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“PREPOSTEROUS AND PARALLEL”:
REALIST DISORIENTATION
IN MONA CAIRD’ S THE DAUGHTERS OF DANAUS

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“PREPOSTEROUS AND PARALLEL”: REALIST DISORIENTATION
IN MONA CAIRD’S THE DA UGHTERS 0F DANA US

By

Katherine M. Whitney

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
Department of English

2007

ABSTRACT

“PREPOSTEROUS AND PARALLEL”: REALIST DISORIENTATION
IN MONA CAIRD’S THE DA UGHTERS OF DANA US

By
Katherine M. Whitney

Most scholarly attention to Mona Caird has focused entirely on Caird’s feminist
politics, particularly her views on marriage. Although laying the groundwork for
feminist readings of Caird’s novels, this criticism has ignored Caird’s particular role in
shaping ﬁn-de-siécle realism. I argue that Mona Caird’s novel The Daughters of Danaus
(1894) employs a narrative strategy of realist disorientation that radically reorients
readers to the interiority of the novel’s heroine. As the heroine fails to actualize any of
her proto-feminist desires, readers are meant to empathize with her struggle to escape
traditional women’s narratives. The emotionality of this novel, and its effect upon the
reader, constitute its political agenda: The Daughters of Danaus seeks to change readers’
opinions of women in hopes that a change in public sentiment will lead to changes in

women’s political and legal positions in society.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

THESIS ................................................................................................ 1

WORKS CITED .................................................................................... 33

iii

Mona Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus (1894) arrives at a particularly volatile
moment in literary history. At the so-called end of Realism and on the cusp of
Modernism, late-Victorian aesthetic movements grappled with major issues such as the
political and social implications of the Industrial Revolution and England’s decline as the
Imperial power. As England’s monopoly on the world’s resources weakened, its
monopoly on reality broke down. The attempt to create a uniﬁed narrative reality—
arguably the project of mid-century realists—became more and more fraught with the
question of which reality ought to be “represen ” or created. Instead of asking the best
way to represent the reality or even a uniﬁed reality, late nineteenth-century realists
began questioning the nature of reality itself. The changing experience of reality became
a preoccupation of novels like The Daughters of Danaus, in which one woman’s
experience of the pressures of domesticity keeps her from fulﬁlling her potential to be a
musician. However, I would argue that this novel is not an aesthetic portrayal of political
impotence—an argument frequently made by theorists about ﬁn-de-siécle works; instead,
in its very pessimism—and the narrative strategies used to convey the heroine’s particular
suffering—lies a complex political project.

The Daughters of Danaus emphasizes that there are many different realities and
that it matters which reality one represents. Caird’s narrator chooses to follow Hadria, a
young woman with radical, proto-feminist ideas, but not without making us aware that
there are other “realities” available: by supporting herself with paid work, Hadria’s elder
sister Algitha is able to leave home without ﬁrst marrying. Hadria, the sister who seems
(according to the logic of readerly expectation) to be the most likely character to choose a

life like Algitha’s, cannot seem to get outside of the conventional women’s narrative. At

the same time, the narration of this story shifts from one disorienting mode to another—
never seemingly able to settle on one successful mode of representing Hadria’s particular
negotiation of societal pressures. Both the plot and the narrative strategy of this novel
beg the question: what does it mean to chronicle failure rather than catalog success? As
Hadria repeatedly fails to actualize any of her proto-feminist desires, readers are meant to
empathize with her struggle to escape the traditional women’s narrative of domesticity,
marriage and motherhood. The rest of this essay argues that the emotionality of this
novel, and its effect upon the reader, constitute its political agenda; The Daughters of
Danaus seeks to change readers’ opinions of women in hopes that a change in public
sentiment will lead to changes in women’s political and legal positions in society.

In order to convey this political message, the novel employs several (shifting)
narrative strategies, working within and in contradiction to earlier realist styles. In The
Realistic Imagination, George Levine argues that realist novelists deﬁne their own
realism over and against that of earlier realist novelists, making the deﬁnition of (an ever-
shifting) Victorian realism elusive and disorienting. However, it is the self-consciousness
inherent in this form that becomes realism’s most recognizable “convention” (15). As a
precursor to the Modernist rejection of a reality to represent, The Daughters of Danaus
exploits this instability of realism and creates a certain multiplicity within the narrative
self-consciousness of this novel that makes it hard to pin down. Both reacting against
and borrowing from earlier realist narrative strategies, The Daughters of Danaus puts
pressure on the one “convention” (of creating a style in reaction to earlier realist styles)
that the realist mode can most easily claim. In other words, it not only matters that the

narrator self-consciously respond to earlier realist styles, but it also matters what sort of

self—consciousness the narrator employs to convey the reality of Hadria’s experience.
The novel’s altering self-consciousnesses create an atmosphere of confusion that
encourages readers to respond emotionally to the narrative.

As I mentioned earlier, the common critical narrative associated with ﬁn-de-siécle
literature—that the late nineteenth-century realists were politically jaded and pessimistic
about changing society via literary intervention—contradicts the argument I am making
about the political agenda of this novel. Although quite different in their theoretical
approaches to literature, Terry Eagleton and Nancy Armstrong point to similar trends in
late nineteenth-century realism. Eagleton, in “The ﬂight to the real,” ﬁames his argument
in terms of historical and aesthetic trends towards the end of the century. Recognizing
the inability to control or direct the social order, late-century realists committed a “kind
of collective intellectual suicide” (17). In light of the failures of the Industrial Revolution
or the various applications of the theory of evolution to resolve England’s problems, ﬁn-
de-siécle artists could not conceive of their own, comparatively small, works as
politically inﬂuential. Eagleton argues that this pessimism creates a stylistic combination
of aestheticism and naturalism in the novel that manifests itself in apathetic determinism:
“[I]f determinism is true, then consciousness can now only register rather than intervene.
The point is to photograph the world, not to change it. Aestheticizing the unacceptable is
a common ﬁn-de-siécle pastime” (16). In How Novels Think, Nancy Armstrong locates a
similar pessimism at the end of the nineteenth century. Where earlier novels created
individuals (3) and mid-century novels “disciplined” the excesses of individualism (8),
late-century novels “spelled out the conﬂict between the individual and some form of

collectivity that obliterated individualism” (23). For the late-century novelist, the

individual is no longer able to enact social change. In other words, the late nineteenth-
century novel seems to have lost its utopian longings, its aspirations to engender change
in its readers and thereby society. In discussing the pessimism associated with late
realism, both Armstrong and Eagleton describe an aesthetic movement divorced of its
political ambitions. The Daughters of Danaus, in its narrative instability and description
of Hadria’s failure to avoid marriage, seems to follow this pattern of pessimism.
However, this pessimism works on readers’ emotions in an attempt to inform them of the
injustices of women’s inferior positions in society.

