Women, Power, and Subversion: Social Strategies in British Fiction, 1778-1860 by JudithLowder Newton; The Determined Reader: Gender and Culture in the Novel from Napoleon toVictoria by Carla L. Peterson; Women in the English Novel, 1800-1900 by Merryn Williams;Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel by Ruth Bernard YeazellReview by: Patricia Meyer SpacksSigns, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Winter, 1988), pp. 365-369Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174095 .

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Winter 1988 / SIGNS

Women, Power, and Subversion: Social Strategies in British Fiction, 1778-1860. By JUDITH LOWDER NEWTON. New York: Methuen, 1985.

The Determined Reader: Gender and Culture in the Novel from Napoleon to Victoria. By CARLA L. PETERSON. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986.

Women in the English Novel, 1800-1900. By MERRYN WILLIAMS. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984.

Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Edited by RUTH BERNARD YEAZELL. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.

Patricia Meyer Spacks, Yale University

How many ways we read now! Sharing a common concern with nineteenth- century literary texts as revealers of cultural actuality, the authors of these books paint their subjects in extraordinarily different colors. Maggie Tul- liver of The Mill on the Floss, for example, is "a bright child suffering from the company of stupid people" (Williams, 143). She is also depicted as someone disastrously "unwilling to rewrite traditional narrative plots" (Peterson, 197), and as a way for George Eliot to demonstrate "the material and ideological sources of dependency on men" (Newton, 145). These interpretations, not necessarily incompatible, are certainly divergent. "In- terpretation remains vulnerable; it remains a construct; but it adds to the filling of a void that extraneous element of imagination," writes Thomas Greene in The Vulnerable Text (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, 46). The critics' reflections in these four books on the nineteenth- century novel dramatize both the vulnerability of interpretation and the varying power of critical imagination.

Judith Newton's book, first published in 1981, retains its single-minded energy and provocative force. Newton investigates "social strategies in British fiction" with full awareness of ideological strategies involved in her own approach. This study implicitly proposes to show women the realities of their position in society by uncovering its historical roots, to enforce the necessity of amelioration, to reveal how previous female generations found their own modes of power, and to discriminate between more and less successful modes. It thus makes literary texts into means for political ends and claims criticism as political action.

Yet the interpretations provided by Women, Power, and Subversion seem more than constructs of an excessively politicized imagination. Be- ginning in the eighteenth century with Fanny Burney's Evelina, Newton cogently demonstrates the insistent-if not always fully conscious-ideo- logical strain in novels by women. Evelina shows its young protagonist operating in a society where men define women as prey or as treasure. The novel's fleeting recognition of facts of power and powerlessness dissipates

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into conventional marriage at the end, a marriage that completes the transformation of Evelina's original "quest plot"-her effort to create the story of her selfhood-into a love plot. Pride and Prejudice, on the other hand, shows a woman achieving genuine autonomy. Yet Elizabeth Ben- net's marriage, though it "initiates new life," also "confirms a flickering suspicion that the best is over" (85), revealing, in Newton's view, the impossibility of marriage as a female solution. Charlotte Bronte, in Villette, implicitly acknowledges that impossibility. Lucy Snowe seeks emotional and economic independence and tries to separate herself from the tradi- tional women's plot of love and marriage; her lover, M. Paul, helps her toward independence, but he cannot be allowed to survive. Bronte recog- nizes, according to Newton, the fantasy involved in hoping to combine quest with marriage. The Mill on the Floss, Newton's final text, depicts Maggie Tulliver in a richly imagined society where men retain economic and social power but women exert their own kind of power. Despite Eliot's clearsightedness about such matters, she immerses herself finally "in an ideology of love and sacrifice" (150). Yet she uses Maggie's drowning to express not only love but rage at social actualities.

