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She "Had Made Up Her Mind to Suffer":
The Ethics of Female Renunciation In
Five Nineteenth Century Novels

presented by

Suzanne Arnette Magnuson

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SHE "HAD MADE UP HER MIND TO SUFFER":
THE ETHICS OF FEMALE RENUNCIATION
IN FIVE NINETEENTH CENTURY NOVELS

BY

Suzanne Arnette Magnuson

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Department of English

1994

ABSTRACT

SHE "HAD MADE UP HER MIND TO SUFFER":
THE ETHICS OF FEMALE RENUNCIATION
IN FIVE NINETEENTH CENTURY NOVELS

BY

Suzanne Arnette Magnuson

Time and again the subject of women renouncing their
lovers was taken up by Nineteenth Century authors. The
pervasive belief in the ethical correctness of such action

is the subject of this thesis.

Copyright By
Suzanne Arnette Magnuson

1994

II.

III.

IV.

VI.

VII.

Introduction
Duty
Delusion
Decision
Deliverance
Destruction

Bibliography

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Austen's gggggagign
Dickens' filgah_ngg§§
Eliot's W
Gissing's Ihe_9dd_flemen
Hardy's wine—99.5%

iv

INTRODUCTION

The renunciation of love and of lovers by female
characters has long been addressed by writers of fiction.
Often these choices are presented by the author as a matter of
course, made out of duty, desire for material gain,
"over-niceness" (as in Samuel Richardson's, Clarissa), and a
host of other reasons. While anyone who reads fiction can
think of a number of examples of this plot device, there are
far fewer examples of the female characters' reasoning behind
their decisions. I would like to examine five, spanning the
Nineteenth Century, to show an ethical evolution in the
renunciation plot and in the battles waged by the heroines
between the conflicting forces of egotism and altruism.

I would like to declare at the outset that I feel the
authors speak best for themselves and so most quotations in
this study' will be from. original source material, with
secondary sources added only where particular insight into the
works is justified.

The famous "woman question" of which the renunciation
plot is an integral part has been addressed by some of the
most prominent writers of the Nineteenth Century, but this

plot has been largely ignored in contemporary criticism in

2

favor of the specific questions of marriage, law, religion.and
science which all play a part in the ethics of renunciation
put forth by all the authors in this study. Renunciation of
one's lover, however, was obviously much on the minds of
Nineteenth Century authors, as the frequency and breadth of
its use as a plot or sub-plot in contemporary novels will
attest. Unfortunately, there seems to be a great lack of
discourse on this important subject in current writings on
writing, which I hope this study can take the first few steps
at remedying.

That women must give up their lovers for a "moral"
purpose is taken.for'granted.by Nineteenth Century authors, if
not as a true imperative, then at least as within the popular
perception of the proper scope of a well-brought up woman's
duty. (Well-brought up, being almost exclusively a middle-
class phenomenon, at least for the purpose of this study.)
The writers, for all the allowances of literary license,
weren't inventing this problem.out of whole cloth in some sort
of established formula for "romantic" or tragic plots, they
were reacting to or expressing the cultural notions of their
own times and causing their characters to react to or express
them as well.

As we will see, the use of the renunciation plot extends
throughout the century, with each author responding to it in
her or his own fashion. But the fact that all of them chose

the same plot to treat, demonstrates its hold on the popular

3
imagination and how important this thinking was in the lives
of women.

The notion of female self-sacrifice in Western culture
has its origin as far back as the development of Christianity
and is so one of the most pervasive and enduring "reasons"
given for women to renounce love or a lover of their choosing.
They must be ultimately self-sacrificing and obedient because
God, the ultimate Father figure, desires them to, not merely
because it is convenient to enable mortal men to preserve the
status quo. Religion, because of its didactic and
indoctrinary properties, was considered one of the only safe
outlets for women's energies during the entire century and
became for many, including some of the women in the novels
used in this study, almost an obsession.

Even the famous John Ruskin agreed that religious study
could be a safe outlet for female energies: "She is to be
taught somewhat to understand the nothingness of the
proportion which that little world in which she lives and

loves, bears to the world in which God lives and loves"

(Millet, 129). In his study, no e t e ' a s ' i
W Peter T. Cominos outlines the extremes to

which this feminine self-effacement in religion could be
taken.

In Femina Sensualis the sense of I-ness, of
individuality, of apartness was thwarted in its
development. "Women don't consider themselves as human
beings at all," proclaimed Florence Nightingale in an
impassionate denunciation of the Evangelicals for what
she thought was their role in the idolatrous "fetish"

4

worship of the family. So very much in Victorian life
was designed to promote womanly self-effacement and
absorption into family life. "All the moralities tell
women that it is their duty," wrote John Stuart Mill,
"and all the current sentimentalities that it is their
nature to live for others; to make complete abnegations
of themselves, and to have no life but in their
affections." (161)

Cominos goes on to describe the ways in which the saintly,
sexless woman of the Victorian ideal sublimated her sexual
desires through extreme forms of religious devotion in an
attempt to feel real love.

While gentlemen were encouraged to conquer their
sexual instincts by complete sublimation through work,
genteel women, barred from work and confined to the
family circle, sublimated through religion, "the only
channel" through which the sexual emotions could be
expressed "freely and without impropriety." Women
realized ideal-love in the religious sense...

It was not without justification that Geoffery
Mortimer wrote about self-deception as the source of much
pietistic emotion... The innocent and pietistic woman,
as Mortimer pointed out, "imagines she has subjugated the
instinct of her sex; but in reality her emotions have a
sexual origin." (164)

This religious zeal concealing the deeper sexual desires
has definite applications to several of the novels in this
study, especially in the cases of Esther Summerson, Maggie
Tulliver and Sue Bridehead. It was obviously a subject of
which the authors were more or less aware, and each treats it
with skill and sympathy as a fact of life for the middle-class
English girl.

But it was not merely from religious writings that women
and men were receiving these ideas about women's role in
society. A number of essayists were widely read and their

prescriptions for women were absorbed into the culture and

5

reflected in the literature. (While it is important to note
that these ideas existed before the essays were written, it
was through the dissemination of such essays that the notions
became even more popular, especially among the literate
middle—class - the class producing the most writers of the
time.) Acton's widely quoted notions about female sexuality
were believed (Calder, 88), and Ruskin's "Of Queen's Gardens"
and Wm, outlined the paranoid, romantic notions
of modest women many tried so desperately to perpetuate.

Ruskin's classist and sexist arguments included the
outlining of the "kingship" and "queenship" of the middle-
class over"the "illguided. and illiterate" (Millet, 124)
proving that the written word itself was vastly instrumental
in popularizing the notion of the morbidly self-sacrificing
heroine. Ruskin was influenced by Thomas Carlyle and the
longing for the romantic Age of Chivalry and determined to
resurrect those "ideal" notions in his own time (Millet, 125).
His outline of the proper "sphere" for women is based on
biology. He described them as follows:

Now their separate spheres are briefly these. The
man's power is active, progressive, defensive. He is
eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the
defender. His intellect is for speculation and invention:
his energy for adventure, for war and for conquest... But
the woman's power is for rule, not for battle and her
intellect is not for invention or recreation, but sweet
ordering, arrangement, and decision. She sees the
qualities of things, their claims, and their places. Her
great function is praise; she enters into no contest, but
infallibly adjudges the crown of contest. By her office
and place, she is protected from all danger and

temptation. The man, in his rough work in the open world,
must encounter all peril and trial - to him therefore must

6
be the failure, the offence, the inevitable error; often
he must be wounded or subdued, often mislead, and always
hardened (Millet, 126). [Bold Mine]
Ruskin also has decided views about the proper education

of women, outlined by Kate Millet in her 1968, Sexual_
221112125:

"We cannot consider how education may fit them for
any widely extending duty until we are agreed what is
their true, constant duty." Translated (it is continually
necessary to translate chivalrous sentiment), this only
means that women should not be educated in an real sense
at all, least of all for the sake of education itself.
Instead they should be indoctrinated to contribute their
"modest service" to the male...

But Ruskin also furnishes definitive propositions
about female education; it is to be directed toward making
women wise, "not for self-development, but for self-
renunciation."... "A man ought to know any language or
science he learns, thoroughly: while a woman ought to
know the same language or science only so far as may
enable her to sympathize in her husband's pleasures, and
in those of his best friends" (128-29). [Bold Mine]

Women's whole education, obviously, is designed to fit
them to please men - only; There is to be no thought of doing
anything simply for themselves. Millet's analysis of Ruskin
makes his attitude very clear, his obvious fear of women in
intellectual.pursuits, his idealized.notions.of what should be
based on his readings of poetry, especially the pseudo-
Medieval past and his insistence on self-sacrifice and self-
renunciation. in. all 'women. if ‘they‘ are to ibe ruling (a
contradiction, of course) "queens".

Along with the literary stereotypes that were being
perpetuated by essayists and authors from the 1850's on,
science itself helped to reenforce the stereotypes of

femininity until new discoveries pointed to the real ways of

7

transmitting sexual characteristics. (Conway, 140) Herbert
Spencer's and Patrick Geddes' work helped to reduce the role
the female played in biology and reenforce the notion of her
innate passivity. Their work in regards to sexual differences
mostly consisted of finding biological "reasons" for already
accepted ideas of the "nature" of women.

Such ideas as male cells being "katabolic" and females as

"anabolic" were integral to Geddes' theory. As Jill Conway

wrote in Stereotypes of Eemininity in a Theory of Sexual
219.133.19.11:

"Male cells had the power to transmit variation
along with their tendency to dissipate energy. Female
cells by contrast had the power to conserve energy,
support new life, and to maintain stability in new forms
of life...

By making sperm and ovum exhibit the qualities of
male katabolism and female anabolism Geddes was able to
deduce a dichotomy between the temperaments of the sexes
which was easily accommodated to the romantic idea of
male rationality and female intuition... In fact the
entire evolutionary progression from the lowest organism
up to man rested upon these male and female qualities...
Male and female sex roles had been decided in the lowest
forms of life and neither political nor technological
change could alter the temperaments which had developed
from these differing functions (144). [Bold Mine]

Geddes further asserted that if women abandoned their
proper spheres for "masculine activism" it would be dangerous.
"What was decided among the prehistoric Protozoa, can not be
annulled by act of parliament" (Conway, 146). He also denied
that politics or social institutions had subjugated women,
pointing to the roles of women in traditional cultures,
"primitive societies" around the world to justify the present

power structure.

8

Geddes was influential beyond his own publications by
lecturing in Edinburgh to such notables as William James, at
The International School at the Paris Exposition of 1900,
(Jane Addams was one of his converts) and the London
Sociological Society (Conway, 150-152). He, and others like
him, perpetuated the notions of biologically determined
gender-specific roles well past the turn of the century.

With so many well thought-out systems of ethics and
science arrayed before them, it is no wonder that women of the
Nineteenth Century, and consequently the authors interested in
presenting them more or less realistically, were concerned
with the "woman question" or the more eloquently put "woman
problem". That it was, indeed, a problem, is more than
evident by the quantity of ink spent debating it.

Women were being perceived as if not already so, then in
danger of going out of control, so it was necessary to
implement systems of ethics to keep them within their "proper
sphere"; the reasons for this perception*were:many, but one of
the most important were the "extra or redundant" women and.the
prostitute, who was really another form of the same.

While there has been debate as to the reading of the
population statistics of the time, and as to whether ornot
there actually were a large number of "redundant" women about
during the century, there is no question as to whether or not
people perceived that this was so. From the 1851 census on,

articles appeared with great regularity on this very subject

9

with titles such as "Why are Women Redundant?" by W.R. Greg,
"How to Provide for Superfluous Women" by Jessie Boucherett.
(Manner, 184) Even in the art of the period, the problem was
taken up by such painters as Richard Redgrave, George Frederic
Watts and George Smith (Roberts, 55-63). With all of this
attention being paid to extra women, it became an even greater
challenge to erect philosophical and social barriers to keep
them from leaving their "proper sphere" even though there was
no place for them there.

Related to this problem was the "social evil" of
prostitution, despite its being intertwined in the fabric of
the proper Nineteenth Century marriage, as a wife with no
sexual desires could not hope to satisfy the "natural" desires
of her husband. Prostitutes being the most visible form of
extra women, writers and the law courts combined to try to
keep them in control and also used their existence to help
perpetuate the mythos surrounding their "better" sisters, J.C.
Whitehorne estimated in 1858 that one in six of unmarried
women between 15 and 50 were prostitutes - 83,000. The reason
for this? In his opinion it was because "...Young gentlemen
and young ladies cannot and dare not marry without ceasing to
be gentlemen and ladies..." (Sigsworth and Wyke, 78, 86). So
the problem of "redundant" women was largely a product of the
economic climate of the time, but something had to be done
with them. They could not all become wives or governesses,

the only legitimate occupations open to them, so many women

10

had merely a long life of waiting ahead of them - living
within an extended family with no family of one's own and
waiting for death to end their "redundancy". It was an
incredibly bleak prospect even without a code of ethics to
support it, but several competing ones were in the air at the
time, and how the extra women reacted.to them was also of much
interest to contemporary novelists.

In reality, all of the women in this study fall into this
class, either by virtue of being older and unmarried or in
being middle-class and still having to work for a living.
While some authors choose to sentimentalize their plight, most
treat.it realistically and.give serious thought.to the systems
of ethics required to both.buoy them up and keep them in their
proper self-sacrificing mindset. For sacrifice is necessary
for "redundant" women, as they are not fulfilling the
biological imperative that was popularly regarded as their
only "proper" role. Each of these treatments is unique and
comes from the ethical standpoint of the individual author.
Together, they give us an interesting map of opinion

throughout the Nineteenth Century.