The few literary critics who have studied The Daughters of Danaus are largely
concerned with Caird’s political writings and how they might bear on readings of the
novel.1 Because the novel critiques marriage, domesticity and motherhood, scholars
often read it as part of the political fervor of late 19m—century feminism, and even though
it is ﬁction, literary critics often read it as a polemical feminist essay. For example, in the
most extensive reading of The Daughters of Danaus, Margaret Morganroth Gullette
maintains that “‘Marriage” was the word—the system—[Caird] chose to deconstruct”
(496), but Gullette seems more interested in marriage as a social institution rather than a
trope in ﬁction. To argue this point, Gullette draws ﬁom The Daughters of Danaus as
well as Caird’s polemical essays, but she does not distinguish between these texts. The
quotes appear all Caird’s, even though Gullette is, at times, actually quoting the narrator

of The Daughters of Danaus. Discussing the Greek myth to which the novel’s title

 

' There is no doubt that the Victorian New Woman novel both shaped and was shaped by radical feminist
politics. In fact, most critics of this ﬂn-de-siécle phenomenon tend to equate ﬁction writing and feminism.
Ann Heilmann argues that “New Woman ﬁction [. . .] constituted, and conceived of itself as, an agent of
social and political transformation” (4), and as Sally Ledger points out, “writing itself is seen as a liberatory
activity [for women writers]” (27). Although these critics have paved the way for feminist readings of New
Woman ﬁction, it is important to keep in mind the artistic intervention of the novel into the political
movement of feminism.

alludes, Gullette writes that “Caird saw [housework . .] as ‘the idiot’s labour of eternally
drawing water in sieves from fathomless wells’” (496). The quoted portion of Gullette’s
writing actually comes from a narrative description towards the end of the novel (467). It
is not what “Caird saw” but what the narrator, describing Hadria’s impression of another
woman’s lot, “saw.” Effectively making narrator and author identical, Gullette’s style of
argumentation does not account for narrative mediation or the implications this mediation
might have for the feminism of the novel. Her attention to Caird’s feminism makes no
distinction between Caird’s nonﬁction essays and her novels. Gullette’s collapsing of
Caird’s essays and novels does not allow one to understand the complex and artistic ways
Caird’s ﬁction expresses feminist ideals. In other words, one cannot understand the
feminist implications of The Daughters of Danaus without regarding the implications of
its genrez.
This is not to say that Caird’s essays and ﬁction bear absolutely no relationship to
one another. What we can glean from reading Caird’s ﬁction in light of her essays is not
a direct statement of political intent that crosses seamlessly from one genre to another but
rather an awareness of the political discourses that underlie both works. Certain patterns

emerge, particularly in Caird’s interest in and use of Darwin, that give us clues about the

political motivations of her ﬁction.

 

2 Reading through “The Morality of Marriage,” I noticed a curious echo of a moment in The Daughters of
Danaus. In the essay, Caird writes that women haven’t “written Shakespeare’s plays (as it is generally
quaintly expressed)” because of “the weary detail of domestic duties, of the unending petty responsibilities
(6). Towards the end of the novel, a “callow youth” comes to dinner one evening and utters that quaint
expression (371). The narrator paraphrases his words: “But it was so absurd to pretend that women could
do work that was peculiar to men (Hadria agreed, with a chuckle.) When had they written one of
Shakespeare’s dramas? (When indeed? History was ominously silent on that point)” (372). Hadria’s
parentheticals constitute an ironic commentary on the absurdity of the callow youth’s logic; whereas the
argument in Caird’s essay directly conﬁ'onts the difficulties of women creating art. Even at these moments,
when novel and essay most obviously echo each other, generic contexts shift and complicate the effect each
passage has. In other words, they cannot be said to say the same thing without grossly simplifying both.

9’

The Morality of Marriage and other essays, a collection of Caird’s political
writings, is heavily inﬂuenced by Darwinism. In it, Caird describes human nature in a
state of development, but she signiﬁcantly does not equate this development with positive
progress. She explores the complex interplay of “human nature” and “Nature,” arguing
that society has driven women to reproduce to a destructive extent. What Caird calls
“human nature,” we might call “culture”—since she describes it as the human
intervention in natural processes. Because of the social value placed on women’s
reproductive capabilities, women’s “whole nature is directed to hot-house cultivation, in
such a manner, as to drive all the vital forces in one sole direction.” This “creates
innumerable miseries, and some of them seem to have become chronic, or hereditary, and
from being so common have lost the very name of disease” (135). Caird almost describes
the contemporary view of women’s place in civil society as a genetic experiment gone
wrong. She puts pressure on the Victorian use of the theory of evolution to justify the
status quo: “to found a theory of society upon hereditary adaptations which they now ﬁnd
in an enslaved race [of women], is to found a theory of nature upon artiﬁcial and diseased
development” (135). In other words, it is unnatural for women to devote all of their
energies to reproduction—it is a ﬂawed and monstrous overdevelopment of only one
aspect of woman’s nature. At the same time that she critiques this development of human
nature she also holds out the possibility for human nature to develop differently. She
calls human nature “that most plastic material” and writes that it “is precisely the author
and creator of all the changes that the world has ever seen or ever will see” (148).

In Time Travels (2005), Elizabeth Grosz echoes a similar understanding of the

potential of Darwin’s writings. Grosz goes against conventional feminist critiques of

Darwin and argues that Darwin’s writing, in its “dynamic and open-ended understanding
of the intermingling of history and biology,” puts pressure on the “essentialism and
teleology” that are usually attributed to it (1 7). In her reading of Darwin, Grosz accords
humans—particularly feminists—some agency in shaping society. Over one hundred
years before Grosz, Caird uses Darwin to implicitly argue for the same agency. But it is
how human nature can change the way society treats women that has essential
implications for the political valence of Caird’s ﬁction.

Dedicated to the theory of evolution as a model for social change, Caird takes
seriously the extreme slowness of evolutionary change. After discussing the ways
women have been mistreated by men and society at large, she writes,

But practically, what is to be done? How would a ﬂea system work? We must

face the unpalatable fact that a cut-and-dried scheme which will now seem

plausible, is just as impossible as our present state of society would have appeared

to the man of the Middle Ages. All that can be done, at any time in the world’s
history, is to indicate the next direction of development (148).

