Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel: Rereading Nineteenth-Centur ...

Most of the novelists labelled—or branded—as typical antifeminists held ambiguous, even contending, views on various, not necessarily interrelated, agendas. They may be generally characterised by a shared interest in the domestic, by being opposed to certain ideological doctrines (including the attendant stereotyping of women authors and their thereby gendered works), or simply by not being interested in political constructions. Terms such as domestic and popular, however, are even more difficult to theorise, and are moreover associated the more emphatically perhaps with aesthetic quality judgements. As Brenda Ayres has recently pointed out, “Such signifiers as ‘domestic, sentimental, and sensational’ persist with implication that these novels have value but little literary virtue; they might become canonised and yet remain stigmatised as those silly novels by silly women novelists” (xiv).

By contrast, antisuffragism (with which antifeminism overlaps in some parts) can be more clearly demarcated, although Julia Bush has argued that a strict dichotomy between suffragettes and “antis” likewise leaves out the silent majority, and that this “non-political women’s movement” can provide important insight precisely because of its continued marginalisation (4). Although primarily focused on the political dimension of antisuffragism, Bush’s recent study not only suggests that novels by writers opposed to the vote (Bush mentions Linton and Yonge, among others) contain interesting evidence of “varied and fluctuating viewpoints on many aspects of the Woman Question” (84). It is also suggestive, Bush further emphasises, that “some of the most widely read Victorian novelists, and some of those whose reputations have declined most steeply since the turn of the century, were committed anti-suffragists” (4). Building on Bush’s study, Susan Hamilton, in her contribution to this collection, marks out fissures in women’s writing on antifeminism in general and the suffrage in particular by dissecting Linton’s creation of a distinctive press signature. As her professional achievements as a novelist and journalist generated the value of her signature, Linton was in many ways an uneasy presence on the antisuffrage petition. So far, however, the predominantly dismissive treatment of “antis” in critical assessments of women’s contributions to the public sphere and to literature has largely erased the significance of just such perceived incongruities.