DUTY

The first of these is.Jane Austen's last.published novel,
Eeregeeien, in which the heroine, Anne Elliot, breaks her
engagement with the young naval officer Frederick Wentworth
because of the disapproval of her vain and foolish father, Sir
Walter Elliot ("he thought.it.a‘very degrading alliance" <55>)
and on the advice of Anne's friend and surrogate mother, Lady
Russell. Lady Russell objects to‘Wentworth for very practical
reasons and believes that Anne would be "throwing herself
away" because Wentworth "had nothing but himself to recommend
him, and no hopes in attaining affluence, but in the chances
of a most uncertain profession, and no connexions to secure
even his farther rise in that profession" (55). As Lady
Russell truly loves Anne and Wentworth cannot guarantee her a
secure life, Lady Russell exerts great pressure to break up
the match and finally,

"Such opposition, as these feelings produced,

was more than Anne could combat. Young and gentle as

she was, it might yet have been possible to withstand

her father's ill-will, though unsoftened by one kind
word or look on the part of her sister; - but Lady

Russell, whom she had always loved and relied on,

could not, with such steadiness of opinion, and such

tenderness of manner, be continually advising her in

vain. She was persuaded to believe the engagement a

wrong thing - indiscreet, improper, hardly capable of

success, and not deserving it. But it was not a merely
selfish caution, under which she acted, in putting an
end to it. Had she not imagined herself consulting his
good, even more than her own, she could hardly have

given him up. The belief of being prudent, and self-
denying principally for his advantage, was her chief

ll

12

consolation, under the misery of a parting - a final
parting (56). [Bold Mine]

In the passage above, Austen clearly outlines Anne's
thinking at the time of her renunciation of her fiance. It is
all perfectly conventional for a woman of her time: filial
duty, though more to her surrogate parent than her natural
one, who is, Austen assures us, too foolish to be much relied
upon for'good counsel (Though later, Anne's "sense of personal
respect to her father" keeps her from defending her friend,
Mrs. Smith, from his attack on her social position [170]):
common-sense, always a large factor with Austen and her
heroines (Austen was, after all, a product of the
Enlightenment); and self-denial, giving up her personal
happiness for the good of another.

Later, Anne regrets her decision to be persuaded from
making the match by Lady Russell, but Austen states that "she
did not blame Lady Russell, she did not blame herself for
being guided by her" but that "she should yet have been a
happier woman in maintaining the engagement, than she had been
in the sacrifice of it" (56-57). But despite this feeling,
Anne, whom Austen once described as being "almost too good for
me" (Gard, 63) carries on and we see it is her habit to be
self-denying generally for the good of others, altruistic in
the moral sense.

When her father overspends and must pay off creditors, it
is Anne who "considered it as an act of indispensable duty to

clear away the claims of creditors, with all the expedition

13

which the most comprehensive retrenchments could secure, and
saw no dignity in any thing short of it. She wanted it to be
prescribed, and felt as a duty." (43) She goes to stay with
her hypochondriac sister, Mary, because "To be claimed as a
good, though in an improper style, is at least better than
being rejected as no good at all: and.Anne, glad to be thought
of some use, glad to have any thing marked out as a duty...
readily agreed to stay." (61) There, she puts aside her own
depression at having to leave her home and "cures" Mary by "A
little farther perseverance in patience, and forced
cheerfulness" (66). She takes care of Mary's son when he
is injured so Mary can attend a dinner party (80-83), because
"She knew herself to be of the first utility to the child"
(83) despite the fact that the man she loves and really longs
to see, Frederick Wentworth, will be at the partyu When Anne,
herself, attends parties she spends the evening playing the
piano rather than dancing (95-96); the list is endless. She
is everybody's nurse, confidante, entertainer and steadfast
friend and she is absolutely certain it is her "duty" to be
so, as dictated by her conscience, despite the fact that from
the first mention of her in the novel we are assured she "was
nobody with either father or sister; her word had no weight;
her convenience was always to give way;- she was only Anne"
(37).

It makes one wonder’how'such.an exemplary person could be

seen as "nobody", and Austen is quick with an explanation -

14

the other characters are all fools. Anne has "an elegance of
mind and a sweetness of character, which must have placed her
high with people of real understanding" (37) and Anne knows
it. When comparing herself to the Musgrove sisters she admits
"but still, saved as we all are by some comfortable feeling of
superiority from wishing for the possibility of exchange, she
would not have given up her own more elegant and cultivated
mind for all their enjoyments" (67). And still she remains
self-sacrificing and dutiful despite her own recognition of
her worth. Why should she be this way, or rather, why should
Austen choose to make her this way?

There are numerous clues to be found in the book, itself.
Anne Elliot is greatly concerned with duty as dictated by her
"own conscience" (43) and sees a clear duty in almost every
aspect of her life. Specific instances of Anne's duty are
mentioned over a dozen times in the course of the novel (43,
56, 61 etc.). That duty is to be sweet and obliging and at
everyone's service, to help where possible and never hinder or
criticize; at heart, the Christian ideals of love and.charity.
And while many feminist critics would see this as Austen's
bowing to patriarchy in the form of established religion, any
book which contains an exchange such as the one between Anne
and Captain Harville over the capacity of steadfast devotion
in men and women and in which the manifestly Christian heroine
declares: "Men have had every advantage of us in telling

their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher

15

a degree: the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow
books to prove any thing." (237) is hardly written by someone
who blindly accepts the patriarchical system in which she
lives. Nor is Mrs. Croft's taking her brother to task for
sexism and hypocrisy when he says women don't belong on board
ships because of his "rating the claims of women to every
personal comfort high." (92) Taken as a philosophical system
on which to order one's life, Christianity and the virtues of
love and charity have no gender. However, the outward
manifestations of Anne's devotion to those virtues are gender
specific, as defined by the society in which she, and Austen,
lived.

As a woman in the early Nineteenth Century, Anne was
expected to be the "angel of the house" - a perfect paragon of
Christian and domestic virtue, despite her "redundant" state,
and the psychic cost of this role was high. Anne is often
affected by depression, or Austen's other term "lowness", in
the course of the novel (45, 58, 69, 85, 95 & etc.) and she
feels guilty for having these or any feelings that aren't
other-directed, "She‘was ashamed of herself, quite ashamed of
being so nervous, so overcome by such a trifle" (104). Anne
is also outwardly affected by her mental stress and her "faded
and thin" or "haggard" appearance (37-38) is remarked by
Austen from her first introduction onward. But despite these
side-effects of duty, Anne Elliot never questions that duty

itself; and it is this lack of questioning of her place

16
in the universe that allows her to be the best adjusted of any
of the heroines of the renunciation plot.
Jane Austen's father was a clergyman and all the Austens

appeared fairly sincere Christians. In his book, The
W. Gene Kappel

prints a portion of a prayer attributed to Jane, underlining
her notion of Christian duty.

Look with mercy on the sins we have this day
committed and in mercy make us feel them deeply, that
our repentance may be sincere, and our resolution
steadfast of endeavouring against the commission of
such in future. Teach us to understand the sinfulness
of our own hearts, and bring to our knowledge every
fault of temper and every evil habit in which we have
indulged to the discomfort of our fellow-creatures, and
the danger of our own souls. May we now, and on each
return of night, consider how the past day has been
spent by us, what have been our prevailing thoughts,
words and actions during it, and how far we can acquit
ourselves of evil. Have we thought irreverently of
thee, have we disobeyed thy commandments, have we
neglected any known duty, or willingly given pain to
any human being? Incline us to ask our hearts these
questions oh! God, and save us from deceiving ourselves
by pride or vanity...

Above all other blessings oh! God, for ourselves
and our fellow-creatures, we implore thee to quicken
our sense of thy mercy in the redemption of the world,
of the value of that holy religion in which we have
been brought up, that we may not, by our own neglect,
throw away the salvation thou hast given us, nor be
Christians only in name... (7) [Bold mine.]

Koppel sums it up by saying "To serve God and one's fellow man
in every significant phase of daily life, was, then, a major
goal of Jane Austen's religion; the immense difficulty of such
an ideal clearly makes itself felt both in her prayer and in
her fiction. (8) It is safe to say that Anne Elliot is the

only heroine of an.Austen novel that nearly always reaches the

l7
ideal, Fanny Price in Men§f1e1g_£ezk being far too spiritless
to ever be tempted to sin, even by the strict standards of
Austen's prayer.

While Austen was deeply committed to the tenets of her
religion, she rarely felt the need to concentrate on religion
as the main subject of her novels; instead, she put it into
practice, showing her characters grappling with real moral
dilemmas encountered by everyone in the course of their lives.
I am certain that this is one of the main reasons for her
enduring popularity. Through her manipulations of her
characters her readers can see how or how not to react in the
same situation, how to deal charitably with difficult people,
and.how to be good Christians in the philosophical sense» The
reader is drawn into the moral action of the novel as well as
the action of the plot. We watch Austen's characters choose
and evaluate those choices, often from the standpoint of the
turmoil of their thoughts. The moral content is as integral
a part of the novels as is the dialogue or description. And
while Jane Austen's Christianity is not obtrusive in
Bezeeeeien, Anne Elliot does prescribe to Captain Benwick the
reading of:

...a larger allowance of prose in his daily study;
and on being requested to particularize, mentioned.such
works of our best moralists, such collections of the
finest letters, such memoirs of characters of worth and
suffering, as occurred to her at the moment as calculated
to rouse and fortify the mind by the highest precepts,
and the strongest examples of moral and religious

endurances (122).

and criticizes Mr. Elliot for, among other things, "Sunday-

18
travelling" (172).

It is clear that, to Anne and Austen, being a good
Christian absolutely required suffering, if not absolute
martyrdom on the altar of usefulness to others. It is
obviously a psychological adjustment necessary to reconcile
one's place as an "extra" woman in a society where the norm
was considered to be one of a couple. If one is useful
despite one's redundancy, then that redundancy can't possibly
be as great an evil. And suffering or martyrdom often
substituted for the human relationships lacked by extra women
(Cominos, 163-64).

However, it is alsoiclear'that the foundation of Austen's
form of Christianity is in putting others before ones' own
desires or altruism. Anne is a clear-cut altruist, and while
her altruism takes on peculiarly feminine forms of extreme
submission and self-denial because of the society in which she
lives, her duty is clearly spelled out by all she has been
taught. She clearly doesn't question this duty as being
morally'correct, and.neither'does.Austen, though.she obviously
understands the different actions expected of women than of
men in her society. In several instances Anne even remarks on
her satisfaction with herself at not feeling moral qualms
about her actions. In her reconciliation with Wentworth she
states:

"I was perfectly right in being guided by
the friend whom you will love better than you do now.

To me, she was in place of a parent... But I mean,
that I was right in submitting to her, and that if I

19

had done otherwise, I would have suffered more in

continuing the engagement that I did even in giving

it up, because I would have suffered in my conscience.

I have now, as far as such as sentiment is allowable

in human nature, nothing to reproach myself with: and

if I mistake not, a strong sense of duty is no bad

part of a woman's portion" (248). [Bold mine.]
The three highlighted portions of the passage illustrate:
Anne's moral reason for her submission to Lady Russell's
authority, her self-justification of her submission, and her
(and Austen's) recognition of the necessity of that submission
in the standards of female behavior set by the society in
which she lives.

Austen does not let the men off the hook, however, and in
contrast to Anne's near-selflessness of action (though she
does, admittedly, have motives as well as the altruistic in
many of her actions ie. staying behind with hurt baby Charles
to avoid Wentworth as well as taking care of the invalid
[79-841) Mr. Elliot's total self-serving egotism, Mary's
selfishness and self-importance, Elizabeth's vanity of
position and Sir Walter's vanity of his appearance - "the
Elliot pride" - are all arrayed. While the Musgroves and
Crofts are simply benignly vapid, the Elliots, with the
exception of Anne, are evil in their selfishness and Austen
spares no ink in delineating their abuses of Anne and others.
Pride being the first of the seven deadly sins, the Elliots
are completely imbued with it, and through Anne's superior

morality, the readers see the contrast all the more. And all

characters, no matter how stupid, are held up to Austen's

20
strictly Christian moral code.

As Gene Koppel argues in his book, "Jane Austen helps the
reader become aware of a spiritual reality which exists with
and intensifies the realities of psychology and morality:
mainstream Christianity (of which the Church of England is
certainly a part) considers that, with the help of God's
grace, every human being possesses the ability to choose
between good and evil" (12-13). The characters are endowed
with free will and Anglican religious instruction: therefore
they have all the tools necessary for unquestioning obedience
to authority at the very least” The more intelligent actually
have to grapple with morality (especially in the case of Emma
Woodhouse), but even they, like Anne Elliot, know their clear
duty in this time before the death of God.

Mr. Elliot especially comes under Austen's moral guns.
Through the paragon, Anne, we are told "Mr. Elliot is
evidently a disingenuous, artificial, worldly man, who has
never had any better principle to guide him than selfishness"
(214). And Anne's suffering friend, Mrs. Smith, declares:

"Mr. Elliot is a man without heart or conscience;

a designing, wary, cold-blooded being, who thinks only

of himself: who, for his own interest or ease, would

be guilty of any cruelty, or any treachery, that could

be perpetrated without risk of his general character.

He has no feeling for others. Those whom he has been

the chief cause of leading into ruin, he can neglect

and desert without the smallest compunction. He is
totally beyond the reach of any sentiment of justice

or compassion. Oh! he is black at heart, hollow and

black (206)!

Nearly all of chapter'21 is devoted to careful scrutiny of the

21

evils of egotism as embodied by Mr. Elliot. It obviously much
concerned Austen, as she could as easily have had Anne decline
to marry him from simple, virtuous fidelity to Wentworth,
rather than turning him into the monster of egotism he is.

Even Frederick Wentworth, himself, doesn't evade Austen's
critical eye when it comes to the evils of thinking too much
of oneself and pride. While she praises his "sanguine temper,
and fearlessness of mind" and his "genius and ardour" (56-58) ,
Austen points out that Wentworth, too, is guilty of egotism,
though his stems more from honest knowledge of his worth than
false pride or selfishness. His treatment of the Musgrove
sisters, for example, which Anne criticizes for the pain it
causes Henrietta's suitor, Charles Hayter, is merely simple
thoughtlessness, but it is not overlooked for comment on its
morality. "He was only wrong in accepting the attentions-(for
accepting must be the word) of two young women at once" (105) .
His near rejection of a chance to see Anne in a snit over her
sisters' foolishness and rudeness is, however, much more
prideful and hurtful to Anne and is made to look much more
stupid by Austen. "Anne caught his eye, saw his cheeks glow,
and his mouth form itself into a momentary expression of
contempt, and turned away, that she might neither see nor hear
more to vex her" (231). His own admission of having been
"weak and resentful" (240) in his letter of proposal shows
Austen's opinion of his actions.