In order to point humanity in the right direction, Caird relies explicitly on sentiment. In
the introduction to her collection of essays, Caird guides her readers’ understanding of
her mode of political intervention:
It will be clear to any reader [. . .] that sentiments [. . .] rather than legal machinery,
are relied upon as a method of reform; the law being regarded merely as the
means of stereotyping the advance in sentiment when it is achieved;
accompanying, not preceding, the change of feeling (2).
Under this reading, emotions are the root of political change. If we are to accord Caird’s
ﬁction a political motive, we might begin by examining its emotionality. This aspect of
Caird’s nonﬁction can give us some insight into the choices she makes as a novelist. The

Daughters of Danaus does not follow the pattern of other New Woman novels (for

instance, George Gissing’s The Odd Women or Fanny Fem’s Ruth Hall, in which

heroines avoid marriage and/or support themselves through work) because she believes
change does not begin with changing the rules of society (i.e. making it more legally
possible for women to support themselves and remain single). The best way she can
point her readers in the direction of change is to reach them emotionally. Thus Hadria’s
failures to achieve New Woman goals——which gives the novel its melancholic and
disappointing resolution—arguably constitute the novel’s feminist successes.

In order to understand the novel’s feminism, it is necessary to look closely at the
unique narrative strategies Caird uses to convey its melancholy plot. The narrative
strategy of this novel is what I call realist disorientation. The moments I explore later in
this essay are narrative passages that work within and against the conventions of realism
in order to disorient the reader. What I will argue is that this project of disorientation
attempts a radical reorientation of readers’ interiority to that of women like Hadria,
women who have the intellectual and creative potential to create complex works of art
but cannot because of societal pressures to marry and produce children. The pessimism
of this novel’s dénouement may coincide with the ﬁn—de-siécle artistic apathy discussed
by Eagleton and Armstrong; however, this novel uses its melancholy to engender change
in its readers’ worldviews. The novel’s attempt to change society can no longer be
encompassed by the subj cot-making and subject-disciplining project of its realist
ancestors. In light of the myriad conﬂicts engendered by the very projects that were
meant to ameliorate society’s woes—such as the technology of the Industrial Revolution
or the concept of evolution—Caird’s novel does not accept pure determinism and the
helpless stance that goes along with it. Instead, The Daughters of Danaus re—envisions

the role that a novel can play in shaping social structures. The narrative strategy of realist

disorientation involves plunging readers into objectively confusing moments so that the
emotional saturation of these moments becomes the impetus for shifting readers’
sympathies to the complex interior struggles facing late-Victorian women.

The opening passage of The Daughters of Danaus highlights the ways Caird’s
narrator deviates from earlier realist narrators and hints at the technique of realist
disorientation Caird employs throughout the novel. Elements that at ﬁrst appear to be
unrealistic become evidence of the particular realism Caird creates:

It was only just light enough to discern the ﬁve human forms in the dirnness of the
garret; the rays of the moon having to ﬁnd their way through the deep window-
embrasures of the keep. Less illumination would have sufﬁced to disclose the
ancient character of the garret, with its low ceiling, and the graduated mouldings
of the cornice, giving the effect of a shallow dome. The house stood obviously
very high, for one could see from the windows for miles over a bleak country,
coldly lit by the rays of the moon, which was almost at the full. Into the half light
stole presently the sound of some lively instrument: a reel time played, as it were,
beneath one’s breath, but with all the revel and rollicking emphasis of that
intoxicating primitive music. And then in correspondingly low relief, but with no
less emphasis, the occupants of this singular ball-room began to dance. One might
have fancied them some midnight company of the dead, risen from their graves
for this secret revelry, so strange was the appearance of the moving ﬁgures, with
the moonlight catching, as they passed, the faces or the hands. They danced
excellently well, as to the manner born, tripping in and out among the shadows,
with occasional stamping, in time to the music, and now and again that wild Celtic
shout or cry that sets the nerves athrill (5).

The most striking aspect of this passage is the mood it evokes. A garret lit by moonlight,
a bleak country, primitive music and the dancing dead all join to create an almost gothic
scene that is mysterious and ﬁ'ightening. Striving to set “the nerves athrill,” this
beginning differs strikingly from those of earlier realist novels. Anthony Trollope’s The
Warden (1855), for example3, begins with a rather conventional introduction to the main

character of the book:

 

3 For another example, see Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (l 886). The novel begins, “One
evening of late summer, before the present century had reached its thirtieth year, a young man and woman,

The Rev. Septimus Harding was, a few years since, a beneﬁced clergyman

residing in the cathedral town of ---; let us call it Barchester. Were we to name

Wells or Salisbury, Exeter, Hereford, or Gloucester, it might be presumed that

something personal was intended; and as this tale will refer mainly to the

cathedral dignitaries of the town in question, we are anxious that no personality

may be suspected (1).

Not only does the narrator introduce us to the person around whom the story will revolve,
but the narrator is also “anxious” to establish the parameters of the story—or its realism.
We are assured at one and the same time that this story is ﬁction and will seem so real as
to call to mind particular historical persons. It is not only this narrator’s barely concealed
argument for the story’s superb realness but also the tone of assurance and explanation
the narrator exudes that expose the extent to which Caird’s narrator diverges from the
more blatant self-consciousness of narrative intervention. The beginning of The
Daughters of Danaus endeavors to disorient rather than orient the reader, and it is
emotionally provocative rather than matter-of—fact. Both of these characteristics mark
clear divergences ﬁom earlier realist projects, and they attempt to plunge readers into the
garret without allowing them the bearings they might retain from a more self—assured
(meta-)narration.

The emotive and disorienting features of this ﬁrst passage become realist when
seen in the “half light” reiterated throughout this passage. It is “only light enough” to see
that there are humans in this garret, but who they are is entirely unclear. And the “rays of
the moon” have to “ﬁnd their way through the deep window-embrasures of the keep.”

Personified, this moonlight illuminates the difficulties of Caird’s realist project—as if the

narrator were openly admitting the impossibility of objective representation. Instead, this

 

the latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village of Weydon-Priors on foot” (3). This narrator
establishes the time of day, the season, the historical moment and the location for the reader in the very ﬁrst
sentence, and the man, woman and child make much clearer and obvious ﬁgures than the barely
distinguishable “ﬁve human forms” of Caird’s beginning.

