While Edward Dowden’s conception of literary criticism and literature follows Heather Walton’s position that ‘rational subjects,’ such as literary criticism, have been gendered male and that literature had been gendered female in Western culture, other Victorian critics were nonetheless interested in guessing the sex of individual novelists based on the perceived gender of the texts they wrote. Yet much of the Victorian concern over whether a novel or novel writing should be deemed masculine or feminine revolved around a larger debate about the nature of the novel and its relation to real life. This relationship between the novel and the author’s life was used by literary critic George Henry Lewes as a means of ascertaining the gender of fictive works. Lewes, who was George Eliot’s lifelong partner and lover, discussed these connections in an article entitled “The Lady Novelists,” published four years prior to Eliot’s own essay on the
38 Ibid, 702.
topic.39 His essay demonstrates an acceptance of women writers, despite the many
stereotypes that abounded regarding their work. In light of more recent feminist criticism, Lewes’ essay contains both positive and negative discourse about female-written
literature.40 While Lewes pointedly criticizes those unable to accept the cultivation of intellect among women, at the same time he is decidedly negative toward the “strong minded woman,” avoiding the “folly” of discussing “‘woman’s mission’ and
‘emancipation.’”41 Nonetheless, his central query, “What does the literature of women really mean?” was ultimately a question that grew out of his desire to define the gendered attributes of literary works. 42
Lewes’ answer reveals just how much the gendering of text in the nineteenth century was related to Victorian gender roles, or, in other words, how the fictional world in the novel was connected to the real, gendered, life experience of the author. He begins by explaining that literature is not simply a mirror raised at society, and that rather than reflecting society, literature is the “expression of the emotions, the whims, the caprices, the enthusiasms, the fluctuating idealisms which move each epoch.”43 This led Lewes to consider what specifically “female literature” means. For Lewes, female literature is a fictional world that is an expression of life shaped by a distinctly female experience so that “the advent of female literature promises woman’s point of view.”44 Lewes attributes the molding of a woman’s experience to her involvement in the domestic sphere and
39 Alice R Kiminsky argues that the similarities between Eliot’s and Lewes’ beliefs on female-written literature reflect her “literary indebtedness to him.” (“George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, and the Novel.”
PMLA, Volume 70, No. 5 (December 1955), 997-1013, 998.)
40 See: Barbara Caine. “G.H. Lewes and ‘The Lady Novelists.’” Sydney Studies in English 7. (1981): 85-101.
41 G.H. Lewes. “The Lady Novelists,” 129-130.
42 Ibid, 130.
43 Ibid,131.
44 Ibid.
natural inclination to “greater affectionateness, [and] her great range and depth of emotional experience.”45 At this point Lewes’ argument is excessively dependent on his culture’s stereotypical understanding of womanhood. This dependence, which permeates the essay, results in a belief that both promotes female experience and understands such experience as inherently inferior to its male counterpart. Yet Lewes criticizes female authors who simply imitate male work, and, in a line that sounds strikingly similar to second-wave feminist literary criticism,46 he asserts:
We are in no need of more male writers; we are in need of genuine female experience. The prejudices, notions, passions, and conventionalisms of men are amply illustrated; let us have the same fulness with respect to women.47
Therefore, as a literary critic, Lewes believed that female literature was directly tied to female experience and should be valued for this distinction. Throughout his essay, Lewes constantly returns to the word experience. It is the author’s own life experience which sets his or her fictional worlds apart from the creative works of others, thus explaining the need for distinctly male and female fictional works, as each one, according to Lewes, reflects very different types of life experience.
Though Lewes clearly contends at the beginning of his essay on female fiction that literature does not mirror society, he struggles to maintain consistency in his
construction of the relationship between the fictional world of the novel and the real life of the author throughout his essay. If fiction relates the life experience of its author, as Lewes contends, how can it not, in some form, reflect society at large? Even in his own praise of specific female authors, Lewes contradicts this point. Praising Jane Austen’s
45 Ibid,132.
46 Feminist poet and critic Adrienne Rich in particular emphasizes that women are now living in an era where their own voices are awakening, and they must give birth to writing which reflects their own experiences as women. (“When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision,” 18-30.)