Wentworth's problems with Anne stem from his misjudgment

22

of the extent of her Christian goodness, but his recognition
of his culpability in them is his redemption in Austen's eyes,
"He had imagined himself indifferent, when he had only been
angry: and he had been unjust to her merits, because he had
been a sufferer from them" (244), proving that for some men
selflessness in women can backfire when it comes to the men
achieving what they desire. Wentworth does come to
understand her devotion to self-denial and to accept it as
being part of a "character [that] was now fixed on his mind as
perfection itself, maintaining the loveliest medium of
fortitude and gentleness" (244). He admits that he was
"proud, too proud to ask again. I did not understand you. I
shut.my eyes, and would not understand you, or do you justice"
(248).

The Christian ideals of love and charity bear all before
them in Austen's universe. Everyone must love someone or
there is no society. Love is necessary and ordinary.
Everyone does it. However, charity, the greatest of the
Christian virtues preached by Paul to the Corinthians (I
Corinthians 13:13), is what is truly needed to be a good
Christian and is the foundation of Austen's morality. As
Koppel says in his book, "We cannot enter the consciousness of
another person, and we often misunderstand what he is trying
to communicate, but charity can prevent our filling in every
gap in our understanding of others with hostility, fear, or

contempt (99). It is also the main bastion against egotism,

23
as Koppel goes on to explain, "Self-awareness is a paradoxical
quality. If its intensity increases past a certain point it
will destroy the very qualities - such as complexity,
sensitivity, and the ability to love and to respond to love -
that nourish it. Only an outwardly directed charity and
concern for others can prevent the occurrence of this
self-destructive process" (105).

Anne is highly intelligent, contemplative and prone to
depression, but she charitably turns her perceptions outward
toward others rather than dwelling on her own importance, thus
allowing her to find contentment and even, eventually,
happiness within the society in which she lives, rather than
becoming a martyr to its abuses of her through self-absorption
and self-pity - the ultimate forms of egotism. Through her
forced unconsciousness of her self and her own desires, Anne
can even find a certain contentment in knowing she is morally
"right".

But, for Austen, self-denial and renunciation are
situational and motivated by duty, and once the objections to
the match are removed in the course of time and Wentworth's
success, there is no reason for Anne to defer her wishes for
the good of others. She does not accept Mr. Elliot, though
her family would welcome it because "If I was wrong to yield
to persuasion once, remember that it was to persuasion exerted
on the side of safety, not of riskg When I yielded, I thought

it was to duty: but no duty could be called in aid here. In

24
marrying a man indifferent to me, all risk would have been
incurred, and all duty violated" (246) and takes back her
lover, previously rejected out of duty because the duty no
longer existse She is then free to follow her own desire, her
duty having been done, the only time one is allowed to please

oneself in Austen's strictly Christian universe.

DELUSION

When Charles Dickens' §;eek Hpuse was printed in 1852,
the ordered, religious views of Jane Austen's time had begun
to be shaken by the writings of such men of philosophy as
Auguste Comte, George Henry Lewes, Herbert Spencer and John
Stuart Mill and such men of science as T. H. Huxley and
Charles Darwin. While Dickens, himself, never fully rejected
Christianity as did these scientists and philosophers, he was
certainly writing in and to a generation concerned with
discovering a more secular basis for morality as all of his
criticism of charity and religious institutions attest.

It is one of the problems addressed in gleek House and goes
hand in hand with the problem of renunciation in the novel.

It has been said that Dickens wrote three
autobiographical novels, David Copperfield, Great Expectatioue
and ELeek House. While I think Esther is a bit too good to be
a true representation of Dickens or anyone else, it is
important that she has been called autobiographical because it
is indicative of Dickens' level of concern with and sympathy
for her, equal to David or Pip. The fact that her narration
is nearly half the book (only one chapter shorter than the
omniscient narrator), shows the importance her perspective on
the events of the novel had to Dickens.

Esther's narrative, as Joseph Gold points out in QDQIIQS

25

26

Wig provides a subjective perspective on
events in contrast to the omniscient narrator's more objective
one. (186) Thus she acts as the everyman surrogate with a
limited perspective on events, and gives us a different vision
of the characters than the omniscient narrator's. In fact,
the entire story of Ada and Richard is seen through her eyes,
allowing the reader a greater sense of sympathy for them,
perhaps, than we would have had from the more objective, and
in this novel, more cynical narrator's point of view.

Unfortunately, Dickens moral perspective of what Esther
is and what she ought to be also colors the events of the
novel. Unlike David and Pip, whom Dickens allows to have
their failings in regards to‘vanity and uncharitable thoughts,
Esther'is never allowed such normal, human feelings, evenwwhen
confronted with the horror of a Mrs. Jellyby or a Horace
Skimpole. Dickens makes her so thoroughly idealized that many
critics have accused her of being a flat or static character.
But Dickens was too clever a creator of character to have one
so central to any novel be either flat or static. Esther is,
however, symbolic in various ways and that does cause Dickens
to make her react in a certain, set fashion to similar
situations as a symbolic function. This function is one
firmly grounded in Dickens' morality.

As Dennis Walder writes in Qiekens and Religion:

In orthodox Christian terms, there is much that is
missing, or at best negatively expressed, in Dickens'
works. The role of priest and church is minimal, and
certain kinds of chapel-going and sermonizing are

27

typically represented as ludicrous and reprehensible.

The Bible is drawn on more than any other source, but

not as a literally inspired text, nor even always

with veneration - although it is treated as a

guide to those elements in the Christian ethic

(largely from the New Testament) which Dickens

most admired. Prayer, or other overt manifestation

of the religious spirit, is more often shown to be

hypocritical and self-seeking than a genuine attempt

to communicate with the deity. Dickens shows little

sympathy with missionaries, at home or abroad. Puseyism,

the workings of the Calvinist conscience and any

attempt to indoctrinate anybody (but especially the

young) with stern views of man's reprobate nature

are all abhorred. Intolerant of intolerance, the

novelist is at the same time frequently blind in

his prejudice on the subject of Jews and Roman

Catholics, as he is on the views of other races (2).
Walder goes on to assure us that Dickens' religion was New
Testament based and that his art was largely concerned with
the creation of a "social gospel" based on broadly Christian
doctrines (4). In this Dickens shares much.with Comte, though
it is evident that Dickens doesn't thoroughly reject the
mystic aspects of Christianity or its authority as does that
philosopher. He was, however, fully dedicated to the notion
that it was good works, not faith, that would redeem a person
and that nothing could be done for anyone's soul until they
were fed and clean (10). In his reaction to the writings of
Thomas Arnold, Dickens' biographer, Forster, was certain they
appealed to him "above all for their stress on "meaning by
Religion what the Gospel teaches us to mean by it", namely "a
system directing and influencing our conduct, principles, and
feelings, and professing to do this with sovereign authority,
and most efficacious influence" (11-12).

Dickens didn't, therefore, question the authority of God

28
or Christianity, but merely its outward forms as practiced by
hypocrites and egotists. Precisely what he thought of as the

essence of religion was made abundantly clear in this excerpt

from The_Life_2f_Qur_Lerd. which he wrote for his children:

Remember! - It is Christianity TO DO GOOD always -

even to those who do evil to us. It is Christianity

to love our neighbour as ourself, and to do to all

men as we would have them Do to us. It is Christianity
to be gentle, merciful, and forgiving, and to keep those
qualities quiet in our own hearts, and never make a
boast of them, or of our prayers or of our love of

God, but always to shew that we love Him by humbly
trying to do right in everything. If we do this, and
remember the life and lessons of Our Lord Jesus Christ,
and try to act up to them, we may confidently hope that
God will forgive us our sins and mistakes, and enable
us to live and die in Peace (Walder, 13).

So while Dickens was an admittedly liberal Christian,
sometimes allied with the Unitarians and sometimes belonging
to mainstream Anglicanism, he didn't question the fact that

its teachings were correct and that is more than evident in
W-

Esther, as a child, is the victim of just the extreme
form of Evangelicalism that Dickens most hated (Walder, 9).
She asks on her birthday "Why am I so different from other
children, and why is it my fault" (Dickens, 19)? And she is
told by her aunt, who she knows only as her "godmother":

It would have been far better, little Esther, that you
had had no birthday, that you had never been born!....
Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were
hers.... For yourself, unfortunate girl, orphaned and
degraded from the first of these evil anniversaries, pray
daily that the sins of others be not visited on your
head, according to what is written....8ubmission,
self-denial, diligent work, are the preparations for a
life begun with such a shadow on it. You are different
from other children, Esther, because you were not born,

29

like them, in common sinfulness and wrath. You are set
apart (19). [Bold Mine]

Causing Esther to resolve:

I would try, as hard as ever I could, to repair the

fault I had been born with (of which I confusedly

felt guilty and yet innocent), and would strive as

I grew up to be industrious, contented and kind-

hearted, and do some good to some one, and win

some love for myself if I could. I hope it is not

self indulgent to shed these tears as I think of

it. I am very thankful, I am very cheerful, but I

cannot quite help their coming to my eyes (19-20). [Bold

Mine]

This is obviously a psychologically damaged child who grows up
to be an equally damaged, though functional, woman. ZEsther is
willing to do anything to be perceived as good, despite the
personal cost to her.

Dickens gives us countless examples of self-denial and
resulting good works in Esther, sitting up all night while
Caddy Jellyby sleeps on her lap the very first day they meet
(45), to her nursing Jo when he arrives ill at Bleak House
(383), and most especially in her whole relationship with
Allan Woodcourt.

Esther notices him from the first time they meet, but is
psychologically unable to admit her feelings for him, though
Dickens as creator of her entire narrative allows in all sorts
of revealing slips. Often her silences about Woodcourt are as
revealing as her statements. She waits until the end of both
chapters XIII and XIV to mention even his presence at events,

claiming them as omissions or forgetfulness (163, 182). She

seems to forget him a very great deal, indeed, and adds things

30

such as: "He was seven years older than I. Not that I need
mention it, for it hardly seems to belong to anything" (214).
When he leaves for India to make his fortune she spends the
day being "very busy indeed" (215) her usual reaction to
emotional stress, and Caddy Jellyby brings her flowers
Woodcourt has left for her, allowing both Caddy and Ada to
tease her about her lover (216). Esther saves these flowers
like a .holy relic, even after' her' disfigurement "as a
remembrance of what was irrevocably past and gone" (445)
because she "could have loved him - could have been devoted to
him" (445) as she obviously already is.

When Esther hears of Woodcourt's actions in the
shipwreck, she writes "I felt that no one - mother, sister,
wife - could honor him more than I. I did, indeed" (442)!
She then speaks of her "little secret":

I had thought, sometimes, that Mr. Woodcourt loved me:
and that if he had been richer, he would perhaps have
told me that he loved me, before he went away. I had
thought, sometimes, that if he had done so, I should
have been glad of it. But how much better it was now,
that this had never happened! What should I have
suffered, if I had had to write to him, and tell him
that the poor face he had known as mine was quite gone
from me, and that I freely released him from his bondage
to one whom he had never seen!

0, it was so much better as it was! With a great
pang mercifully spared me, I could take back to my heart
my childish prayer to be all he had so brightly shown
himself: and there was nothing to be undone: no chain
for me to break, or for him to drag; and I could go,
please God, my lowly way along the path of duty, and he
could go his nobler way upon its broader road: and
though we were apart upon the journey, I might aspire
to meet him, unselfishly, innocently, better far than
he had thought me when I found some favour in his eyes,
at the journey's end (443). [Bold Mine]

31

Here we see Esther's attempt to pretend Woodcourt's love was
all in her own mind and that she had been spared "a great
pain" as she is in the very act of feeling it. Esther
willfully forces herself to be deluded about her feelings,
turning every feeling for herself, no matter how just and
deserved, outward into feeling for others. She totally denies
any depression she feels, and she often is depressed and
cries, as when Jarndyce asks her to marry him, not because "I
was very happy, very thankful, very hopeful: but I cried very
much" (538), but because she loves Allan Woodcourt and is
convinced she must renounce him. In her willful self-delusion
she writes of going into Ada's room and then burning
Woodcourt's flowers:

It was weak in me, I know, and I could have no
reason for crying, but I dropped a tear upon her dear
face, and another, and anotheru Weaker than that, I took
the withered flowers out, and put them for a moment to
her lips. I thought about her love for Richard:
though, indeed, the flowers had nothing to do with
that. Then I took them into my own room, and burned
them at the candle, and they were dust in an instant
(539).

Esther sublimates all of her natural, sexual feelings for
Woodcourt and turns them, not quite successfully, into
Christian duty. Esther's (and Dickens') system of ethics
demands that she feel only a general love of her fellow man
and save her specific love for her Creator, or the one acting
in place of God in the novel, John Jarndyce. Her feelings for

Allan Woodcourt deny that ideal so Esther must deny them in

turn to be the good girl redeeming the sin of her mother that

32
Esther so longs to be.

In addition, this total denial of any feeling for herself
is a portion of her function as the symbolic ideal of love in
the novel. As Bert Hornback writes in Noah's Ateuiteetute,
"Esther is in part another version of that "principle of Good"
or "principle of Love", along with.Oliver and David" (92) (The
principle that Dickens expressed as the goal of humanity in
his novels.) Hallmarks of that ideal are good acts and moral
duty as outlined in the Bible, in Esther's case, to her
guardian, protector and surrogate father, John Jarndyce. She
resolves "To devote my life to his happiness was to thank him
poorly, and what had I wished for only the other night but
some new means of thanking him" (538)? Declaring to herself
in the mirror, which should normally help one see more
clearly, but here allows Esther to attempt to perfect her
self-delusion, "When you are mistress of Bleak House, you are
to be as cheerful as a bird. In fact, you are always to be
cheerful: so let us begin for once and for all....And so,
Esther, my dear, you are happy for life. .Happy with your best
friends, happy in your old home, happy in the power of doing
a great deal of good, and happy in the undeserved love of the
best of men" (538). She accepts Jarndyce's proposal though
she hides this fact from everyone for some time, as she senses
the wrong in it, though she can't admit it. When she finally
does tell Ada, Ada objects (606), but Esther doesn't allow

that to shake her resolve, though she reports it as she does

33
everything, and becomes depressed again and cries.

