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

Building on the warning that we need to consider “masculine and feminine identities not as distinct and separate constructs,” influentially articulated in masculinity studies (Roper and Tosh 8), Valerie Sanders has already stressed that “the family is the ideal place in which to site such an investigation, and [that] the brother-sister relationship is as central to the debate as the relations between parents and children” (Brother-Sister 9). In Yonge’s novels, Sanders suggests, families regularly “split off into brother-sister pairs who function like couples within the enormous sibling structure” (Brother-Sister 97), yet as Schaffer and Juckett both show, the construction of ideal, reconstituted families often operates along extensions of such structures that are intriguingly multifaceted and consciously explode gender norms. In analysing in detail the narrative function of the traditional value of subjection as demanding the feminisation of every Christian subject, female or male, and how the endorsement of this value is emphatically different from mere female confinement or submissiveness (which have tragic consequences in the novel), Juckett’s essay moreover links together Schaffer’s focus on Yonge’s alternative family constructions and Shakinovsky’s reassessment of the complex realisation of a Tractarian agenda.

In focusing on the much misunderstood value of self-sacrifice, Tamara S. Wagner’s “Marriage Plots and ‘Matters of More Importance’: Sensationalising Self-Sacrifice in Victorian Domestic Fiction” then forms a transitional piece both in its combination of genre analysis with a revaluation of ideals that have regularly been dismissed as typically antifeminist and in its juxtaposition of fiction by Yonge and Oliphant. Comparing the different engagement with the narrative potential of an increasingly sensationalised representation of self-sacrifice, or altruism, in novels of the midsixties, Wagner shows how the reworking of expected plotlines in Yonge’s The Clever Woman of the Family (1865) and Oliphant’s Miss Marjoribanks (1866) cuts across the artificial dividing lines of experimental and traditional, radical and conservative, domestic and sensational, women writers. Antifeminist novelists can, moreover, be much more emphatic in showing that especially domestic realist fiction, like life, is not just about marriage or courtship, that there are other relationships of equal, if not more, importance.