10

narrator will lead us through the confusing, unclear and subjective experience of emotion,
particularly as the novel explores the complex interiority of its protagonist. But before
entering the heroine’s private thoughts and feelings, the narrator subtly establishes how
imprecise and partial this journey will be. As a liminal space separating outside and
inside, the window-embrasure is where the light gets lost, and it is this ability to look in
on the story—and on the heroine’s interiority—that this narrator ﬁnds most difﬁcult.
Whatever we see of this “ancient” house and “bleak country” will be at most “coldly lit,”
but this is not the narrator’s attempt to dismiss the realism of this project. Actually, this
opening passage is the artistically concealed defense of this project’s realism: the passage
implicitly argues that The Daughters of Danaus is more real than earlier novels because it
works within, rather than against, the difﬁculties of representation. The passage calls
attention to the limiting parameters of representation precisely because it wishes to
suggest something beyond those limits—a real interior space. The garret, in this opening
passage, is a metaphor for the real experience of interiority, the muddied conﬁrsion of
recognizing both the radical split and interdependency of the outside of society and the
inside of one’s thoughts and feelings. Ironically, both Trollope and Caird implicitly
argue for authenticity; however, the former argues for the authentic representation of the
way things are, whereas the latter argues for the authentic representation of the way
things are experienced.

Caird’s narrator embraces the limitations of representation and seeks to capture
the emotional aura of each moment rather than cataloging the ﬁner, environmental details
of the immediate surroundings. This is entirely unlike that conﬁdent assertion of

verisimilitude in The Warden, and it operates in direct contradiction to earlier realisms.

11

In fact, the “half light” of this beginning can be read as an almost direct response to the
beginning of George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859). The second paragraph of Eliot’s novel
evokes light to make much the same argument Trollope’s narrator makes for The
Warden’s authentic representation:
The aﬁemoon sun was warm on the ﬁve workmen there, busy upon doors and
window-frames and wainscoting. A scent of pine-wood ﬁom a tent-like pile of
planks outside the open door mingled itself with the scent of elder-bushes which
were spreading their summer snow close to the open window opposite; the
slanting sunbeams shown through the transparent shavings that ﬂew before the
stead plan, and lit up the ﬁne grain of the oak paneling which stood propped
against the wall (7).
In direct contrast to the moonlight in Caird’s beginning, the aftemoon sun in Adam Bede
encounters open doors and windows rather than deep window-embrasures that block out
the light. As the scent of pine-wood drifts over the invisible threshold, outside and inside
mingle effortlessly, and the metaphorical frames of representation pose so little 3 problem
for Eliot’s narrator that even the workmen—minor characters—are “busy” at making and
controlling frames. Unlike the barely discerning moonlight in The Daughters of Danaus,
the light in Adam Bede is interested in transparency and clariﬁes ﬁne details like the
grain of the oak paneling. This light apparently sees all and orients us to this workshop
environment, making Caird’s beginning an almost parodic reversal of Eliot’s. The
Daughters of Danaus seems aware that the “slanting sunbeams” of Adam Bede are
angled and skewed—only illuminating part of the setting. Where Eliot’s narrator glides
with ease from character to character, exploring freely different motivations and
interiorities, Caird’s narrator struggles to capture the tension between Hadria’s interiority
and the world that does not allow her any self-actualization. The narrator’s difﬁculty in

accessing this complex negotiation of inner desire and outer constraint mirrors Hadria’s

difﬁculty in avoiding the conventional narrative allotted to women. Caird’s narrator, as a

12

reaction against earlier realist narrators, adopts an almost confessional stance toward the
reader—rather than exhibiting the assurance of novels like The Warden and Adam Bede.

As the narrator delves deeper into the protagonists interiority, he she uncovers
inner conﬂict and radical desires that do not seem able to manifest themselves; this rather
depressing trajectory is not only part of Caird’sﬁn-de-siécle realism but also a political
intervention. According to the logic of this novel, the affect produced by Hadria’s failure
to actualize her radical dreams constitutes the work of the novel. In its pessimism, the
novel works on the reader’s desire to see Hadria become a new woman. In a novel like
Adam Bede, characters are practically doomed to express their interiority: the country
gentleman desires the farmer’s niece, and it is inevitable that he will sleep with her. This
kind of fate is nearly reversed for Hadria However, she is not simply doomed to desire
and never experience; there is a complex war between her thoughts and her words, her
inner desires and her outward actions, her dreams and her reality. These realms, posed as
opposites, bleed into one another, but, in the parlance of this novel, circumstance almost
always triumphs over will.

These conﬂicts play out near the beginning of the novel in a particularly telling
passage. As the dancing ﬁgures in the ﬁrst passage come to a halt, we are introduced to
Hadria Fullerton and the rest of the Fullerton siblings while they are engaged in a debate.
“The Preposterous Society,” as they call themselves, begin their discussion with a lecture
from Hadria, but before Hadria commences her argument, she reads a passage from
Emerson that champions human will over circumstance. Hadria, however, passionately
disputes this assertion, claiming—despite the shock and disapproval of her siblings——that

circumstances can trump even the strongest will (1 1). She states,

13

There is nothing to prove that thousands have not been swamped by

maladjustment of character to circumstance, and I would even go so far as to

suggest that perhaps the very greatest of all are those whom the world has never

known, because the present conditions are inharmonious with the very noblest

and the very highest qualities (12).
Albeit melodramatic, this speech is also an eloquent argument utilizing the rational
rhetoric of proof to make a claim against Emerson. That Hadria contradicts this
argument within her thoughts illuminates some of the most tortured paradoxes of her
character and, arguably, this novel’s political intervention: “Her intellect, rather than her
heart, had opposed the philosophy of Emerson. Her sentiment recoiled ﬁ'om admitting
the possibility of such tragedy as her expressed belief implied” (l7). Hadria’s intellect
recognizes a ﬂaw in Emerson’s argument; she knows—from her own experience of being
conscripted within the domestic sphere—that there are people with “the very noblest and
the very highest qualities” who do not have the power to act on them. But in order to
make this argument, Hadria must silence part of her interiority. She must split her
feelings ﬁom her rationality. Hadria’s heart, however, allows her to dream of
alternatives to circumstantial determinism; Caird seems to locate the radical possibilities
of New Women within the private, emotional sphere—rather than the public sphere of
formal debate. Following this logic, though, the sentiments Hadria expresses might allow
her to break out of her domestic prison. Unfortunately, it is Hadria’s spoken words rather
than her secret emotions that accurately foreshadow the course of her own life.