Her self-delusion is so complete, that when they meet
again, she totally misreads Woodcourt. She had been "afraid
of his recognizing me. I had been unwilling that he should
see my altered looks" (548). When he finally catches sight of
her she imagines, "And I saw that he was very sorry for me"
(549) when he is merely taken aback to see her and at her
strange, too-talkative behavior. Her oversensitivity to her
appearance is apparent at her reaction when they are talking
of Richard and Woodcourt remarks: ""He is changed," he
returned, shaking his head. I felt the blood rush into my
face for the first time, but it was only an instantaneous
emotion“ I turned my head aside, and it was gone" (550). She
entrusts Richard to his care and he seizes on it "as a trust,
and it shall be a sacred one!" because he loves her and would
do anything she asked. She responds with: "God bless you,"
said I, with my eyes filling fast; but I thought they might,
when it was not for myself" (550). But, of course, the
emotions here are for herself, though she must displace them
onto others to keep her ideal of being a selfless paragon
intact. She still loves Woodcourt and sees that he wishes to
please her though she forces herself to deny it, concluding
the incident with the same refrain: "And in his last look as
we drove away, I saw that he was very sorry for me" (551). It
isn't sorrow, but Esther can't allow it to be anything else.

She knows he loves her, not for her general goodness as

34
Richard, Ada, Caddy and the others do, but specifically as a
lover and she can't let herself know that, especially as she
has already promised herself to Jarndyce out of duty.

In fact, when Woodcourt finally proposes she assures him:

"Mr. Woodcourt," said I, "you will be glad to know
from my lips before I say Good night, that in the future,
which is clear and bright before me. I am most happy,
most fortunate, have nothing to regret or to desire...

From my childhood I have been," said I, "the object of

the untiring goodness of the best of human beings: to

whom I am so bound by every tie of attachment, gratitude,

and love, that nothing I could do in the compass of a

life could express the feelings of a single day"

(732-733).

She goes on at such length about Jarndyce's goodness that it
is obvious she is trying to convince herself as well as
Woodcourt. When he leaves, she cries:

But they were not tears of regret and sorrow. No.

He had called me the beloved of his life, and had said

I would be evermore as dear to him as I was then: and

I felt as if my heart would not hold the triumph of

having heard those words. My first wild thought had

died away. It was not too late to hear them, for it
was not too late to be animated by them to be good,
true, grateful, and contented. How easy my path: now

much easier than his (733)!

It is Dickens' choice that she behaves in this way. As
the exemplar of true Christian love, charity and duty in the
novel, Esther cannot be allowed a single selfish feeling; She
must turn every one outward and into a feeling for others,
even if this creates conflict and self-deception in her
character; This is the reason she's accused of being flat and
passive, because of her symbolic function as love and charity,
neither of which are uniformly exciting, either. Dickens was

smart enough to know that no person could live up to those

35
ideals without being self-deceived, as Anne Elliot also must
be when she reproaches herself for "lowness", so he gives us
countless examples of Esther's self-delusion to show the
mental adjustments necessary if one is to conform to the
Christian ideal. It is, perhaps, fair to argue that Esther is
excessively good, but she also conforms to the ideal of
Victorian womanhood and Dickens is a known dealer in
stereotypes as Barbara Hardy tells us in The Metal Art pf
Diekeue (29). John Kucich also points out in Repressipu in
Vietetieu_£ietipu that Dickens demanded an extreme form of
selflessness for his characters to be considered truly good:

For selfishness is not simply a moral crime in Dickens;

as a form of desire, it is antithetical to another kind

of desire that Dickens valued more highly. We can also
begin to understand why affirmed experience in Dickens
always revolves around self-reflexiveness: Dickens'
protagonists always hope to know and to purge the
deepest recesses of the self of an interest in its

own preservation (206-207).

But because Dickens is who he is, he can't allow Esther
to suffer for making the correct, moral decision and he
arranges the plot so that she can marry Woodcourt without
giving up her resolve to "do the right thing". Esther's
choice is removed by John Jarndyce, himself, the man to whom
she owes her obligation. And whom Hornback claims is Dickens'
true surrogate in the novel (92).

After seeing her true love for Woodcourt expressed in her
manic behavior and efforts to be perfectly cheerful (604-606) ,

soicheerful, in fact, that Jarndyce tellser .‘Woodcourt later

that she "will sacrifice her love to a sense of duty and

36

affection, and will sacrifice it so completely, so entirely,
so religiously, that you should never suspect it though you
watched her night and day" (752), Jarndyce then gives her
outright to the younger man. "Allan," said.my guardian, "take
from me, a willing gift, the best wife that ever a man had.
What.more can I say for you, than that I know you deserve her"
(753)! Regardless of the sexist implications of such an
action, Dickens the creator can't help but reward real,
sincere virtue, especially virtue at such a psychic costa But
while he rewards Esther and her altruism, acting as the God in
his own miniature universe, he also can punish when he finds
that altruism lacking.

In the story of Richard and Ada, we see what a lack of
renunciation can bring. In becoming engaged and then married
without Jarndyce's consent, in fact, against his express
wishes (303) Richard and Ada cut themselves off from the
protection of that benevolent benefactor. In his absorption
with the demonic lawsuit and its servants: the Lord
Chancellor, Vholes and all of the other court parasites,
Richard sends himself to hell and takes Ada with him as he
provokes her willful disobedience to the guardian to whom she
owes her loyalty. As "the wages of sin are death" what else
could happen to Richard?’ Thus Dickens rewards dutiful
renunciation with happiness and contentment (as even Jarndyce
is part of the happy family group at the end of the novel) and

punishes the failure to renounce with poverty, suffering and

37
death, in many ways more like the avenging God of the Old
Testament than the forgiving one of the New Testament, whose

values he enforces.

DECISION

By the time we reach George Eliot and Ih§_Mill_Qn_Ih§
Elpee, the ideas about evolution and humanity's place in the
universe, only anticipated at the time of ETeak House had
emerged full-blown with Darwin's publication of The Qtigin ot
Speeiee and in the works of Herbert Spencer and his
developmental theory of evolution (Paxton, 16) IEliot.was very
much concerned with the various debates scientific and
philosophic of her time and throughout her life had contact
with leading contemporary theorists, among them.her "husband"
George Henry Iewes and Spencer, a personal friend for many
years. Unlike these men, however, she chose to make her
commentaries upon society, philosophy, science and the place
of humans in the universe in the form of fiction, thereby
creating believable characters to act out the various theories
of her contemporaries in.a realistic and everyday way, as well
as to react against them.

In The MiTT Op The Floss, one of the many things with
which she concerns herself is the matter of female
renunciation, and unlike Austen and Dickens, she portrays it
as stemming from her central character's own moral choice
rather than as simple "duty" imposed from above. In Maggie,
we see the flounderings of the first generation to grapple

with the problems of making ethical choices in a world where

38

39
God is absent. In Eliot's work, this lack of absolute duty
makes the idea of renunciation and self-sacrifice harder to
support, but not unsupportable, as many modern novelists seem
to find it.

George Eliot, who had gone through a severe religious
phase in her youth, similar to the one Maggie experiences in
Mill, eventually replaced religion in her life with a complex,
philosophical system of her own with portions borrowed from
the ideas she'd heard and read in her lifetime. There has
been much written about where she garnered these ideas and
where the people she adopted them from had got them in the
first place, so much so that it would take a graduate-level
reading course in eighteenth and nineteenth-century philosophy
to cover it all. For the sake of brevity, I will not attempt
to do so, and it isn't particularly important to Eliot's work
to be aware of every philosophical theory behind each
character's moral choices. IEliot speaks for herself and.we.do
not need to read our own or anyone else's theories into works
that present their own. Each revision in trendy critical
thought gets you farther from the novel and what the novelist
was attempting to communicate to his or her readers. Thus,
when Felicia Bonaparte claims Eliot is an existentialist (11)
or John Kucich sees everything as a function of libido (3)
they are disregarding Eliot's argument to prove a point of
their own. While acknowledging the experience of the reader

in coloring the reading of any novel, I do believe that an

 

8';

es

40
author has something in mind when they sit down to write,
especially moral novelists such as those I've chosen for this
study.

Eliot was very much concerned with viewing a person
holistically, or creating "rounded" characters. She wanted
her readers to experience the character's whole reasoning
process, armed with knowledge about the character's nature.
What K. M. Newton calls "continuity of the self" based on
memory, which gives "a source of authority for feeling"
(102), Maggie's past means everything to her future
development and she is constantly looking into it to decide to
whom she owes her loyalty and moral "duty". Newton and Eliot
both attest it is her feelings, based on her knowledge of the
past, that must be used to control her other feelings. "That
the claims of the past, preserved by memory, constituted a
body of feelings she could choose to obey and so control the
more impulsive feelings which were also a part of her nature"
(113). Newton also says that "for George Eliot, an individual
with a clear sense of continuity of self intuitively knows
when an impulse stems from his whole self and when it is the
product of a purely temporary state of feeling" (66).

For her the continuity of self which memory makes
possible is a solution to the problems of identity in

a world devoid of immanent order or meaning. Even if

there is no order to which the self can relate and which

can act as an external support for continuity, such
continuity must be created, either through memory or

through a social ideal which provides the self with a

sense of stability and direction. It should be

emphasized that George Eliot does not see the past as
standing in a static relationship to the self, as some

41

critics have implied in referring to the "authority"

or the "worship" of the past and the "doctrine of

continuity" in her work. Continuity does not involve

passive or mechanical submission to the past: it is
memory and choice that are fundamental in the creation
of a sense of continuity. The psychological need to
achieve a sense of whole self is what is important, not
obedience to a past that stands apart from the self

(100 - 101).

While this is certainly a part of the morality Eliot outlines
in The hill en The Elose, I must disagree with Newton in that
I think there is a certain amount of self-denial required in
Maggie's renunciations, certainly in her renunciation of
Stephen, not just "whole self" affirmation. While being true
to one's conscience is certainly what Eliot outlines as
Maggie's struggle in The hit; up The Floss, "whole self" as
the only source of moral authority is still much closer to the
"egotistical Romanticism" Newton claims Eliot rejects (11),
than to the "community of feeling" Eliot, herself, wanted to
foster.

Maggie grapples with her self and her egotistical desires
and ultimately defeats them in her renunciation of Stephen,
and while in doing so she remains true to her best, moral
self, her "whole self" certainly suffers. It is necessary for
her to suppress parts of herself that are as natural and a
part of being human as morality (some would argue, more
natural). Maggie, in fact, suppresses her need to be loved,
"the greatest need in poor Maggie's nature" (Eliot, 37), and

sexual desire for a philosophical goal, thus elevating a

portion of herself above the others - the moral, reasoning

42
self, not alienated from feeling, but empowered by it to
consider others and choose altruism.

At the first mention of Maggie in the novel, her father
remarks that "she's twice as 'cute as Tom. Too 'cute for a
woman, I'm afraid" (12) and her mother that she has "a brown
skin as makes her look like a mulatter" (13), and complains
about her dark, straight.hair and.dark.eyes, setting Maggie up
as unconventional and intelligent in one fell swoop. Both of
these serve to alienate her from the conventional society at
St. 099's, and mark her out as a future "redundant" woman
almost from her birth. She is clearly one who will have to
make her own way and clearly, her own decisions as well.
Maggie is somewhat indulged by her father, but suffers the
constant disapproval of all the other members of her family
and threats such as "I'll tell your aunt Glegg and your aunt
Pullet when they come next week, and they'll never love you
any more" (27-28). This treatment causes her to desire love
and approval more than anything else because of her great lack
of it.

When she is little, conformity is all that is requested
of’ her, and. against arbitrary' conformity' Maggie rebels,
ducking her head.in.a basin of water to prevent her hair being
curled (27), refusing to wear her bonnet (13), and eventually
cutting all her’ hair' off’ because she desired "her’ own
deliverance from her teasing hair and teasing remarks about

it, and something also of the triumph she should have over her

43

mother and her aunts by this very decided course of action:
she didn't want her hair to look pretty- that was out of the
question - she only wanted people to think.her a clever little
girl, and not to find fault with her" (64). However, as soon
as this is done Eliot describes the consequences of pleasing
oneself and being different in Maggie's world, contrasting her
to her brother, Tom, the model of conformity.

She could see clearly enough, now the thing was
done, that it was very foolish, and that she should have
to hear and think more about her hair than ever; for
Maggie rushed to her deeds with passionate impulse, and
then saw not only their consequences, but.what would have
happened if they had not been done, with all the detail
and exaggerated circumstance of an active imagination.
Tom never did the same sort of foolish things as Maggie,
having a wonderful instinctive discernment of what would
turn to his advantage or disadvantage: and so it
happened, that though he was much more wilful and
inflexible than Maggie, his mother hardly ever called him
naughty. But if Tom did make a mistake of that sort, he
espoused it, and stood by it: he "didn't mind". If he
broke the lash of his father's gig-whip by lashing the
gate, he couldn't help it - the whip shouldn't have got
caught in the hinge.

If Tom Tulliver whipped a gate, he was convinced,
not that the whipping of gates by all boys was a
justifiable act, but that he, Tom Tulliver, was
justifiable in whipping that particular gate, and he
wasn't going to be sorry. But Maggie, as she stood
crying before the glass, felt it impossible that she
should go down to dinner and endure the severe eyes and
severe words of her aunts, while Tom, and Lucy, and
Martha, who waited at table, and perhaps her father and
her uncles, would laugh at her, - for if Tom had laughed
at her, of course every one else would: and if she had
only let her hair alone, she could have sat with Tom and
Lucy, and had the apricot pudding and the custard (65)!

It is clear in this passage that it is Tom who is actually the
egotistical one, justifying his every act to himself and not
being sorry for any of them. Here, as throughout the novel,

Maggie's acts of egotism are accompanied by feelings of

44

remorse and a recognition of their innate selfishness and how
they displease others.

