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

Amy Robinson’s essay, “An ‘original and unlooked-for ending’?: Irony, the Marriage Plot, and the Antifeminism Debate in Oliphant’s Miss Marjoribanks,” further argues that Oliphant uses irony to disrupt established marriage plots. Humour operates as a narrative tool to expose the complexities of Oliphant’s position, proving that there is no litmus test for determining whether her predominantly ironic representation of marriage as a career is more suitably labelled feminist or antifeminist.

In “Ghosts in the House: Margaret Oliphant’s Uncanny Response to Feminist Success,” Leila Walker likewise takes Miss Marjoribanks as her starting point to explore the centrality of the home in Oliphant’s writing but aligns its creation of the homely with her stories of the afterlife. These ghost stories are curiously—uncannily—homely as well, as they depict heaven as analogous to an idealised domestic space. At the same time, however, the representation of female empowerment granted within the home renders it unhomely. What Robinson, Wagner, and Walker all stress by foregrounding very different aspects of Oliphant’s oeuvre is that the shifting dividing line between the feminist and the antifeminist elements in her writing is not the only false dichotomy. Rather, her fiction capitalises on the contradictory concepts associated with various subgenres as they emerged in the course of the nineteenth century. Heather Milton’s discussion of the one Oliphant novel that has repeatedly been seen as a calculated foray into sensation fiction, Salem Chapel (1863), in a similar vein situates this negotiation of competing elements in its narrativisation of different forms of confession. In “The Female Confessor: Confession and Shifting Domains of Discourse in Margaret Oliphant’s Salem Chapel,” Milton suggests that the novel’s seemingly bifurcated structure works as a deliberate fusion of different narrative modes that means to illustrate the controversies surrounding the transitions in confessional discourse: the sensational subplot questions the representation of confession within a domestic chronicle that presents the tensions between religious denominations primarily as social comedy.

Conversely, the next two chapters approach one of the perhaps most notorious sensation novelists of the Victorian age to explore her diverse investment in—and narrative use of—divergent agendas, paradigms, and self-reflexively evoked critical discourse.