Newton clearly stipulates the limitations of her argument. She does not contend that the four novels typify their authors' ideologies, since ideology can change from one work to the next, or that the progression of conscious- ness in these novels characterizes the period's development. Claiming only to delineate forms of ideological resistance in the four specific works, and to demonstrate the "sisterhood" these works establish between author and female reader, she expertly accomplishes what she set out to do, though not without a few ideological assumptions of her own. When she points out, for instance, that, despite the "emphasis upon material and ideological forces which so dominates Eliot's account of Maggie's childhood," the novelist lapses into identification with Maggie's dependency (152), Newton appears to assume that novelistic deviations from her own view of the world amount to flaws of perception or of craftsmanship. Yet the ideological tensions embodied in The Mill on the Floss generate much of the novel's energy-as do comparable tensions in the other novels here treated. Newton has done important critical service in precisely locating those tensions.

Carla Peterson, examining French as well as English novels of the nineteenth century, defines a less ambitious although broader subject. Concerned to "analyze the motif of the reader-protagonist and his or her reading activity" (3), she considers novels by men (Dickens, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Hardy) as well as women (Mme. de Stael, Bronte, Eliot). She writes rather stiffly, with mechanical references to obligatory critics: Derrida, Foucault, Lucien Goldmann, Stanley Fish. But she illuminates important differences between the French and the English novel, and she suggests how much cultural weight an apparently limited motif can carry.

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Peterson distinguishes between the typical concern of English novel- ists' protagonists to win acceptance by their communities and the French tendency to stress the desire for absolute superiority-a desire clearly related to Napoleon's influence on French imaginations. The Determined Reader emphasizes the contrast between male and female protagonists. For example: reading "masculinizes" de Stael's Corinne, making her "sex- ually knowledgeable and, beyond that, independent and assertive"; it "feminizes" Balzac's Louis Lambert, turning him inward and "encouraging in him a passive attitude toward life" (70). Such comparisons strikingly illuminate the search for selfhood that marks these novels.

Jane Eyre's childhood reading guides her to the union of providential and romantic themes in her life. Dickens relies on a fairy tale structure for David Copperfield in order to avoid "traditional literary models of linear masculine growth" (123). Stendhal and Flaubert, recognizing the "failure of male forms of heroism based on the Napoleonic model," turn to their heroines for "possibilities of artistic and heroic self-realization" (135). Peterson argues persuasively that, through depicting their characters' relation to reading, nineteenth-century novelists convey their attitudes toward sexual stereotypes and their understanding of the human position in the universe.

Sometimes, however, Peterson sounds as though she thinks characters are people. She relies on a kind of pop psychology that obscures the facts of a novel, claiming, for instance, that the negative feelings of Maggie Tulli- ver's mother toward her prevent the child from developing an adequate sense of self, while Mr. Tulliver unfortunately cannot compensate for maternal neglect despite his good impulses. In fact, Maggie shares few if any values with her mother, and her father believes that female fates depend on belonging to some man. Again, Peterson offers confusing accounts of the narrators in Corinne and Balzac's Louis Lambert. Indeed, in repeated passages The Determined Reader made me wish to quarrel with it-but it never put me to sleep!

Merryn Williams's study aspires in 186 pages "to trace attitudes to women in the English novel between 1800 and 1900" (ix). This work allots nine pages each to Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott, fourteen to "Women Novelists of the Later Nineteenth Century," and twenty-two to "Ideology and the Novel." The book provides useful reminders of such virtually forgotten Victorian writers as Margaret Oliphant and Charlotte Yonge, both, Williams insists, of ideological as well as literary interest. Williams calls attention to important aspects of some novelists: to Scott's awareness of the extreme vulnerability of women, for instance; to Dickens's assign- ment of extraordinary power to Betsey Trotwood in David Copperfield, but on the whole, she hardly moves beyond plot summary.

Only vaguely aware of the last ten years of feminist criticism, Williams often produces meaningless generalizations: "Jane Austen, in spite of the

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limited world which she had no choice but to live in, was a free spirit" (52). Her summaries prove misleading as well as facile. Thus she claims that Lucy Snowe, in Villette, "finally chooses" the life "of the independent teacher. Her happiest years are over but she is self-respecting, her own mistress, and unlikely to become a victim of depression again" (96). Lucy, of course, receives her independence as a gift from M. Paul. We cannot know that her happiness has ended, and the whole novel in its melancholy tone contradicts the judgment about her depression. "We cannot under- stand," Williams writes, "why [Maggie in The Mill on the Floss] should sacrifice herself for Tom" (144). But the entire novel stands behind this sacrifice. To compare Williams's accounts of Villette or The Mill on the Floss with Newton's illuminates the difference between mechanical and committed criticism.