Eliot, however, believes Maggie deserves to be loved.
Her constant additions of new, hurtful experiences and threats
of the withdrawal of affection as motivating factors and ways
of easily manipulating Maggie prove she deserves, or at least
needs, affection by the appalling lack of it in her life. As
love is not given to her freely, as she gives it to others,
Maggie is from the first morally superior to the other
characters in the novel.

George Eliot was a clear believer in the "Religion of
Humanity" espoused by Comte, in which "loving our neighbors as
ourselves" is the most important law. As Suzanne Graver

points out in Geprge Eliot and Qommuhity:

This phrase and related ones concerning brotherhood
and fellowship appear so regularly in their work as to
constitute a leitmotif whose dominant theme may be heard
in these words from Comte: "When the morality of an
advanced society bids us love our neighbors as ourselves,
it embodies in the best way the deepest truth" (Positive
Philosophy, p. 501) From this "sublime precept" it was
a short step to the altruism they were all committed to
furthering. Indeed, the French word altruisme, which
opposes against selfishness and egoism an ideal of living
for others, was coined by Comte, and the word altruism
was introduced into English in the early 1850's by his
translators and expounders, among them Lewes. In his
1852 Leader articles on Comte, Lewes explains that the
normative tags of "good" and "bad" are commonly applied
to people depending on whether the altruistic or
egotistic impulse predominates (56).

Maggie, then, is clearly good and Tom bad.
What Maggie predicts about her hair indeed becomes the

case and she is humiliated. This humiliation and many more

45

like it scar her permanently, and Maggie, who was a naturally
kind-hearted, moral and loving person to begin with, becomes
even more impressed with the necessity to please others rather
than herself, rather than be labelled "wild" or "unnatural".

When she grows older and Mr. Tulliver is "ruined", it is
Maggie who retains compassion for him in the midst of public
censure, and also for herself, as Eliot attests.

Maggie had witnessed this scene with gathering
anger. The implied reproaches against her father - her
father, who was lying there in a sort of living death-
neutralized all her pity for griefs about table-cloths
and china; and her anger on her father's account was
heightened by some egoistic resentment at Tom's silent
concurrence with her mother in shutting her out from the
common calamity. She had become almost indifferent to
her mother's habitual deprecation of her, but she was
keenly alive to any sanction.of it, however, passive that
she might suspect in Tom. Poor Maggie was by no means
made up of unalloyed devotedness, but put forth large
claims for herself where she loved strongly. She burst
out at last in an agitated, almost violent tone, "Mother,
how can you talk so? as if you cared only for things
with your name on, and not for what has my father's name
too - and to care about anything but dear father
himself!- when he's lying there, and may never speak to
us again. Tom, you ought to say so too - you ought not
to let anyone find fault with my father."

Maggie, almost choked with mingled grief and anger,
left the room, and took her old place on her father's
bed. Her heart went out to him with a stronger movement
than ever, at the thought that people would blame him.
Maggie hated blame: she had been blamed all her life, and
nothing had come of it but evil tempers. Her father
had always defended and excused her, and her loving
remembrance of his tenderness was a force within her that
would enable her to do or bear anything for his sake
(204-205). [Bold Mine]

As the highlighted portion suggests, Eliot, like Austen, but
unlike Dickens, acknowledged the place of self interest in
moral decision-making. Contrary, however, to Felicia

Bonaparte's argument in Will ehu pestiuy, she is definitely

46
not the patroness of egotism.

Eliot comes down fully on the side of altruism, though
Maggie's moral grappling with self-interest is much more
profound and muddled than Anne Elliot's regret over the loss
of wentworth. This is largely because she has no clearly
outlined conventional moral "duty" as does Anne: at least not
one that Eliot sees as legitimate. Using Austen's and
Dickens' ideas of duty, Maggie would be obligated to people
who»don't.much.deserve it, not.decent people like Lady Russell
or John Jarndyce. Instead, Maggie must be guided by her
feelings. She must decide whether her feelings toward others
are stronger and of more worth than her feelings for herself
and weigh them in the moral balance. This is a much more
serious kind of moral soul-searching than any done by Anne
Elliot or Esther Summerson, both of whose strongest feelings
and loyalties lay in the same, clear direction.

Maggie's first attempt at renunciation is a fine example
of Eliot's carefully thought-out philosophy. 2n: the other
works, renunciation has been uniformly noble and good;
Maggie's is an exercise in egotism. She rebels against the
empty religion practiced by her family, the "revering whatever
was customary and respectable" (273), and turns to Thomas a
Kempis, who preaches renunciation in a passage quoted by
Eliot.

Know that the love of thyself doth hurt thee more
than anything in the world...if thou seekest this or

that, and wouldst be here or there to enjoy thy own
will and pleasure, thou shalt never be quiet nor free

47

from care: for in everything somewhat will be wanting
and in every place there will be some that will cross
thee...On this sin, that a man inordinately loveth
himself, almost all dependeth, whatsoever is thoroughly
to be overcome: which evil being once overcome and
subdued, there will presently ensue great peace and
tranquillity...Though oughtest therefore to call to
mind the more heavy sufferings of others, that thou
mayest the easier bear thy little adversities.

(289, my selections from the passage)

In practice, however, Maggie uses these lessons to feed her

ego.

Here

With all the hurry of an imagination that could
never rest in the present, she sat in the deepening
twilight forming plans of self-humiliation and entire
devotedness: and, in the ardour of first discovery,
renunciation seemed to her the entrance into that
satisfaction which she had so long been craving in
vain. She had not perceived - how could she until she
had lived longer? - the inmost truth of the old
monk's outpourings, that renunciation remains sorrow,
though a sorrow bourne willingly. Maggie was still
panting for happiness, and was in ecstasy because
she had found the key to it (291).

Her own life was still a drama for her, in which
she demanded of herself that her part should be
played with intensity. And so it came to pass that she
often lost the spirit of humility in being excessive in
the outward act: she often strove after too high
a flight, and came down with her poor little half-
fledged wings dabbled in the mud. For example, she
not only determined to work at plain sewing, that she
might contribute something towards the fund in the
tin box, but she went, in the first instance, in her zeal
of self-mortification, to ask for it at a linen-
shop in St. Ogg's, instead of getting it in a more
quiet and indirect way: and could see nothing but
what was entirely wrong and unkind, nay, persecuting
in Tom's reproof of her for this unnecessary act...
That is the path we all like when we set out on our
abandonment of egoism - the path of martyrdom and
endurance, where the palm-branches grow, rather than the
steep highway of tolerance, just allowance, and self-
blame, where there are no leafy honors to»be gathered and
worn (292-293).

in the highlighted sections, Eliot outlines the

48
difference between true renunciation and egotistical
self-mortification, proving that she believes there can be
true renunciation and is not the goddess/patron of egotism.
She sees this concentration on the self as wrongheaded.

But here, too, we see reflected the common absorption in
religion experienced by many Nineteenth Century girls,
including Eliot herself. Since Maggie is a loving, healthy
girl and doesn't receive the attention she needs from those
around her, she turns to God to provide a place on which to
fix her affections. Her devotion to "martyrdom" approaches
that described by Annie Besant (Cominos, 163), especially in
her longing to experience martyrdom or religious vision.

The suffering itself, however, ultimately becomes the
goal, because it masochistically makes Maggie feel clean and
good. It is Philip Wakem who "wakes" her up, proving the
appropriateness of his name, and though his reason for doing
so is not purely altruistic, it is certainly far more so than
her renunciation, and his explanation of her deification of a
Kempis, hits the nail on the head.

"Yes Maggie," said Philip, vehemently: "and you
are shutting yourself up in a narrow self-delusive
fanaticism, which is only a way of escaping pain by
starving into dulness all the highest powers of your
nature. Joy and peace are not resignation: resignation
is the willing endurance of a pain that is not allayed -
that you don't expect to be allayed. Stupefaction is
not resignation: and it is stupefaction to remain in
ignorance - to shut up all the avenues by which the
life of your fellow-men might become known to you. I
am not resigned: I am not sure that life is long enough

to learn that lesson. You are not resigned; you are only
trying to stupefy yourself" (327-328).

49

Maggie, of course, succumbs to Philip's prompting and reenters
life, as his love, but still with the marks of her egotism
upon her. "She had a moment of real happiness then - a moment
of belief that, if there were sacrifices in this love, it was
all the richer and more satisfying" (337). But then, Eliot
has already excused this as a sign of youth and it is not
until she is grown up that we see mature grappling and defeat
of egotism. However, Maggie is trying even now, though she
was self-deluded about her bout of renunciation, she is at
least attempting to become a better person, unlike the total
self-satisfaction of Tom or the Dodsons.

Tom discovers Maggie's relationship with Philip and he
bullies her into a second renunciation. Maggie only succumbs
because "It was for my father's sake...he couldn't bear it"
(346). When Tom continues to bully her, even after getting
his way, she answers him with one of the cornerstones of
Eliot's humanist philosophy as presented in the novel:

"I know I've been wrong - often, continually. But
yet, sometimes when I have done wrong, it has been
because I have feelings that you would be the better for,
if you had them. If you were in fault ever - if
you had done anything very wrong, I should be sorry for
the pain it brought you: I should not want
punishment heaped on you. But you have always
enjoyed punishing me - you have always been hard
and cruel to me:... you have no pity: you have no
sense of your own imperfection and your own sins.

It is a sin to be hard: it is not fitting for a

mortal - for a Christian. You are nothing but a

Pharisee. You thank God for nothing but your own

virtues- you think they are great enough to win

you everything else. You have not even a vision of

the feelings by the side of which your shining
virtues are mere darkness (347)!

50
And it is here that we clearly see that Maggie, though she
struggles with self-indulgence and egotism, always comes down
firmly on the side of altruism in her real caring and feeling
for others and her attempts to do what is best despite the
personal costs.

It is Maggie who stops her father from.killing Mr. Wakem,
she insists that he forgive Wakem on his deathbed, and she
strives to be independent of the Dodsons, acting as the moral
bellweather in the novel. Maggie has become conscious of her
egotism and actively attempts to control it, unlike most of
the other characters who are either unaware, like Tom, or
simply don't care to control it, like Stephen Guest.

When Maggie first returns to St. Ogg's from her teaching
position, we see that this conscious self-control is the
hallmark of the grown-up Maggie. "No, Lucy," said Maggie,
shaking her head slowly. "I don't enjoy their happiness as
you do - else I should be more contented. I do feel for them
when they are in trouble; I don't think I could ever bear to
make anyone unhappy: and yet I often hate myself, because I
get angry sometimes at the sight of happy people. I think I
get worse as I get older - more selfish. That seems very
dreadful" (373). Immediately after this statement, however,
Maggie is introduced to Stephen Guest, and though she
recognizes his egotism from the first (377) she is attracted
and must balance her own inclinations with her keenly felt

obligations to Lucy and Philip. The obligations always win

51
out. Efliot says of Maggie, "But there were things in her
stronger than vanity - passion, and affection, and long deep
memories of early discipline and effort, of early claims on
her love and pity" (436).

She weakens at times and can't help what she feels for
Stephen, as when they walk in the conservatory at Park House,
but she is always conscious of the feelings of the others
involved. "The hovering thought that they must and would
renounce each other made this moment of mute confession more
intense in its rapture" (441). Throughout Stephen's pleading
and argument for her to elope with him, Maggie reminds him of
their obligations, granting him the credit for a moral nature
he clearly doesn't have, and explaining Eliot's idea that it
is moral feelings that are the foundation and.binding of human
society. "You feel, as I do, that the real tie lies in the
feelings and expectations we have raised in other minds. Else
all pledges might be broken, when there was no outward
penalty» There would be no such thing as faithfulness" (449).
Stephen's egotism is so advanced, that he remains unconvinced
bringing on further explanation.

0 it is difficult- life is very difficult! It seems
right to me sometimes that we should follow our strongest
feeling: - but then, such feelings continually come
across the ties that all our former life has made for us
- the ties that have made others dependent on us - and
would cut them in two. If life were quite easy and
simple, as it might have been in paradise, and we could
always see that one being first towards whom....I mean,
if life did not make duties for us before love comes,
love would be a sign that two people ought to belong to

each other. But I see - I feel it is not so now: there
are things we must renounce in life: some of us must

52

resign love. Many things are difficult and dark to me:
but I see one thing quite clearly - that I must not,
cannot, seek my own happiness by sacrificing others.
Love is natural: but surely pity and faithfulness and
memory are natural too. And they would live in me still,
and punish me if I did not obey them. I should be
haunted by the suffering I had caused, Our love would.be
poisoned. Don't urge me: help me - help me, because I
love you (449-450).

Eliot doesn't, like Dickens, make Maggie a saint, however.
Her conflict with egotism isn't at an end. It is clearly
delineated in the following passage:

There were moments in which a cruel selfishness

seemed to be getting possession of her: why should not
Lucy - why should not Philip suffer? She had had to
suffer through many years of her life; and who had
renounced anything for her...But amidst all this new
passionate tumult there were the old voices making
themselves heard with rising power, till from time to
time the tumult seemed quelled. Was that existence
which tempted her the full existence she dreamed?
Where, then, would be all the memories of early
striving - all the deep pity for another's pain,

which had been nurtured in her though years of
affection and hardship - all the divine presentiment
of something higher than mere personal enjoyment, which
had made the sacredness of life...And then, if pain
were so hard to her, what was it to others (458)?

Immediately thereafter, she contemplates Stephen's suffering,
and this affects her even more than her love for him, a truly
altruistic example of fellow-feeling; It is this sympathy and
her love that allow Maggie to be taken out in the boat by
Stephen in the daze where memory and thought were excluded.
Even when she comes to herself and demands to be taken back,
it works on her:
"Maggie was paralyzed: it was easier to resist
Stephen's pleading, than this picture he had called
up of himself suffering while she was vindicated -

easier even to turn away from his look of tenderness
than from this look of angry misery, that seemed to

53

place her in selfish isolation from him. He had called

up a state of feeling in which the reasons which had

acted on her conscience seemed to be transmuted into
mere self-regard. The indignant fire in her eyes was
quenched, and she began to look at him with timid
distress. She had reproached him for being hurried
into irrevocable trespass - she, who had been so weak
herself.