To read this passage as politically radical in light of the remainder of the novel,
one must understand the emotional work it performs upon the reader. It is not Hadria’s
heart that contains radical possibilities but the effect that the split between her heart and

intellect has upon the reader that has the potential to alter women’s social/political

position. Hadria’s siblings are outraged by her professed pessimism, mirroring the

14

outrage that readers are meant to feel upon discovery of that pessirnism’s ultimate truth.
Hadria, despite ambitious and noble sentiment, does not overcome circumstance. And
this, readers must feel, is preposterous.

On that note, allow me to take a preposterous digression. According to the Oxford
English Dictionary, an older meaning of preposterous is “having or placing last what
should be ﬁrst; inverted in position or order.” The narration that places Hadria’s speech
ahead of, and in contradiction to, her feelings in the passage discussed above is
preposterous when read in light of this deﬁnition as well as Caird’s professed opinion that
emotions precede political change. The preposterous society is one in which legal change
precedes a change in sentiment.

Another deﬁnition of preposterous that appears in the OED conjures different
images however: preposterous can also mean “contrary to nature, reason, or common
sense; monstrous; foolish, perverse’.” Caird’s decision to call this group the
“Preposterous Society” demands one to ask what is preposterous about the Fullerton
siblings debating contemporary issues. Of course, the debate that happens in private and
among young people can seem preposterous when compared with the public sphere it
mimics. Also, the women in this group—Hadria and her elder sister Algitha—have an
equal voice within this mixed setting, which arguably creates an even more
‘preposterous’ chasm between this family group and the outside world of Victorian
patriarchal society. One could argue that the name is an ironic nod toward the

possibilities for equality this group entertains—possibilities that never come to fruition

 

" Both senses of the word were in use during the Victorian era. However, the OED includes two examples
of the ﬁrst use in the second half of the nineteenth century; both of these examples stress that the word
must be read in its “exact sense” or “strictest sense.” Therefore, there is some clariﬁcation about using the
word’s older meaning at this point, suggesting that the other meaning—monstrous—was used at the time
without clariﬁcation.

15

within the novel. However, I think a more interesting interpretation involves reading the
great gap between Hadria’s thoughts/emotions and her speech as a ﬁighteningly
monstrous incongruity, a dismemberment of inner and outer forced by women’s
particularly frustrated political position.5

Later in the novel, Hadria mysteriously accepts a marriage proposal from Hubert
Temperly. In a preposterous inversion of the teleology associated with evolution and
“progress” during the Victorian era, Caird evokes the discourses of heredity and
evolution in order to critique the ways those discourses are used to keep women in their
“natural” place: the supposedly civilizing process of marriage, according to this passage
in the novel, leads to death. Here, the disorienting narration of the beginning passage of
the novel returns to create a morbid and confusing atmosphere in which marriage, death
and heredity collide. During a ball at the Fullertons’ home in Scotland, Mrs.
McPherson”, a “kindly old Scottish dame,” plays a “strange old tune” that ﬁres the
“northern blood” of the dancers and allows Hadria to “recall [. . .] primitive experiences”:
“It seems almost as if I had lived before, among some ancient Celtic people, and now,

when I hear their music—or sometimes when I hear the sound of wind among the

 

5 I ﬁnd it interesting that preposterous begins with “pro” and "post.” Smashing these two preﬁxes together,
preposterous echoes this novel’s relationship to “past” Realism and “future” Modernism. The conventional
critical narrative reads the latter as a rejection of the former, but The Daughters of Danaus, in certain
“Modernist” moments that I discuss later in the essay, could be read as an unstable—and preposterous—
bridge between the two movements.

6 Caird utilizes some minor characters, in addition to Hadria, to draw out a connection between Scotland
and women. Mrs. McEwen, the mistress of the Craw Gill farm in Dunaghee, is “a ﬁne example of the best
type of Scottish character; warm of heart, honest of purpose, and ﬁrll of a certain unconscious poetry, and a
dignity that lingers still in districts where the railway whistle is not too often heard” (54). That she is
unconscious of her “poetry” and lives outside the progress of the railway system implies an antique
quaintrress, endearing because of its ignorance. The patronizing nostalgia the narrator irnbues her with
indeed makes her a “character,” and Mrs. McPherson constitutes another of her “type.” The two ‘Mrs.
Mc’s’ husbands do not appear in the text, aligning Scotland with innocuous, antiquated, and minor matrons
within the community, and the unprogressive oldness of these two Scottish characters, as well as their lack
of individual development within the novel, blends these women into the ancient landscape Caird carefully
constructs.

l6

pines—whiffs and gusts of something intensely familiar return to me” (137). As the
music connects Hadria to an autochthonous heritage and ancient Celtic traditions of that
primitive people, Scotland comes to signify a discourse of heredity in this passage. But
also, this reference to the “intensely familiar” past suggests the uncanny; it is as if, in
Hadria’s dancing, the ghosts of Celtic ancestors return to embody her. She is both herself
and not herself in this passage. The music Mrs. McPherson plays puts Hadria “under a
singular spell,” allowing (and perhaps forcing?) her to accept a marriage proposal—
despite her protestations and her “will” (137). The emotional quality of the music in this
instance becomes dangerous, even though earlier in the novel, Hadria’s mercurial
emotions allow her to entertain the liberating possibility that the will can transcend
circumstance. In this moment of extreme emotions, Hadria enters a state of near ecstasy,
becoming almost beside herself: “[U]nable to wake out of the nightmare,” Hadria’s
“sense of the importance of personal events had entirely disappeared. What did it all
matter? [. . .] The graves would put it all right some day” (137). She is paralyzed by the
ancient (ghostly?) music and the monstrous emotions it evokes. On the historical scale
provoked by mention of ancient Celts, the “personal events” of one woman’s desire to
escape that long chain of women becomes so small as to be insigniﬁcant. The mention of
death not only alludes to Hadria’s morbid desire to die but also suggests that marriage, at
least for some women, is a kind of death. Accepting this marriage proposal means the
death of her will and her ambitions to become a musician. It may also allude to the literal
death many women experienced in childbirth. What could be a conventional passage in a
Victorian novel—a marriage proposal in a ballroom—begins to test even the boundaries

of realism, as Hadria’s emotions become completely out of her control and permit her

17

only the ﬂeeting solace of waiting until death for the torment to end. It is ironic and
troubling that the primitive—so closely linked to the discourses of heredity and evolution
that inform Caird’s political agenda—takes control over Hadria’s actions and nearly
forces her into accepting a marriage proposal.

