embodies a rational and radical social critique.1 In her lifetime much of her work was controversial: Mary Barton brought accusations from the manufacturers that she was too much on the side of the workers; the first volume of Ruth was burnt by some respectable men of her acquaintance; and the first edition of The Life of Charlotte Bronte had to be withdrawn because of threatened libel action. Yet by the early years of the twentieth century many of her readers thought of her chiefly as the charming author of delightful Cranford. Reviving interest in Gaskell from the 1950s onwards has reopened old controversies and started new ones. Marxist critics, reassessing her novels of industrial life, have praised her sympathetic rendering of working-class life, but concluded that she was an apologist for middle-class power.2 Feminist critics re-reading her presentation of gender relations have found her on the contrary deeply critical of the power structures of her society.3

Giving Utterance: Mary Barton

The gradual development of the Unitarians from a persecuted group, strongly associated with radical politics, to a socially powerful one, many of whose members were rich capitalists in growing industrial centres like Manchester, opened up gaps between theory and practice; and it is these gaps to which Gaskell’s first novel calls attention.1 It has been shown that her descriptions of working-class conditions and attitudes depend a great deal (to the extent of verbatim quotation of a number of paragraphs) on the Unitarian publications, The Reports of the Ministry to the Poor, for the years covered in her novel (1839–42).2 These reports were themselves fuelled by the desire to confront rich Unitarians not only with the poverty but with the feelings of their employees. Gaskell shared that desire, and wrote to recall the prosperous to a sense of Christian charity. Her targets were her own friends, members of her husband’s congregation, the leading figures in Manchester society; and while readers like Carlyle and Dickens were deeply impressed by her novel, the reaction closer to home was much less favourable. The Edinburgh Review article on Mary Barton, for example, which criticised Gaskell for dwelling on the workers’ difficulties and ignoring the sufferings of unsuccessful manufacturers, was written by William Greg, a manufacturer, Unitarian and friend.3

History and Tyranny: Sylvia’s Lovers

Gaskell’s novels of contemporary or near-contemporary life are committed to an optimistic assessment of how an individual’s actions can affect social developments. North and South especially, as we have seen, assigns a crucial importance to the heroins role as mediator in the class war. In Sylvia’s Lovers she adopts the more pessimistic view of human agency typical of the nineteenth-century historical novel pioneered by Scott, whose heroes are typically caught up in large historical events on which they can have little or no impact. Gaskell had always been fascinated by history, and during the 1850s had written stories based on historical events, including ‘Lois the Witch’ (1858) about the Salem witch trials, and ‘My Lady Ludlow’ with its inset narrative about victims of the guillotine during the French Revolution. With Sylvia’s Lovers she turned to the full-length historical novel, and like other novelists at the same time — George Eliot in Adam Bede, Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities — she turned to the events of the 1790s.

Changes: Cranford and North and South

Cranford (1851–3) and North and South (1854–5) in many ways represent opposite poles of Gaskell’s achievement. Cranford is a humorous rendering of old-fashioned life in a small rural town: mainly set (there are a few minor inconsistencies in dating) in the 1830s, and glancing back over its characters’ histories as far as the 1780s, it re-creates a quiet and quaint way of genteel life that at first sight may appear static. The action of North and South is undated but evidently meant to be contemporary: it deals with the new industrial town Milton, with the new class groupings of industrial working class and capitalist manufacturer, with the topical issue of strikes. Milton is young, harsh and rapidly changing, its newness emphasised by being experienced through the consciousness of Margaret Hale, an unwilling emigrant from an older way of life. Yet for all the difference in pace, both works are concerned with social change. Life in Cranford is in fact subject to change: personal losses are often the focus of individual episodes, but the picture emerging from the narrative as a whole is of beneficial changes to the community. They differ from the changes in North and South mainly by coming about more gently and gradually.