"As if I shouldn't feel what happened to you -
just the same." she said, with reproach of another
kind - the reproach of love, asking for more trust.
This yielding to the idea of Stephen's suffering was
more fatal than the other yielding, because it was
less distinguishable from that sense of others' claims
which was the moral basis of her resistance (466).

Eliot is showing us a person with a different group of moral
claims to be sorted out, the one, however, which has already
been discarded is Maggie's ego.

Maggie allows herself to be led by Stephen, caught in the
paralysis of two conflicting obligations. It takes her some
time to put them in perspective, but she realizes her feeling
for Stephen has more egotism in it, thus she rejects him.
But, "the irrevocable wrong that must blot her life had been
committed: she had brought sorrow into the lives of others -
into the lives that were knit up with hers by trust and
love...she had rent the ties that had given meaning to duty"
(470-471). She begins true renunciation now, putting others
before herself, learning truly the lessons of a Kempis. This
is, however, the renunciation Stephen also should make and is
really not gender-specific, though Maggie might be at
advantage in knowing how to give things up because of her
position as a woman and as one who is so strongly influenced

by Christianity.

54

While she does her best to hurt Stephen as little as
possible, and though he continues to appeal to her pity and
sympathy "Maggie had made up her mind to suffer" (474).
Stephen makes an argument for the supremacy of their feelings
of attraction and love, but it is obviously bound up with
selfishness and egotism. Maggie argues for a higher sort of
moral love based on faithfulness and constancy, the ties of
the past ("being true to all the motives that sanctify our
lives"), and the desire to never have committed a willful sin,
the willfulness of egotism (475-477).

When Maggie chooses to renounce Stephen, she does so for
the same sense of obligation to others than motivated Anne
Elliot and Esther Summerson, but from a different
philosophical basis, though that one did certainly borrow from
Christianity. While Eliot's position is a more complicated
one because of the lack of an absolute rule such as
Christianity, her organicist humanism leads her characters to
the very same conclusions about what is morally correct.
Eliot's focus on Maggie's struggle to come to that conclusion,
however, demonstrates that nineteenth century moral
conventions are truly not static. Egotism makes a greater and
greater claim as the Victorians became more preoccupied with
the development of the self. While Anne and Esther do not
undergo much character development, Maggie does: and as the
self grows in importance, altruism becomes more and more

difficult to attain.

DELIVERANCE

George Gissing's The Qdd flbmeh, in 1893, specifically
takes up the problem of the extra or "redundant" woman in
society, though, in reality, all of the novels discussed so
far have treated this subject in a much less obvious way.
Both Anne Elliot and her sister Elizabeth are aging spinsters
in a society where women who do marry usually do so between
the ages of 20 and 25 (Branca, 4-5). Esther Summerson, in her
position of housekeeper and companion is clearly one of the
genteel working woman who had responsibility but no salary for
their services. Maggie Tulliver, too, is expected never to
marry and works as a teacher for almost no pay to enable her
to support herself. While all three of these heroines
ultimately receive proposals, it doesn't alter their position
as "redundant" women until they actually die or do marry and
become accepted as wives, both Esther and Anne merging their
identities with those of their husbands in traditional
fashion.

In June 1893, Gissing wrote:

My demand for female "equality" simply means that I
am convinced there will be no social peace until women
are intellectually trained very much as men are. More
than half the misery of life is due to the ignorance and
childishness of women. The average woman pretty closely
resembles, in all intellectual considerations, the
average male idiot - I speak medically... I am driven
frantic by the crass imbecility of the typical woman.
That type must disappear, or at all events become

altogether subordinate. And I believe that the only way

55

56

of effecting this is to go through a period of what many

people will call sexual anarchy. Nothing good will

perish: we can trust the forces of nature, which tend

to conservation. (Poole, 185)

While the similarity to his "hero" Everard Barfoot is
remarkable, Gissing is setting' himself up as a radical
reformer when it comes to the position of women in society and
in novels.

In The Odd Women, Gissing offers an alternative to death
and. marriage in ‘work - and not merely work, but work
traditionally reserved for men. Mary Barfoot and Rhoda Nunn
train young women for work as typewriters, stenographers and
other secretarial jobs previously held only by men. Because
of the low or nonexistent pay in traditional female
occupations such as nursing or teaching, Gissing actively
presents an alternative and a chance for independence from the
entire Ruskin/Acton supported system, by encouraging women to
obtain decent wages on their own.

But.Gissing'sipicture is not rosy; a Social Darwinist, he
presents the struggle necessary for change and the evolution
of a social system. As John Goode points out in geprge

ss ° de 0 and Fiction:

...in each of the novels the female protagonist is
placed at the ideological frontier of the text's
representativeness. This is partly because of the
relative lack of mobility of women who are not therefore
faced with a choice of action, so that while the male
protagonist battles with circumstances, the female
internalizes the battle as an ideological drama. This
has the effect of making them seem stronger and more

decisive and at the same time more incapable of altering
anything except by self-sacrifice (143).

57
Gissing offers in his many characters the entire spectrum of
female experience in the working middle-class. The book
begins by introducing us to the Madden sisters, six genteel,
unattractive daughters of an improvident father who raised
them traditionally, and.educating them for their proper "role"
- pleasing men:

The one duty clearly before him was to set an
example of righteous life, and to develop the girls'
minds - in every proper direction. For, as to training
them for any path save those trodden by English ladies
of the familiar type, he could not have dreamt of any
such thing. Dr. Madden's hopes for the race were

inseparable from a maintenance of morals and conventions
such as the average man assumes in his estimate of women

(3).

Dr. Madden dies, leaving his daughters 800 pounds, a small
inheritance that was not enough to live on. By the second
chapter we are informed that three of the Madden sisters are
dead, two are unemployed genteel laborers of the traditional
type and the youngest, who works at a draper's shop, is "sure
to marry. Thank Heaven, she was sure to marry" (12)! It is
the one hope her family entertains in their traditional
mindset.

But the two eldest know that they will have to work, but
that their outlook is grim. They discuss it in the same
chapter:

"Surely," Alice began by murmuring half absently,

"I shall soon hear of something."

"I am dreadfully uneasy on my own account," her
sister replied.

"You. think. the jperson. at Southend. won't write
again?"

"I'm afraid not. And she seemed so very
unsatisfactory. Positively illiterate - oh, I couldn't

58

bear that." Virginia gave a shudder as she spoke.

"I almost wish," said Alice, "that I had accepted
the place at Plymouth."

"Oh, my dear! Five children and not a penny of
salary. It was a shameless proposal."

"It was, indeed," sighed the poor governess. "But
there is little choice for people like myself.
Certificates, and even degrees, are asked for on every
hand. With nothing but references to past employers,
what can one expect? I know it will end in my taking a
place without salary" (13-14).

Genteel, traditional women had only such employment to look
forward to.

Through the Madden sisters we are introduced to Misses
Rhoda Nunn (the ethical heroine of the novel) and Mary
Barfoot, who run a school to train women for work in the
business world. One of the first comments we hear from Rhoda
Nunn is that "Self-sacrifice may be quite wrong, I'm afraid."
(21). However, she intends to devote her life to educating
women to enter business occupations, partially through being,
herself, an example of a useful sort of "odd woman". And
later, Rhoda claims this is, "Because one of the supreme
social needs of our day is the education of women in self-
respect and self-restraint" (56). She sees herself as the
exemplar of both virtues.

Rhoda is actively against the idea of marriage, stating,
"I would have girls taught that marriage is a thing to be
avoided rather than hoped for. I would teach them that for
the majority of women marriage means disgrace... Because the

majority of men are without sense of honor. To be bound to

them in wedlock is shame and misery" (99). Because of her

59
decided low opinion of men, she hasn't been in love since she
was fifteen, happily dedicating herself to furthering the
cause of women's emancipation, going so far as to tell her
lover,

[Marriage] would interfere hopelessly with the best
part of my life. I thought you understood this. What
would become of the encouragement I am able to offer
our girls... To scorn the old idea that a woman's life
is wasted if she does not marry. My work is to help
those women who, by sheer necessity, must live alone -
women whom vulgar opinion ridicules. How can I help
them so effectually as by living among them, one of
them, and showing that my life is anything but
weariness and lamentation? I am fitted for this. It
gives me a sense of power and usefulness which I enjoy.
Your cousin is doing the same work admirably. If I
deserted I should despise myself (182-83).

Here we see Rhoda's ethical position and the choice that is
going to be laid before her. Should she desert all she
believes in for the love she could not otherwise have, put her
personal happiness before the example she could be (and it is
assuredly the only chance she will ever have to be married),
or should she choose the life of asceticism and self-sacrifice
for a cause she truly believes in? Rhoda claims she's "fitted
for" such a life, but through the course of the novel we learn
she is not as fitted for it as she may have once believed.
When Rhoda meets Mary's cousin, Everard Barfoot, his
similar ideas and contempt for stupid women combined with his
desire to educate them (much like Gissing's) , interests her in
intellectual companionship. While Rhoda clearly enjoys
talking with him, Barfoot (despite the fact that Rhoda is not

beautiful), soon puts a sexual spin on their social

60

encounters. "...he was tempted to make love to her as an
interesting pastime, to observe how so strong-minded a woman
would conduct herself under such circumstances..nA contest
between his will and hers would be an amusement decidedly to
his taste" (126-27). So, in the spirit of conquest Barfoot
determines to make Rhoda fall in love with him. But by the
end of the same conversation with her, he is already
entertaining thoughts of the reverse. "But if his
intellectual sympathy became tinged with passion - and did her
discern no possibility of that? An odd thing were he to fall
in love'with Rhoda Nunn" (130-31). And by a short time later,
his fantasies have become overtly sexual, "It would delight
him to enrage Rhoda, and then to detain her by strength, to
overcome her senses, to watch her long lashes droop over the
eloquent eyes. But this was something very like being in
love, and he by no means wished to be seriously in love with
Miss Nunn...In this humour she seemed more than ever a
challenge to his manhood...Yet he saw her as a woman, and
desirable" (142-43).

Despite Barfoot's view of the entire relationship as
being about getting Rhoda to submit to his will, Rhoda is
genuinely charmed by him and sincerely falls in love with him
despite her resolutions to the contrary.

"As a girl she had dreamt passionately, and the
fires of her nature, though hidden beneath aggregations
of moral and mental attainment, were not yet smothered...
Everard Barfoot's advances surprised her not a little.

Judging him as a man wholly without principles, she
supposed at first that this was merely his way with

61

all women, and resented it as impertinence. But even
then she did not dislike the show of homage: what her
mind regarded with disdain, her heart was all but
willing to feed upon, after its long hunger...
Certainly she thought with much frequency of Barfoot,
and looked forward to his coming (142). [Bold Mine]

However, she retains enough of her suspicions of men in
general and enough respect for herself to expect Barfoot to be
equally above-board. But Rhoda has the added complication of
having to contemplate marriage's effect on her chosen life's
work.

"What was her life to be? At first they would
travel together: but before long it might be necessary
to have a settled home, and what then would be her social
position, her duties and pleasures? Housekeeping, mere
domesticities, could never occupy her for more than the
smallest possible part of each day. Having lost one
purpose in life, dignified, absorbing, likely to extend
its sphere as time went on, what other could she hope to
substitute for it?

Love of husband - perhaps of child. There must be
more than that Rhoda did not deceive herself as to the
requirements of her nature. Practical activity in some
intellectual undertaking: a share - nay, leadership, in
some "movement": contact with the revolutionary life of
her time - the impulses of her heart once satisfied,
these things would again claim her. But how if Everard
resisted such tendencies? Was he in truth capable of
respecting her individuality? Or would his strong
instinct of lordship urge him to direct his wife as a
dependant, to impose on her his own view of things?

She doubted whether he had much genuine sympathy with
woman's emancipation as she understood it. Yet in

no particular had her convictions changed; nor would they
change. She herself was no longer one of the "odd
women": fortune had - or seemed to have - been kind to
her: none the less her sense of a mission remained. No
longer an example of perfect female independence, and
unable therefore to use the same language as before,
she might illustrate woman's claim of equality in
marriage - If her experience proved no obstacle (269-70) .
[Bold Mine]

However, in the same chapter, we have already learned that

Barfoot has no intention of allowing her to continue her work.

62
He views their relationship as "a long, perhaps bitter,
struggle for predominance" (268). But Rhoda is entirely
unaware of this, her love has grown and become real, but she
cannot give up her' altruistic ideals for' mere personal
happiness.

At first, when he proposed love to her, Rhoda answered
quite honestly, "I don't love you in the least. And if I did
I would never share your life" (181). Rhoda refuses to lie
about her intentions as Barfoot does, but through his
persistent wooing, she succumbs to real love, even becoming
jealous when suspicion is planted in her mind about Everard's
fidelity (254). "She loved with passion, allowing herself to
indulge the luxurious emotion as never yet. She longed once
more to feel his arms about her" (264). She is willing to
enter intO‘whatever'sort.of an arrangement Everard may desire.
He proposes a "free union", which Rhoda does not reject, in
fact, "it seemed to her an easier and nobler thing to proclaim
her emancipation from social statutes than to announce before
her friends the simple news that she was about to marry"
(264). But Barfoot uses his proposal as an opportunity to
test her,

The hour had come for his last trial of Rhoda, and
he felt some confidence as to the result. If her mettle
endured his test, if she declared herself willing not
only to abandon her avowed ideal of life, but to defy the
world's opinion by becoming his wife without forms of
mutual bondage - she was the woman he had imagined, and
by her side he would go cheerfully on his way as a
married man. Legally married: the proposal of free

union was to be a test only. Loving her as he had never
thought to love, there still remained with him so much

63

of the temper in which he first wooed her that he could

be satisfied with nothing short of unconditional

surrender. Delighting in her independence of mind, he

still desired to see her in complete subjugation to him,

to inspire her with unreflecting passion... She must

rise far above the level of ordinary intelligent

women. She must manifest an absolute confidence in

him - that was the true significance of his present

motives (261). [Bold Mine]
Rhoda feels "able to dare everything - as far as the danger
concerned herself: but she perceived more strongly than
hitherto that not only her own future was involved, How would
such practical heresy affect Everard's position" (264)?
Again, her altruistic tendencies put her in conflict with
Everard's desire. She thinks of him, he thinks only of his
test. Everard assures her that "free union" is what he really
desires.
She believed him entirely serious. Another woman
might have suspected that he was merely trying her
courage, either to assure himself of her love or to
gratify his vanity. But Rhoda's idealism enabled her
to take him literally. She herself had for years
maintained an exaggerated standard of duty and merit:
desirous of seeing Everard in a nobler light than
hitherto, she endeavoured to regard his scruple against
formal wedlock as worthy of all respect (265).
However, out of concern for him, she urges conventional
marriage, to which Barfoot agrees, but he becomes incredibly
resentful and desires to break it off, Rhoda having failed.his
test - to be his unconditionally; Of course he would take her
back, "Even now, perhaps, he would bring her to her knees
before him" (273).