To understand what the discourse of primitivism signiﬁes in this passage, we
must look at a related, and equally uncanny, moment that comes just after Hadria’s
emotional trance. Caird writes:

The savage builds his mud but to shelter him from the wind and the rain and the

terror of the beyond. Outside is the wilderness ready to engulf him. Rather than

be left alone at the mercy of elemental things, with no little hut, warm and dark
and stuffy, to shelter one, a woman will sacriﬁce everything—liberty, ambition,

health, power, her very dignity. There was a letter in Hadria’s pocket at this
moment, eloquently protesting in favour of the mud but (138).

In this passage, the woman becomes the savage, exposing the novel’s relationship to the
evolutionary discourse around savages—one of the more problematic aspects of Darwin’s
writing. The third sentence, with all of its introductory clauses, leads one to expect the
savage to be the subject of them, but instead, it is “a woman.” Is it woman’s savagery
that forces her to marry? The passage may be arguing instead that it is the uncivilized—
indeed primitive—institution of marriage that keeps women from becoming civilized and
able to support themselves in the economic sphere rather than the domestic sphere.

The ﬁgure of the savage also connotes the problematic application of Darwinian
concepts to society and culture. In “Darwin’s Savage Mnemonics,” Cannon Schmitt
exposes and troubles Darwin’s own attempts to apply his theory of evolution to humans;
in other words, he exposes Darwin’s Darwinism. The savage, as a recurring ﬁgure in
Darwin’s writing, is essential to Darwin’s project but also puts pressure on it. Darwin

turns “to savages in remembrance of the origins of the civilized” (57). But in order to

18

feel civilized, he must also “forget the savage’s kinship with the civilized” (57). This
double gesture of remembering and forgetting the savage operates, according to Schmitt,
like “a Darwinian version of Freud’s repetition compulsion” in Darwin’s writings (57).
In Caird’s narration, a married woman comes to represent the same trauma; the woman,
stuck as she is with no options in this society, is an uncanny reminder of savagery. Caird
maps the Darwinian anxiety about savages onto women, effectively troubling the
Darwinist discourse about “the race” and the necessity of British women having as many
children as possible. In this way, the novel uses Darwin differently ﬂom the social
Darwinists of the Victorian era; it exposes the false logic of the progress of civilization.
Women’s place in civilized society is remarkably uncivilized: it is the place of the
savage—both a reminder of humanity’s origins and the abject animal ancestry that must
be forgotten in order to feel civilized. The savage analogy, combined with the primitive
spell that enchants Hadria out of her willpower, preposterously inverts familiar
discourses, exposing the injustices of a marriage system that “naturalizes” women out of
their dignity, humanity and ﬂee will. This proposal passage, with its reference to the
savage, constitutes a monstrous disorientation of those orienting discourses of
teleological evolution that were used to justify the exploitation of women’s reproductive
capabilities. What this passage also implies is that society makes women uncivilized—
not allowed to civilize themselves by supporting themselves with paid work—in order
ostensibly to “civilize” them via marriage to a (hu)man. Part I of the novel ends with
Hadria’s dubious acceptance of Hubert’s proposal, leaving the reader in the dark about

the outcome of that acceptance.

19

At this point, the novel moves ﬂom an obviously conﬁrsing passage full of
magical, primitive, paralyzing music and monstrously savage women to one that is
ostensibly ordered and understandable. Part II of the novel, at ﬁrst glance, appears to
begin with an ordinary description of English countryside; however, this “ordinary
description” constitutes a shift in Caird’s narrative technique used to disorient the reader.
In this passage, a countryman greets a young woman as they walk down a road arrridst the
rolling English hills. As the countryman watches the woman pass, there is a description
(partly ﬂom his point of view) of the woman’s physical appearance. Following that is a
description of the quaint little village of Craddock that the woman is “speeding towards”
(145-6). What makes this uneventful passage extraordinary is its placement in the novel.
We are one hundred forty-ﬁve pages into the novel, and it feels as if the narrative has
started over; everyone is anonymous—a countryman, a young woman, a wayfarer—and
the landscape is unfamiliar. Like Darwin’s savage, this passage resembles an uncanny
repetition compulsion, in which a beginning is recognizable but, because repeated, is also
out of place. This place is unlike that of the ﬁrst beginning and does not have the gothic
mystery of the Scottish highlands.

The road led gradually upward through a country blazing with red and orange for
rolling miles, till the horizon closed in with the far-off blue of English hills.

Everything is clear: we can make out the horizon in the distance, and in the foreground,
the road is “crisp” (145). It also seems as if the narrator has undergone some sort of
personality change. This narrator sees the scene very clearly—a marked change ﬂom the
ﬁrst passage of the novel in which narrative doubt about the representation of reality is
projected onto the description of the garret. But why does Caird “start over”? And what

do these narrative changes suggest?

20

At this point in the novel, an orientation is out of place; this passage reads like a
beginning that the narrator has thrust in the middle of the novel. I would argue that the
uncanny is at work in this passage in order to subtly attune readers to the monstrous
implications of marriage. After a page of description, we learn that the “young woman,”
“wayfarer,” and “swiftly moving ﬁgure7”——one of the strangers in this passage—is Mrs.
Temperly. Toward the end of this passage, two gossips mention her name, or rather her
husband’s name (146). Although we have never seen this name—Mrs. Temperly—
before, it has a familiar ring to it. Could this perhaps be Hadria? It is almost as if this
were a rumor that we must piece together. Has Hadria married Hubert Temperly? What
happened between the mysterious acceptance of Temperly’s proposal and this
unmysterious description of English hills? Speculation alone can answer the reader’s
questions. We can assume that Hadria and Hubert have married; but the way she is
named in this passage reminds us of the social/political importance of this union—ahat
she has become Hubert’s property, wife of Temperly. If it had come at the beginning of a
novel, this passage might not be particularly striking; we might even call it conventional
(but I’ll side step that term for a moment). After 145 pages of intimate access to Hadria’s
interiority, we are made strangers again. And strangers—gossips and countryman—
mediate our access now. Marriage inﬂicts this strangeness upon the familiar. We know
Hadria; we might even guess that the young woman with “the look in her eyes of being
ﬁxed on objects beyond their owner’s immediate ken” is she (145). Marriage, however,

makes Hadria uncanny: she is now a stranger and thing (the property of her husband).