47 Lewes, “The Lady Novelists,” 132.
work in this same essay, Lewes writes, “To read one of her books is like an actual experience of life.”48 He similarly describes both the work of Mrs. Gaskell and Charlotte Brontë, stating: “They have both given imaginative expression to actual experience.”49 In his 1847 review of Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre, Lewes more explicitly notes, “Reality—
deep significant reality—is the great characteristic of the book.” This reality found in the fictional text is evidently a prized trait to Lewes. Throughout these two essays Lewes consistently praises great fiction for its ability to reflect the reality of the world, thus underscoring his belief that each novel is directly connected to the life experience of its author.
The connections drawn between the real world and the fictional novel were not only related to one another in Lewes’ criticism but could be found in a variety of Victorian works on the nature of fictional texts. In a lecture delivered in 1884 on “The Art of Fiction” Henry James proclaimed, “A novel is in its broadest definition a personal impression of life,”50 and later adds, “It goes without saying that you will not write a good novel unless you possess the sense of reality.” James here understands the ability to communicate the reality of the world through fictional writing to be a necessary quality of an author. Fellow author Harriet Martineau similarly noted the connection between the life of the author and his or her stories in her autobiography, writing that it is impossible to create a truly fictional plot. The solution, she notes, is to take the plot from actual life, as “accordingly it seems that every perfect plot in fiction is taken bodily from real life.”51
48 Ibid, 134.
49 Ibid, 138.
50 Henry James and Sir Walter Besant. The Art of Fiction. Boston: Cupples, Upham,1885, 60. James’
lecture also reinforced ideas of male authorship by his mention of the “brotherhood of novelists.” (51).
51 Harriet Martineau. Autobiography. Ed. Linda H. Peterson. Plymouth, UK: Broadview, 2007, 189.
Martineau’s use of the word bodily here stresses just how much the Victorians understood the fictional text to be a reflection of the author’s embodied real-life experience. The best novels, according to Martineau, were those with an author who enables his or her life experiences to become a fictional narrative. While some critics argued that the events depicted in novels varied from lived experience, they nonetheless maintained that there exists a relationship between the two, such as the case of James Fitzjames Stephen’s 1855 essay “The Relation of Novels to Life” in which he argues that novels simply lacked the full experience of real life, not that there was no relation
between the two. Stephen, in fact, notes the similarities between life and the novel in his description of the novel as “fictitious biography,” a term that emphasizes how the genre was understood, at its root, to be a story of life, even if the novel and real life were not to be understood as synonymous.52
Victorian literary critics most often linked the fictional novel to the real world in their discussions on the sex of an author in relation to his or her work, which drew particular interest from critics when an author wrote using a pseudonym. While Mary Ann Evans53 and Charlotte Brontë are some of the most famous Victorian authors who wrote under a pseudonym, this practice was not limited to women, as John Ruskin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Makepeace Thackeray were male authors who at times wrote using female pseudonyms. Gaye Tuchman and Nina E. Fortin argue that female writers were just as likely to use a female or gender-neutral pseudonym as male writers, and that at one point in the century male writers were actually more likely to adopt a
52 James Fitzjames Stephen. “The Relation of Novels to Life.” Victorian Criticism of the
Novel. Eds. Edwin M. Eigner and George John Worth. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985. 93-118, 96.
53 According to her husband J.W. Cross, Evans chose George Eliot as a penname because “George was Mr.
Lewes’ Christian name and Eliot was a good mouth-filling, easily pronounced word.” (Life of George Eliot: as Related in Her Letters and Journals. Thomas Y. Cromwell, 1884, 219.)
female pseudonym than a female was to adopt a male pseudonym.54 Thus, Eliot and Brontë’s use of pseudonyms does not necessarily demonstrate their desire to hide their sex as a way of breaking into a male-dominated field or to avoid having their work dismissed for publication. Rather, they assumed these male pseudonyms so that their work would not be gendered as feminine. Because their work was not received as feminine, Eliot’s and Brontë’s work avoided being read through the biased double
standard feminine writing was judged by, preconceptions that Catherine Judd describes as a type of “class standard” wherein feminine books were held to lesser standards than
‘serious,’ masculine literature.55
When authors maintained anonymity through their use of pseudonyms, various conjectures invariably arose out of an understanding of what a specifically male or female experience of life might be and how that experience then connected to the fictional world as envisioned by the author. Reviewers of female writers using male or gender-neutral pseudonyms drew particular interest from critics who wished to determine an author’s sex, such as in the case of novels by Currer Bell and George Eliot before their identities became public as Charlotte Brontë and Mary Ann Evans. One unsigned
reviewer of Jane Eyre was convinced that no woman could have written the novel, but rather that it was written from the outgrowth of male experience, claiming: “The writer dives deep into human life, and possesses the gift of being able to write as he thinks and feels.”56 Likewise, reviewer Elizabeth Eastlake was quite sure that the author of Jane
54 Tuchman and Fortin. Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists, Publishers and Social Change,53-54.
55 Catherine Judd. “Male Pseudonyms and Female Authority in Victorian England.” Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth Century British Publishing & Reading Practices. John O. Jordan and Robert L.