When she is presented with documentary evidence of

Everard's entanglement. with another' woman, though it is

64

actually all.a.misunderstanding, he refuses to answer it. "In
fact, he felt almost glad of a ground of quarrel with Rhoda"
(273). Because she refuses to trust him unconditionally and
then refuses to accept his offer a second time once his love
was proven false and he admits his wish to test her, they
part. Barfoot, after a short time, marries another, more
traditional and easily dominated, woman.

So Rhoda's story is one of double renunciation. To marry
Barfoot she must (and actually is willing to take the chance
that she will have to) renounce the work on which she's based
her life and her entire world-view. To continue her work, she
must renounce the only opportunity of love that she will ever
receive. She must give up the only man she's ever loved to
retain her selfhood and her beliefs. Gissing offers this
choice in a very practical, matter-of-fact manner and it is
the spiritual aspect of ethical choice that is lacking in this
novel, in comparison with the others. The personal, psychic
costs are well-documented, however. You could call The_9uu
flemeh a book about ethical choice for cynical people. And
unlike the three other heroines we have encountered, Rhoda.has
managed to free herself from the superstition and encumbrances
of her society, though she has retained her sense of
obligation and moral duty to her fellows. But the novel also
assures us that to be free she must be alone, as others are
not so advanced in their thinking. To be free of the burden

of "Queen's Gardens", one had to remain an "odd woman".

65

The story of Monica Madden's disastrous marriage is the
other major plot and the other choice presented in The_9uu
Hemeh. As Goode points out, "[Monica] only marries as an odd
woman. ‘That is, she doesn't.marry by sexual selection: on the
contrary, she marries a man she doesn't love in order to cope
with what would otherwise be her superfluity" (145) . She weds
the much older Edmund Widdowson a Ruskin-type model of the
Victorian husband.

"In no woman on earth could he have put perfect
confidence. He regarded them as born to perpetual
pupilage. Not that their inclinations were necessarily
wanton: they were simply incapable of attaining maturity,
remained throughout their life imperfect beings, at the
mercy of craft, ever liable to be misled by childish
misconceptions. Of course he was right: he himself
represented the guardian male, the wife-proprietor,
who from the dawn of civilization has taken abundant care
that woman shall not outgrow her nonage (196-97).

She provides an important contrast to Rhoda Nunn, for Monica
makes no choices based on ethics, merely following the ideas
of society against her own propensities to the contrary. She
actually is an example of a woman who hasn't "outgrown her
nonage", though she does, through her contact with Rhoda and
Mary Barfoot, have the idea that such a state is wrong.
Because of these newfound convictions, she battles her weak,
traditional husband to a standstill that proves disastrous to
them both, as neither will change their minds. Monica has
been in certain ways freed by her contact with new ideas, and
Widdowson can never really entertain a new notion at all.

She marries and then leaves the bullying, jealous Widdowson

because of a flirtation that proves empty. She dies after

66
giving birth to a daughter, and the book closes with Rhoda
Nunn.holding it in her arms - the child her ethics would never
allow her to have.
Gissing, as a Social Darwinist, simply could not be that
optimistic. Rhoda will change the world, but she cannot
produce the generation that will inherit her changes. Ethics

and sex are incompatible in Gissing's world, as they are in

The Mill 93 the Floss and in Hardy.

DESTRUCTION

In Thomas Hardy's last novel, Jude the Ohscute in 1897,
the developing self has become the crucial purpose of the
novel, but despite this fact, Hardy, too is not a proponent of
the ego. .As‘Virginia Hyman says in Ethical Perspective ih the
prele pt Themes hetdy, his primary motivation in writing his
novels was to promote the altruistic ideal of loving/kindness.
(9) He ties himself, like Eliot, to philosophers such as
Darwin, Huxley, Spencer and Mill, (Hyman, 10) and, ultimately,
Comte. He misses the authority of religion and to a certain
extent regrets its loss but still believes altruism will
prevail without.it (11). However, this cannot be done without
suffering. As Hyman explains:

For apparently, Hardy, like the later ethical
evolutionists, saw the claims of egotism as far more
persistent than Comte had. The transition from egotism
to altruism would not be, these later writers felt,
either as natural or as conductive to happiness as Comte
had assumed. On the contrary, since altruism required
giving up one's selfish desires, it required the
necessary sacrifice of hopes for personal happiness.

Unlike Comte, the later English ethical evolutionists

believed that you cannot be both selfless and happy: you
must choose the one or the other, and be willing to take
the consequences of that choice (21-22).

While it may have been possible to be both good and.happy
in a limited way in simpler times, by the nineteenth
century the two values were mutually antagonistic. It
was, indeed, no longer a matter of choice. By Hardy's
day it was no longer possible for man to achieve
happiness, or at least a kind of happiness which required
the satisfaction of the ego at the expense of others

67

68
(35-36).

It is this view we see operating in Jude the Obsc ,

 

especially in regards to the various renunciations that take
place in the novel.

In Jude, it is not merely the renunciation of love that
concerns Hardy, but also the renunciation of all egotistical
desires. For Jude to progress, he must realize the
selfishness of his desire to attend the university, his
idealization of Sue and the emptiness of religion: for
Phillotson, he must realize his desire to possess Sue is
wrong: and for Sue, she must recognize the meaning of love,
learn to trust, be able to give up her fears for herself and
her wish to be totally independent. Only Jude comes close,
achieving two out of three. Neither Phillotson nor Sue can
seem to fully rise out of their egotistical ruts, though both
have their moments of triumph. As this is a paper on the
ethics of female renunciation, however, it is Sue who will
concern us here.

There seem to be two main camps in Hardy criticism when
it comes to Sue Bridehead, one that buys wholly into D.H.
Lawrence's assessment of her and one that only accepts some of
it. Lawrence seems very quick to judge the women in the novel
in terms of their egotism and wishes to excuse Jude
everything, I think this is a misreading, and so, I think,
would Hardy. Hardy excuses Sue almost everything while

condemning her final, self-destructive and Jude-destructive

69
renunciation. He portrays her as obviously too damaged to be
rational from the outset, despite the distorted, idealized
picture Jude paints of her in his portion of the narration.
This idealization of Sue is the one egotistical renunciation
Jude is never able to make, much to his pain and hers.

When Jude first sees Sue, we see his distorted view of
her that blights their whole relationship. "But she remained
more or less an ideal character, about whose form he began to
weave curious and fantastic day-dreams" (73). These dreams
are mixed with a sexual desire that is so strong it causes a
reaction when he sees her on the street before Sue is even
aware of who he is, "His closeness to her was so suggestive
that he trembled..." (73).

However, when we first see Sue outside of Jude's
perspective she is buying naked statues of Greek gods. We
also see that she is feeling guilty about.it, Hardy describes
this as "They seemed so very large now that they were in her
possession, and so very naked, Being of a nervous temperament
she trembled at her enterprise....But she was still in a
trembling state, and seemed almost to wish she had not bought
the figures" (78). She immediately hides them from her
landlady and we see Sue's overriding motivations in life are
a desire to be unconventional and far more seriously - fear.
She is so caught up by both that she is unable to sleep (78).
Sue's perfection is only in Jude's eyes. She is a flawed,

frightened, young woman trying to do something different and

70
in perpetual fear of being caught at it.

When they first meet, Hardy tells us Jude speaks "with
the bashfulness of a lover" and Sue, "with the freedom of a
friend" (82) Clearly it is Jude who has selfish designs. He
convinces Sue to resume teaching though she declares "I never
thought of resuming it: for I was getting on as an
art-designer." (85) , setting her on the course of her disaster
with Phillotson in his own desire to keep her from returning
to London.

Throughout the novel Hardy describes Sue as nervous and
animated, and so she is, to the point of illness from fear and
anxiety, as*when the school inspector makes his surprise visit
and she nearly faints from fear and stress (88). Afterwards,
Phillotson uses her' weakness as an opportunity to :make
advances, placing his arm about her, though she resists at
first, "she let it remain, looking quickly round her with an
air of misgiving" (89).

It is clear that both Jude and Phillotson are motivated
by possessive desire in regards to Sue, but she is quite
devoid of any desire other than the human desires of
companionship and approval. To satisfy these desires she
behaves in two distinct ways, as Rosemarie Morgan points out
in ome n Sexua t in he Novele of Thomas Hardy:

Hardy perceives that Sue's most characteristic

psychological move is to slide instinctively from the

little-girl role to the ennobled role when her emotional
anxieties are appeased. Both are approval-seeking roles.

And although the significance of this alternation of
poses is lost on Jude, Hardy makes it apparent to the

71

reader that this pattern of behaviour must and does
maintain Sue in unliberated subjection. Childlike or
ennobled, each directional shift gains her momentary
personal satisfaction, in that she gains Jude's approval
- indulgence on the one hand, reverence on the other -
but at the expense of driving an ever thickening wedge
of inequity between herself and her lover. Neither to
submissive child nor ethereal paragon can he relate in
any sexually fulfilling or mutually rewarding way. He
would always have the feeling, or would unwittingly
generate in her the feeling, that she is either abused
and exploited or debased and degraded (117).

This is an incredibly important part of Sue's psychology: to
her, nearly any physical contact is degrading and
objectifyingu She is a true victim.of the Victorian notion of
women's sexuality as outlined by Acton in 1862 and quoted by
Penny Boumelha in Thomas Hardy and Womeh:
...there can be no doubt that sexual feeling in the
female is in abeyance...and even if roused (which in many
instances it never cantbe) is very moderate compared with
that of the male...The best mothers, wives, and managers
of households, know little or nothing of sexual
indulgences. Love of home, children, and domestic
duties, are the only passions they feel.

As a general rule, a modest woman seldom desires any
sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her
husband, but only to please him: and, but for the desire
for maternity, would far rather be relieved from his
attentions (14).

Sue cannot let herself feel sexual desire because to do so
makes her not "a modest woman" but a whore. It is Sue's
urgent wish to be taken seriously intellectually, but to both
of the men in her life she is alternately an object of sexual
desire or a paragon of virtue, not an equal. Hardy is
obviously playing with.this conventional notion, here, Sue is

the perfect Acton-type Victorian woman, but she tries to use

the stereotype to free herself, and the fact that she fails

72
doesn't mean that Hardy finds it the less admirable.

D.H. Iawrence, in his review hypothesized that Sue is
totally selfish and only uses Jude for her own profit and
comfort. Yet Hardy writes that she nurses Jude in his
drunkenness and.disappointment.and is not judgmental and it is
Jude she calls when she is miserable at school and needs
someone, both examples of fellow-feeling. When he takes her
hand at the inn where they're eating, she betrays her true
tenderness for him.

She looked up and smiled, and took his quite freely

into her own little soft one, dividing his fingers and

coolly examining them, as if they were the fingers of

a glove she was purchasing.

"Your hands are rather rough, Jude, aren't they?"
she said.

"Yes. So would yours be if they held a mallet and
chisel all day."

"I don't dislike it, you know. I think it is noble
to see a man's hands subdued to what he works in...Well,

I'm rather glad I came to this Training-School, after

all. See how independent I shall be after two years'

training" (107)!

Sue can't, however, allow this incident to go anywhere and
Jude is so wrapped up in his jealousy of Phillotson and guilt
over having seen Arabella that he can't act on her cue about
her feelings for him. She wants him to free her from her
promise to Phillotson, but in his paralysis, he can't. Sue
can't ask and Jude can't read her well enough to help her.

They stay out all night and upon returning, Sue escapes
from school, running through a river to get to Jude, still as

fearful as ever. "Dear, Sue!" he said. "You must take off

all your things! And let me see- you must borrow some from

73
the landlady. I'll ask her."

"No, no! Don't let her know, for God's sake! We are so
near the school that they'll come after me" (115)! Jude
leaves the room and returns to find her dressed in his Sunday
suit, "so pathetic in her defenselessness that his heart felt
big with the sense of it" (116). She's embarrassed when he
sees her underwear hanging up to dry, betraying her crippling
ties to the notions of Victorian modesty. Jude "saw in her
almost a divinity" (116).

Sue, herself, defines the reason for her behavior later
that evening when Jude calls her learned.

My life has been entirely shaped by what people call a

peculiarity in me. I have no fear of men, as such, nor

of their books. I have mixed with them - one or two of
them particularly - almost as one of their own sex.

I mean I have not felt about them as most women are

taught to feel - to be on their guard against attacks

on their virtue: for no average man - no man short of

a sensual savage - will molest a woman by day or night,

at home or abroad, unless she invites him. Until she

says by a look "Come on" he is always afraid to, and

if you never say it, or look it, he never comes (118).
So, Sue will never invite molestation through word or deed,
and molestation is how she regards any sexual activity

whatsoever. She goes on to say:

"I am not particularly innocent....said she, with
an ostensible sneer, though he could hear that she was
brimming with tears. "But I have never yielded myself

to any lover, if that's what you mean! I have remained
as I began.

"I quite believe you. But some women would not
have remained as they began."

"Perhaps not. Better women would not. People
say I must be cold-natured, -sexless- on account of it.
But I won't have it (119)!