 

7 This ﬁgure echoes the “moving ﬁgures” of the opening passage of the novel. Whereas darkness made
that “midnight company of the dead” monstrous in the beginning, bright sunshine does not seem to shed
any light on this mysterious ﬁgure—or the reasons why Hadria is suddenly being introduced to us as if we
have never met her.

21

The Hadria that we knew has partly died, and the passage, echoing this sentiment,
is marked by death. The epigraph to Part 11 references “happy men that have the power
to die” (145), and Mrs. Temperly’s walk into the village of Craddock leads her to the
cemetery. At the beginning of the narrative, this passage would not seem so morbid and
strange, but the timing makes it, and Hadria, monstrous: it is out of joint with the progress
of the narrative and with our own expectations. It is as if the narrator has broken some
sort of narrative promise.

I would argue that there are two related reasons for Caird’s effort to estrange the
reader at this point. Two major changes have taken place in the novel: Hadria got
married, and she moved to England. But in a Victorian novel, these changes in a
woman’s condition are hardly out of the ordinary. The recognizability of this narrative
set-up—its ordinariness made even more forceful by rampant anonymity—is precisely
what seems out of place at this point in this novel. This narrator, who has confessed
his/her dark secret to us in the garret, has become a cold and distant stranger—a regular
observer. Observation without any self-conscious attention drawn to the problems of
mediation is almost offensive to readers at this point. The ordinariness of this passage
marks two key failures: Hadria’s failure to escape the conventional marriage narrative
and the novel’s failure to live up to its reader’s expectations. The two are intimately
related and the latter is often considered the mark of a successful novel. But, in this
instance, it is important that the reader feel this as a failure. What is created in this
disappointment of readerly expectation is not the usual bittersweet “a ha” appreciation of
novelistic twist. In fact, there is nothing new here. The disappointment is felt in this

novel’s failure, on some level, to be novel. In some ways, we could read this passage as a

22

meditation on the realist novel as a genre—it is always attempting to overcome itself, to
the extent that this attempt, rather than a successfully “new” creation, is what makes it a
novel. To call something a realist novel is, on some level, to call it a failure—at least of
representation.

Caird’s return to a familiar—even expected—narrative at an unexpected moment
parodies this novelistic failure; this parody relies on readers’ recognition of earlier forms
of realist narration as well as recognition of the ways Caird is manipulating and changing
those forms. In The Realistic Imagination, Levine outlines a trajectory of realist
conventions that evolves ﬂom the mid-nineteenth century to the late-nineteenth century.
He states,

Realism in England belongs [. . .] almost provincially, to a “middling” condition

and deﬁnes itself against the excesses, both stylistic and negative. [. . .] The

programatic realism of the late century, with its pseudoscientiﬁc connections, its

“experimental novels,” its assumption that the norm of human experience is the

extreme, was part of a rebellious movement against the mid-Victorian real and the

art that projected it (5).

The beginning of Part II of the novel conforms to the mid-Victorian real; in its objective
observation it avoids stylistic excess.

Understanding the affect of this passage, however, involves recognizing that
“norm”—the use of earlier conventional modes of realist description—as an “extreme”
rejection of those norms and an extremely disconcerting and disorienting disappointment
of the reader’s expectations. In some ways, this novelistic failure mirrors Hadria’s own
failure to reject the script given to her by her family and generations of scripted women.
This rural scene in its sunny clarity mimics that realist narrative conﬁdence we saw in

Adam Bede, but placing it at the center of her novel, Caird exposes the critical blind spots

of such “clarity.” In this easy observation of “the way things should be,” the realist

23

narrator glosses over the inward suffering that comes with such scripted obedience. That
this is felt as a betrayal of the reader’s conﬁdence reveals the affective logic of this novel.
What seems like neutral observation is really a manipulation of reader’s emotions. What
is contained in this rather cynical plot, then, is really the hope that readers will change
their attitudes about women and marriage. This passage marks both a rejection of earlier
realist conventions as well as an afﬁrmation of the project those earlier novelists began,
i.e. social change. What we have become accustomed to, as readers—marmtive intimacy,
a confessional tone, and an emphasis on the emotional aura of each moment—is taken
ﬂom us. We are now being oriented toward the life of a married woman—sunshine and
clarity on the surface but also marked by death and decay.

Hadria’s move to England and the ensuing description of the landscape maps the
“civilizing” process of her marriage onto the relationship between Scotland and England.
In other words, that Hadria enters the married state and the English state at the same time
is not coincidental. Caird’s reaction against the traditional narrative of women’s lives
comes out in a reaction against the hegemony of England over Scotland.8 If we look
more closely at the speciﬁc language of this opening, we begin to see Caird subtly
describing a peculiar aesthetic of decline. We can tell it is Autumn because the country is

“blazing with red and orange for miles” (145). Blazing has obvious ﬁre connotations,

 

8 “A countryman” opens the second part of this novel and encompasses several meanings that bear
differently on interpretations of this passage’s relationship to nationalist discourse. There is a sense of
unanimity in anonymity implied by “a countryman.” No matter what quirks he might possess as an
individual (a “st00ping gait” for instance), he is part of a larger whole. He represents the nation. He is of
this country, which we know is England by the “English hills” on the horizon. But he is also in the
country, part of the rural landscape—a country man. That England is aligned with the rural here is not
accidental; the backward village that Hadria lives in represents the backwardness of “civilized” English
society. Also, he is a country man. He represents the male-coded patriarchal society that the novel wishes
to critique, andhis stooping gait could imply the unhealthy nature ofsuch a society. It could also be a
reference to his class status, marking him as part ofthe English “peasantry.”

24

suggesting rapid destruction, but these bright colors also seem invigorating. This is not
the fall of wet leaves and overcast sky: whatever may be dying in this country, it is doing
so beautifully and invitingly. The paragraph describing the town makes this point even
more obviously as it personiﬁes the town’s backwardness:
The little village seemed as if it had forgotten to change with the rest of the
country, for at least a hundred years. The spirit of the last century lingered in its
quiet cottages, in the little ale-house with half-obliterated sign, in its air of
absolute repose and leisure. There was no evidence of contest anywhere—except
perhaps in a few mouldy advertisements of a circus and of a remarkable kind of
soap, that were half peeling off a moss-covered wall. There were not even many
indications of life in the place. The sunshine seemed to have the village street to

itself. A couple of women stood gossiping over the gate of one of the cottages.
They paused in their talk as a quick step sounded on the road (145-6).

