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

For those of us working on noncanonical nineteenth-century women writers, the time since the early 1990s has been a particularly rich one, as we reached the kind of critical mass needed with enough people working in the area to sustain a scholarly conversation and republication of many texts. I would like in this essay to reflect on this period, and the way that conversation has progressed—its political investments, its assumptions, and some of its costs and benefits to us as we look to the future of the field. Both because it is what I know best and also because I think the discussions of these genres are exemplary of the direction of this period of scholarly work, I would like to pay particular attention to the conversation surrounding the sensation novel and New Woman fiction, but I think similar (though also unique) patterns can be detected in the discussions of Gothic fiction earlier in the century and, to a lesser extent, of sentimentalism in eighteenth-century Britain and in the United States.

Winifred Hughes has said, “The overarching debate in criticism of the sensation novel has concerned the relative extent of its subversion of official Victorian verities and its opposing impulse to containment” (276). The critics most responsible for the revival of the sensation novel were feminists and tended to emphasise the sensation novel’s transgressiveness in matters of female sexuality and gender roles. Later, more nuanced readings, often Foucaultian, noted the competing tendencies in sensation and other popular novels of the period: they both expressed rage against and criticism of conventional values, while often finally (sometimes virulently) upholding them. Indeed, in this way, the sensation novel is an extreme example of the pattern Nancy Armstrong has noted in the “great tradition” novel as a genre: an ideologically bad subject is recuperated and made into a good subject—whereupon she/he ceases to be interesting and the story ends (36). But sometimes in the sensation and usually in the melodramatic novel, it is the plot that is the bad subject rather than the character. If the great tradition novel redeems and socialises a misfit character, the sensation novel redeems a misfit plot—a temporarily successful villain receives comeuppance, and harmony is restored.