She knows she is conflicted and inhibited and tries to explain

74

it to Jude but he simply can't understand, and she also knows
she loves Jude and wants him to love her as her later
approval-seeking behavior that night attests. She is
alternately child or paragon of virtue, as Jude's mood demands
because she loves him and needs him to love her. (Morgan,
117) Much has been written about Jude's needing something on
which to "anchor his life", but Sue needs that too and they
choose one another, crippled by Jude's idealism and Sue's
sexual phobias as they are. This is what most critics forget,
excusing Jude and blaming Sue for the same needs.

Sue, too, is as deluded as Jude on what a woman should be
like. She declares, "But I did want and long to ennoble some
man to high aims: and when I saw you, and knew you to be my
comrade, I - shall I confess it? -thought that man might be
you" (122-123). She, too, sees herself as a symbol of purity
and this prevents her from dealing with the whole notion of
physicality. Virgin goddesses can't reside in their bodies
nor can they enjoy them. later, she will betray the same
detestation of her own physicality under the more acceptable
cloak of religion, rather than her strange sort of self-
reliance.

When Sue marries Phillotson, she does so in reaction to
her realization that.Jude is actually her lover, brought on by
the suspicions of the people at the school and the revelation
that Jude is married (126-127, 133). Her reactions are quite

natural jealousy and feelings of betrayal at finding the man

75

she loves has a wife and hasn't told.hera This is the emotion
Hardy'portrays, but.the critics since Lawrence have chosen, to
make Sue into a pure egotist because of this, when Jude has
the very same feelings about Phillotson and is never
criticized for them. She loves Jude, and if she loves herself
as well it still doesn't change that fact. Hardy shows her
love after she's reproached Jude for not telling her of his
marriage:

When she saw how wretched he was she softened, and
trying to blink away her sympathetic tears said with all
the winning reproachfulness of a heart-hurt woman. "Ah-
you should.have told me before you.gave me that idea that
you wanted to be allowed to love me! I had no feeling
before that moment at the railway-station, except -" For
once Sue was as miserable as he, in her attempts to keep
herself free from emotion, and her less than
half-success (133-134). [Bold Mine]

Sue has to lie to herself and Jude about her feelings, but
Hardy gives many clues as to her true emotions, still the
critics generally choose to ignore them in favor of condemning
her as a harpy, a la Lawrence.

Thus, Sue enters upon her first martyrdom and first
renunciation of Jude. As he has made his feelings for her
abundantly clear, and their union is legally impossible, she
sees the marriage with Phillotson as a way of removing herself
as a temptation to him. That is why she makes such a ceremony
of it -.Jude.giving her to Phillotson, Sue's understanding of
the power of this act is evident in her note.

I have nobody else who could do it so conveniently as

you, being the only married relation I have here on

the spot....I have been looking at the marriage
service in the Prayer-book, and it seems to be very

76

humiliating that a giver-away should be required at

all. According to the ceremony there printed, my

bridegroom chooses me of his own will and pleasure:

but I don't choose him. Somebody gives me to him

like a she-ass or she-goat, or any other domestic

animal (136).
To free herself and Jude from their impossible love, she has
done just what she's always feared, allowed herself to become
a possession and she's done this to protect him as well as
herself. We are hampered at this point in that the narration
is all from Jude, but Hardy mentions that "Sue's manner was
something that of a scared child" (137) and betraying her
conflict even while she's attempting to do the right thing "
she took his arm as they walked through the muddy street-a
thing she had never done before in her life" (138). They go up
to look at the church and Sue continues to hold on to his arm.
They walk up and down the aisle together and.Jude is tortured,
but Sue is torturing herself, too, seeing what it would have
been like with him rather than Phillotson. She even asks,
"Was it like this when you were married" (138)? She lies to
both Jude and Phillotson about what she was doing, but when
Jude leaves on an errand Hardy tells us what it was really all
about. "No," said Sue, "I'll go on to the house with him:"
and requesting her lover not to be a long time she departed
with the schoolmaster (139).

Sue goes to be married and her guilt at it is evident.
Jude describes her as "perverse" and prone to martyr herself

and him in the same egocentric manner as Maggie's obsession

with a Kempis. But this is, of course, Jude's point of view.

77
Hurt and suffering as he is, he still notes her compassion for
him. He fears that: "Possibly she would go on inflicting such
pains again and again, and.grieving for the sufferer again.and
again, in all her colossal inconsistency" (140).

But she is not inconsistent, she continually hurts him
and herself trying to be what she perceives as strong and
self-denying, according to the old, Christian model of Esther
and Anne Elliot though she claims at this point to reject
Christianity. This does, of course, foreshadow her later
regression into religion and its guilt and emphasis on
renunciation. Hardy rejects this as being the true path to
altruism. As Virginia Hyman tells us: Hardy, along with the
ethical evolutionists, believed people were moving from the
"theological phase" to the "metaphysical phase" and thence to
the "sociological phase" of development in reacting to changes
in their environment (19-20). Sue is stuck wavering between
the theological and metaphysical, but, as she acts in this
novel as an example of the wrong way to go about it, it
doesn't mean she's selfish or unethical.

Sue is hideously unhappy with Phillotson and finds him
repulsive. She jumps out of the window when he enters her
room and hides in a closet with the spiders rather than share
his bed. She feels guilty for this.

"Are there many couples, do you think, where one
dislikes the other for no definite fault?"

"Yes, I suppose. If either cares for another
person, for instance."

"But even apart from that? Wouldn't the woman,
for example, be very bad-natured if she didn't like to

78

live with.her'husband: merely“ - her voice undulated, and
he guessed things - 'merely because she had a personal
feeling against it - a physical objection - a
fastidiousness, or whatever it may be called - although
she might respect and be grateful to him? I am merely
putting a case. Ought she to try to overcome her
pruderies" (167)?

She finally breaks down and tells Jude:

What tortures me so much is the necessity of being
responsive to this man whenever he wishes, good as he is
morally! - the dreadful contract to feel in a
particular way in a matter whose essence is its
voluntariness" (169)!

Rosemarie Morgan makes a very sensible case here for
Phillotson being an inconsiderate husband and making Sue feel
even more guilty for her feelings toward him, as, of course,
his later conversation with Gillingham attests (290). She
writes:

There is very little in this behaviour to indicate his
sexual responsiveness and a good deal to suggest that
Sue is quite justified in thinking him content with
celibacy. How had he wooed her after all? "Not kissing
me - that I'm certain!" she protests to Jude. (JO, p.
140) Phillotson, even so, feels it incumbent upon
himself to exercise his conjugal rights. He assumes this
to be an extension of his day-to-day functions and he
assumes that Sue's sexual submission to him is a moral
obligation. In resisting him, she is not in his eyes
simply unresponsive, coldhearted, selfish or
unsympathetic, but morally at fault.

"You vowed to love me", he accuses: "you are
committing a sin in not liking me" (JO, p. 232) (121).

Phillotson does allow her at last to leave him for Jude, the
man she'd loved all along, but she takes the scars of this
experience with her - refusing, at first, to be physical with
Jude even though she does love him.

When Arabella, in trouble, reappears on the scene does

Sue submit to Jude's sexual attentions. She is frantic that

79

she might lose him and she martyrs herself for him again, this
time to love rather than renunciation. Hardy says: "She ran
across and flung her arms round his neck. "I am not a
cold-natured, sexless creature, am I, for keeping you at such
a distance? I am sure you don't think so! Wait and see! I
do belong to you, don't I? I give in" (211)! Thus Sue is
willing to subject herself to something she's always detested
to please Jude, though she remains conflicted and desirous of
controlling her own body and access to it. The next morning,
Sue goes to make amends to Arabella, Hardy writes: "There was
no limit to the strange and unnecessary penances which Sue
would meekly undertake when. in. a contrite mood" (211).
Showing that for all her desire to be a free-thinker, Sue is
still hampered by the old, Christian traditions and guilt.

Sue and Jude live on together even though Jude still
insists on idealizing her and not understanding her at all.
And Sue, who wanted nothing but to be free and love him, takes
on Little Father Time and bears Jude children of their own.
It is her true and honest devotion to these children that
finally sends her over the edge when Father Time kills them.
Especially as he blamed her for becoming pregnant again. The
last words he says to her are: "I won't forgive you, ever,
ever! I'll never believe you care for me, or father, or any
of us any more" (264)! She is immediately sure she is the
cause of the murder-suicide, "an awful conviction that her

discourse with the boy had been the main cause of the tragedy,

80

throwing her into a convulsive agony which knew no
abatement.... She sobbed again. "0, O my babies! They had
done no harm! Why should they have been taken away, and not
I" (266-267)! In her grief she becomes convinced that her
love for Jude has caused the whole tragedy, because she wanted
it more than anything and broke her vow to Phillotson to
obtain it. "We went about loving each other too much -
indulging ourselves to utter selfishness with each other"
(268)! But in her grief, she still doesn't forget Jude. "My
poor Jude - how you've missed everything! - you more than I,
for I did get you" (268)!

But by the time of the funeral she is clearly out of her
mind - crying to have the buried children dug up so that she
can see them one last time. She is completely overwrought and
Jude takes her home. Hardy writes: "Sue was at once got to
bed, and the doctor sent for.

Jude waited all the evening downstairs. At a very late
hour the intelligence was brought to him that a child had been
prematurely born, and that it, like the others, was a corpse"
(270).

This final tragedy and her guilt bring her to one
absolute conviction. "We must conform!" she said mournfully.
"All the ancient wrath of the Power above us has been vented
upon his, His poor creatures, and.we must submit. There is no
choice. We must. It is no use fighting against God" (271)!

She is certain that she still belongs to Phillotson because of

81

the vow made in church and that the deaths of the children
are the punishment for her sin. She comes to the conclusion
that "I have thought that we have been selfish, careless, even
impious, in our courses, you and I. Our life has been a vain
attempt at self-delight. But self-abnegation is the higher
road. We should mortify the flesh -the terrible flesh - the
curse of Adam" (272)! She at last passes sentence on herself
for what she views as her egocentricity. "Self-renunciation
- that's everything! I cannot humiliate myself too much. I
should like to prick myself all over with pins and bleed out
the badness that's in me" (273)! Because of this terrible,
Old Testament, reading of her life, Sue leaves Jude and
returns to Phillotson, who takes her back gladly and
selfishly, though she is clearly still in love with Jude and
ambivalent towards him.

Hardy, while he portrays Sue's regression as incorrect,
maintains it as a tragedy of misplaced duty, not the
selfishness the critics choose to name jig. Sue has simply
slipped backward in her psychic evolution to reliance on
theology in response.to‘change, rather than advancement to the
sociological stage, as.Jude has. Sue is absolutely sincere in
this and Hardy treats her as sincere, but mistaken, not evil
and selfish. Sue, by returning to Phillotson, is not just
thinking of her own soul, but of Jude's. She is convinced she
is still Phillotson's wife, therefore in living with Jude not

only is she committing a mortal sin, but she is causing him to

82
commit one, hence her encouragement of his return to Arabella
(277). She must renounce him or damn them both and concern
for others is the first law of altruism.

Sue, whose self-image has always been shaky, now sees
herself as "a vile creature - too worthless to mix with
ordinary human beings!" (277) but still she thinks of Jude:
"I love you as much as ever! Only - I ought not to love you
- any more. 0 I must not any more" (278)! He pleads with her
to stay and even resorts to emotional blackmail in threatening
to backslide morally into lechery and drunkenness (280), but
she still renounces him, even though she says "it breaks my
heart" (281), and from her subsequent behavior it is obvious
that it has. She is not in her right mind. Even Jude sees
it, observing "The blow of her bereavement seemed to have
destroyed her reasoning faculty. The once keen vision was
dimmed" (286).

Thus Sue Bridehead follows in the footsteps of the
heroines before her, but the world has changed. Simple
Christianiduty can no longer answer all the questions of life.
Sue and Jude love and so are meant to be together, and they
love one another unselfishly as well as selfishly. Thus, the
altruistic tradition of renunciation endures, but the endings
can no longer be happy ones. There is no cosmic payoff for
being good, as in Austen's and Dickens' novels. Hardy's
people exist in a world with very different "divine" laws.

Loving/kindness towards one's "true comrade" is worth. a

83
hundred empty, Christian duties, no matter how sincerely
believed in, and the price of failure to follow these
new rules is suffering, madness and death.

Sue's renunciation cannot bring contentment .as did
Anne's, Esther's, or even Maggie's, because deep in her soul
Sue knows her ties to Jude are stronger than any tie to her
own conscience or to God. So, while her act still remains
dutiful and selfless, it is not morally correct or completely
altruistic because of misplaced loyalty to an outdated
authority rather than to a human being, where Hardy feels
loyalty is properly placed. As a "New Woman" or an "odd
woman" Sue belongs with Rhoda Nunn, but she is too fragile a
creature to tread that narrow path, and love derails her as it
never does Rhoda. Sue falls back into the old traditions long
after they can be psychologically or morally accommodated, she
and Jude both knowing this, it destroys them.

So the renunciation plot evolves with the evolution of
ethical thought, but it still remains a powerful and selfless
gesture to the end of the century. Renunciation itself
remains a moral action, regardless of the value system in
which it operates. Where Anne Elliot had a simple decision
that required relatively little moral anxiety, though at
considerable emotional cost, Sue Bridehead must first go mad
to arrive at the same decision, as her moral path becomes
hazier and hazier. With the loss of the supreme authority of

religion, egotism becomes a greater and greater pitfall to

84
overcome, though the novelists believe it still can be, and
renunciation is one of the most powerful ways in which to
battle egotism. However, it is not always the only way in
which this may be done, as Hardy demonstrates in Quue.

Jude accepts his life and turns to living for others as
the best way in ‘which to be selfless. Sue turns to
renunciation, giving up all love in order also to be selfless.
It is evident which one Hardy sees as preferable and it is
also evident that he does not believe they can be combined as
did Austen, Dickens and Eliot. That is the principle change
the plot from the beginning to the end of the century. When
Christianity has merit, both living for others and
renunciation can occur in the same individual, but.where it is
rejected, the two become separated, one as the true path to
altruism and the other as obedience to an outmoded value

system, empty of meaning in modern society.

BI BLIOGRAPHY

85

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