More eloquently than any of the other works here treated, Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel insists on the sheer excite- ment of current literary criticism at its best. Three of its essays-D. A. Miller on the police in Barchester Towers, Gillian Beer on "Origins and Oblivion in Victorian Narrative," Mark Seltzer on the theme of generation in the naturalist novel-struck me as brilliant. The other three (by Cather- ine Gallagher, Elaine Showalter, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) also con- front provocative questions in provocative ways.

Most of the writers represented in this volume are young, a fact that augurs well for the future of literary studies. The questions they raise move outward from words on a page to the social forces that help account for those words. Miller inquires why Trollope's novel contains no police. Even as metaphor, the police exist only sketchily, in ironically qualified ways. War, on the other hand, thrives in the pages of this decorous novel, a powerful metaphor leading the critic to uncover the full force of Trollope's conservatism, which implies avoiding the very possibility of "radical trans- gression" (33). Beer begins with a memorable formulation: "Forgetfulness is categorized as a malfunction of memory, and yet forgetting is our commonest experience" (63). She goes on to connect Victorian anxieties about oblivion with the influence of Darwinian biology and countermove- ments to it, all profoundly implicated with questions of origins and pre- servation. Seltzer investigates how machines and bodies relate to one another in the nineteenth century, drawing on a wide range of material from economics, physics ("the discourse of thermodynamics", 137), and political economy. He finds an omnipresent "politics of the body" (139) implicit in intertwining ideas about production and reproduction.

Although the essays bear the loose thematic relation to one another suggested by the title, their most important connection comes from their shared awareness of the problematics of critical method. The essayists appear vividly conscious of their own critical choices and as equally aware of issues raised by the critical history of the past twenty years, but I

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detected few common references. Only one-Sedgwick-alludes directly (and cogently, refreshingly) to her own experience. Yet most of the writing here conveys the urgency of its critical acts-an urgency generated by the ferocity of recent critical debate. In a time when those not actually practic- ing literary studies often suspect that this branch of academe has become utterly remote from the real concerns of real people, this collection, even more powerfully than Newton's work, insists that the world matters to literature and that what one says about literature matters in the world.

International Migration: The Female Experience. Edited by RITA JAMES SIMON and CAROLINE B. BRETTELL. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, 1986.

M. D. R. Evans, Australian National University

International Migration: The Female Experience is a good book that de- serves a wide audience. Simon and Brettell focus on the central issue of how gender, class, and ethnicity are related in different societies. Using a rich diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches, the contribu- tors give careful attention to sex-role attitudes that immigrants bring with them and that they encounter in the host society. They examine opportu- nity structures in the countries immigrants leave and in the countries to which they move, as well as the links between those structures and sex-role attitudes. The collection as a whole benefits from the authors' skillful use of a variety of comparative strategies of analysis: of an ethnic group in both sending and receiving societies, of a single immigrant group in several host societies, of legal and illegal immigrants of the same group, and of different immigrant groups within a country. The book's broad international scope makes it particularly valuable to researchers.

This book can be strongly recommended for students, too. The writing is clear and the statistical tables are very easy to read. The authors focus on their findings and interpretations; they discuss methodology succinctly and with an appreciation for the suitability of different methods for different questions. The book's clear organization and thematic continuity make it ideal for use in a graduate or advanced undergraduate class or a specialized course on gender, ethnicity, and immigration. The editors have produced a combined set of references, conveniently placed at the end of the book, which will be a valuable tool for graduate students.

The book contains sixteen articles, too many to discuss individually in a brief review, so I will focus on several themes that figure prominently in the volume and that seem particularly salient for future research.

A great many immigrants are women-indeed in some countries

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