Jennifer Hedgecock’s study of the Victorian “femme fatale” is clearly a feminist study—and that means a Marxist study—of the difficult situation and limited options Victorian women faced in nineteenth-century England, especially if they were from the lower-middle and working class. However, with the exception of an occasional concession to the ideologically charged linguistic coinages currently used to establish one’s credentials as respectably “politically correct,” Dr. Hedgecock spares us polemic. In fact, a reader is hard pressed to discern any ideology at work, feminist or otherwise. And that is as it should be. Instead of encountering the tidal pull of ideology, of being swept up and carried down by the currents of the zeitgeist as one does so often in contemporary criticism, the reader of The Femme Fatale in Victorian Literature bathes in the satisfying sensation of encountering Marxist criticism at its best, and that means old-style criticism of a high order largely untouched by Foucault’s poststructuralism or Derrida’s deconstruction.
And what does it mean to write Marxist criticism in the “permanent” sense in which Kolakowski speaks of it—that is, when Marxism is considered as a “science” rather than “considered as a political or religious phenomenon? ” It means: (1) to seek to discover in the material conditions, that is, the economic conditions of life, the origins of consciousness, especially social consciousness; (2) to bring into high relief the conflicts—especially the social and economic conflicts—between the classes; and (3) to highlight the contradictions inherent in the existing social and economic order and therefore its inherent instability. Of course, it also means much more.
In her study of the Victorian femme fatale, Hedgecock establishes persuasively that being a “femme fatale” was neither caused by nor was a simple reflection of such a woman’s moral failings; it was instead a rejection of their condition of “fallenness” and of their limited economic options—a conscious strategy adopted to secure for themselves the social position and standard of living possessed by comfortable middle-class women. Hedgecock also establishes, equally successfully, I think, how the existing social order so circumscribed a woman’s life possibilities that conflicts between those within the reigning social order and those on the margins of it were inevitable; given women’s constrained possibilities and the society’s exclusionary presuppositions about them, donning a respectable disguise to hide one’s manipulative striving for success could conceivably be construed by a Victorian woman to be a rational strategy.