The Victorian Novel of Adulthood by Rainof Rebecca Elise

Author:Rainof, Rebecca Elise [Rainof, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2015-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOUR

Odd Women and Eccentric Plotting

Maturity, Modernism, and Woolf’s Victorian Retrospection

Maturity and midlife, far from being a realm of “general lost freshness,” as Henry James describes his own “middle years,” carry a freight of subversive potential for writers experimenting with new methods for resisting plot—those “gig lamps” of eventful storytelling that Virginia Woolf protested in “Modern Fiction.”1 The familiar literary history is that this resistance to plot arose in the modernist era contemporaneously with Woolf’s imperative that writers strive to represent the “luminous halo” of lived experience. Yet in exploring nineteenth-century novels that deviate from the bildungsroman, we see an early strain of this defiance already at work. From short fiction like Silas Marner and “The Beast in the Jungle” to sprawling multivolume novels like Little Dorrit and The Ambassadors, a suspended approach to plot can be found in works oriented around middle-aged characters, those figures clustered eccentrically around the edges of the Austenian dance floor earlier in the nineteenth century: confirmed bachelors, aging parents and grandparents, widows and widowers, and lastly, that figure of cheerful abjection, Miss Bates, the “old maid” or “odd woman.”

The threat at the heart of Jane Austen’s Emma, a threat that goes unrealized in her narrative of formation, is that Emma’s own plot will veer toward this margin. At Harriet’s concern that Emma “will be an old maid! and that’s so dreadful,” the heroine insists that the term does not apply to wealthy unmarried women, only poor ones, and she instead envisions an alternative life story that marks a radical departure from both the bildungsroman and the marriage plot as the available trajectories for female protagonists: “If I know myself, Harriet, mine is an active, busy mind, with a great many independent resources; and I do not perceive why I should be more in want of employment at forty or fifty than one-and-twenty. Woman’s usual occupations of eye, and hand, and mind, will be as open to me then, as they are now; or with no important variation.”2 Emma’s fantasy of her life “at forty or fifty” as an unmarried and fulfilled woman—the continuing heroine of a life characterized by “some of the best blessings of existence” (7) if not by marriage—is a plot that would take many decades to be realized as a common central story line in British fiction. Even Austen’s eldest heroine, twenty-eight-year-old Anne Eliot from Persuasion, evades this fate. The eight years Anne waits to reencounter Captain Wentworth, her interlude of suspension, is handled elliptically, the narrative commencing only with the renewed onset of their interrupted romance. Persuasion may be an unconventional marriage plot, telling of first love delayed until the heroine has self-consciously come of age, but it is not the account of the unmarried older woman that Emma fictively envisions. Miss Bates would have to wait until later in the century to receive fuller treatment. The elevation of the “odd woman” from part of the melancholic decor to George Gissing’s central, albeit often unkindly represented, focus for his novel

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