Patten, editors. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995, 250-268, 253.)
56 “Unsigned Review, Era 14 November 1847.” The Brontës: The Critical Heritage.
Eyre was unable to demonstrate any knowledge inherent to her sex and must therefore be male, or, if female, had “long forfeited the society of her own sex,” thus demonstrating that Victorians were very aware of gendered categories of experience, as the gender of the authors was paramount to their sex.57 On the other hand, an unsigned reviewer in The Christian Remembrancer was confident that Currer Bell was female, asking, “Who, indeed, but a woman could have ventured …to fill three octavo volumes with the history of a woman’s heart?” However, this reviewer later explains that the rumor regarding the author of Jane Eyre being male was most likely started by women who understood that it was a most unfeminine work, with “masculine power, breadth, and shrewdness…
masculine hardness, coarseness, and freedom of expression,” and were therefore embarrassed to associate the work with anything other than a male author.58 Despite acknowledging the novel’s masculine tendency, the same reviewer calls Jane Eyre’s Mr.
Rochester a “true embodiment of the visions of a female imagination,”59 thus strongly connecting the author’s own gendered life experience and imagination with an
embodiment of the text.
Similar inferences were also made about George Eliot’s works, prior to the discovery of her true identity. A reviewer of Adam Bede published in The Times mentioned of “Mr.” George Eliot: “When his previous work appeared it was even surmised he must be a lady since none but a woman’s hand could have painted those touching scenes of clerical life.” An unsigned piece in the Saturday Review notes that
Ed. Miriam Allot. New York: Routledge, 2001. 78-80, 79. The author of this review also used overtly masculine language that hinges on the connection between maleness and rationality, noting the novel was
“the victory of mind over matter, the mastery of reason over feeling.” (Ibid.)
57 Elizabeth (Rigby) Eastlake. “Vanity Fair and Jane Eyre.” Quarterly Review Dec. 1848: 153-185, 176.
58 “Unsigned Review, Christian Remembrancer, April 1848, xv.” The Brontës: The Critical Heritage. Ed. Miriam Allot. New York: Routledge, 2001. 89.
59 Ibid, 90.
most reviewers believed the author of Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede to be male, but that after discovering the true author, certain female qualities of the text were
realized. Nonetheless, the critic claims that Eliot, despite exposing certain feminine qualities in her work, “likes to look on paper as much like a man as possible”—a
comment that functions as both a descriptor of Eliot’s work and an explanation for critics who missed what was finally publically realized as the feminine-ness of her novels. In many ways the Victorian interest in gendering the text can be directly tied to a critical double standard in how to judge literature, with male and female works being read and reviewed in different ways. Charlotte Brontë confirms this in the preface she wrote to her sister’s novel Wuthering Heights entitled, “Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell”
in which she explains why she and her sisters chose vaguely masculine pseudonyms:
while we did not like to declare ourselves women, because--without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called
'feminine'--we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice; we had noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a flattery, which is not true praise.60
Charlotte Brontë’s preface demonstrates her own awareness that female written work was not deemed as serious as male work and thus lacked access to genuine critical acclaim—a point that is echoed in George Eliot’s essay on lady novelists. Brontë’s preface also shows her mindfulness that their novels would be identified as masculine because of the novels’ content and style despite having female authors. This emphasizes not only the process whereby Victorian reviewers identified the gender of the novel but also how closely tied a novel’s gender was to the intimate relationship Victorians believed existed
60 Charlotte Brontë. “Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell.” Wuthering Heights. Ed. Alison Booth.
Boston: Pearson Education, 2009, 331.
between an author’s real-life gendered (i.e. masculine or feminine) experience and their created fictional worlds, even in cases where reviewers were wrong.