| Chapter 1: | Feminism and the Canon: Recovery and Reconsideration of Popular Novelists |
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(Or the novel can contain both plots—social-climbing bigamist Lady Audley is punished and languid playboy Robert Audley becomes a solid citizen and family man, for example.)
In 1977 Showalter’s magisterial A Literature of Their Own identified Broughton and Ouida as of the generation of sensation novelists who, along with Braddon, challenged masculine dominion in the literary marketplace and rejected the model of the decorous feminine novelists who immediately preceded them. They “expressed female anger, frustration, and sexual energy more directly than had been done before” (160). Though they were not yet feminist novelists in her reading (who did not appear until the 1880s), they “deliberately revised and rewrote the feminine tradition, challenging the myths of the happy submissive wife and of female self-sacrifice” (Showalter 162). She sees this group of novelists as expressive of a phase of protest against the status quo that precedes a coming to feminist consciousness, though of course she acknowledges that there may be feminist or traditional feminine elements coexisting within their work.
Showalter’s three stage model of development was, and perhaps is, useful in tracing the development of an overtly feminist consciousness and politics as we now define it. However, both postcolonial and Foucaultian readings encourage us to look for complicity with, and resistance to power in, all historical moments, and certainly we would now say that feminism is not an eternal verity, waiting to be discovered or developed, but a dynamic and flexible set of responses to historical circumstance, changing over time. Broughton and Ouida were not feminist avant la lettre (or malgre elles), but their selective and complicated critique of the mores of their day certainly made available structures of thought and feeling that were accessed by writers later considered more properly (or improperly) feminist—as well as writers who were not. But how did we come to think of these novelists primarily in such terms? And to what extent do we continue to do so, and what purpose does it serve when we do?
The 1990s were a period of tussling with the paradigm of recuperation and validation. In 1996 Ann Heilmann struggled to authenticate women as the only true New Women writers and to account for women who wrote against the genre or conformed inadequately to it.