This village “forgot to change” (145). It isn’t stubborn; it just old and a bit forgetful.
This personiﬁcation suggests a quaint and welcoming atmosphere. Even though there are
few “indications of life” in this village, loneliness does not cast a shadow here: The
Sun—personiﬁed—has “the village street to itself” (146).

The “mouldy advertisements,” however, seem to date this village; although it
mi t have the “spirit of the last century,” it is ﬁrmly of the century marked by the
Industrial Revolution. But Nature has overgrown what evidence of progress there used to
be; the only possibility for growth in this environment is the moldy growth of decay.9
Although the horizon is new to Hadria, it is still “closed in” by English bills (145). Now
that she is in England, Hadria is no ﬂeer to do as she pleases. The only difference is that
in England, there is no debate about the will versus circumstance; Hadria’s imprisonment

as “Mrs. Temperly” is entrenched within the sunny, living dead of the landscape (the

 

9 It is worth noting that the two advertisements are for the circus and soap, possibly representing two
Victorian obsessions: spectacle and cleanliness. Of course, the soap ad could also be a reference to British
imperialism, since many soap ads represented matives” of the colonies—or, indeed, “savages”—-the
implication being that they are cleansed by their introduction to civilization.

25

district of Craddock even sports “a ﬁne lot 0’ corpses” a few pages later). Eagleton’s
comment about ﬁn—de-siécle authors “aestheticizing the unacceptable” seems to apply to
this passage, but Caird has added a narrative twist to this formula, making it a particularly
English project to “photograph the world, not to change it” (Eagleton 16). In this
passage, Caird expands her argument about women’s particular suffering to include a
critique of nationalist discourse. The “marriage” of Scotland and England only
“civilizes” Scotland in the way that marriage civilizes women. The description of rural
England in this passage suggests that “civilization”——in the form of order, marked by
scientiﬁc objectivity—comes at a cost. “Ordering” experience involves ignoring or
simplifying the chaotic interaction between interior and exterior; “objective” description
suggests that there is a direct and obvious correlation between what exists and how one
experiences what exists—or, more theoretically, between ontology and epistemology. It
is signiﬁcant that we are no longer afforded access to Hadria’s interiority in this passage.
With its hopes, contradictions, (female) ambitions, and emotions, it has no place in the
(male) ordered landscape of English civility.

Importantly, England is not the only place Hadria moves in the novel, and
marriage is not the ﬁnal failure she experiences. In a radical refusal of her marital
“obligations,” Hadria moves to Paris to pursue musical studies"). This alternative
strategy—Hadria’s effort to escape marital conscription—aligns Caird’s novel with other
New Woman novels, but Hadria’s failure to sustain her career marks a deviation ﬂom

those novels that sought to present self-actualizing women successfully pursuing careers

 

'0 Linda Colley remarks that it was popular in England during the long eighteenth century to characterize
improper conduct as French (252). Although The Daughters of Danaus was written at the end of the
nineteenth century, this British sentiment might still be persistent in the ﬁgure of a rebellious woman
leaving her family to move to Paris.

26

outside the domestic sphere. Here, I am less concerned with Hadria’s inability to sustain
a musical career than I am with what the mobility of this move to Paris signiﬁes. Earlier,
I suggested that Caird’s novel anticipates modernism; this gesture exposes itself most
forcefully toward the end of the novel when the narrative strategy shiﬂs yet again to
disorient the reader. Part HI of the novel begins on the train to Paris, and the narration of
this passage disturbs the staid boredom of the English landscape. However, this
disturbance dismantles Hadria’s interiority in ways that seem to anticipate the Modernist
destabilizing of the subject:
The speed was glorious. Back ﬂashed ﬁeld and hill and copse, and the dear
‘companionable hedgeways.’ Back ﬂew iterative telegraph posts with Herculean
swing, into the Past, looped together in rhythmic movement, marking the pulses
of old Time. On, with rack and roar, into the mysterious Future. One could sit at
the window and watch the machinery of Time’s foundry at work; the hammers of
his forge beating, beating, the wild sparks ﬂying, the din and chaos whirling
round one’s bewildered brain;--Past becoming Present, Present melting into
Future, before one’s eyes. To sit and watch the whining wheels; to think ‘Now it
is thus and thus; presently, another slice of earth and sky awaits me’—ye Gods, it
is not to be realized! (294).
Echoing the movement of the train, the narration rhythmically jumps ﬂom impression to
impression. How can this experience be realized—be made real? The train provides the
perfect opportunity for exploring the great paradoxes of realist representation. What
seems to be a smooth traj ectory—a narrative, a train’s course—is experienced as
overwhelmingly disconnected impressions. Although “Past,” “Present,” and “Future” fall
in obvious order in this passage, the progression of verb tenses connotes a more ﬂaught
relationship to the futurity of train technology. The passage moves ﬂom the past tense
(“speed was,” “Back ﬂashed ﬁeld”) to the subjunctive (“One could”) to unconjugated

inﬁnitive (“To sit and watch,” “to think”) to negated present (“it is not”). It is also

interesting that subject, verb and adverb in the second sentence—“Back ﬂashed ﬁeld”—

27

are inverted. It is as if the train moves so quickly that the sentences cannot keep up, that
consciousness cannot stay on track.

Coming to grips with this technology creates a preposterous inversion of thought.
It also causes some inward speculation: “One could” suggests the imagination forging
possibilities ﬂom reﬂecting on the speed with which the world passes, is past. In other
words, the fast past creates a future of possibilities, but these possibilities pile up so
quickly that they cannot be processed into realities: they stagnate. And ﬂagrnent: “On
with rack and roar, into the mysterious future.” An attempt to bring back the action—the
verbs—turns into a stutter start of inﬁnitives: “To sit and watch [. . .] to think.” The
quickness of thought that comes with watching a train’s progress, of imagining
technological advancement on such a large scale, cannot adequately be represented. “It
cannot be realized!” Remark the articulated thought in quotation marks: “presently,
another slice of earth and sky awaits me.” Who is “me”? We can presume it is Hadria,
but locating a clear narrative position is difﬁcult in this passage, since the beginning
seems to come ﬂom a more “objective” narrative voice. It is also telling that a cut—
“slice”—radically separates the present (“presently”) ﬂom the future (“awaits”). The
attempt of consciousness to grapple with the train, the ability to move relatively great
distances at relatively great speeds, disrupts the ﬂuidity of time. Present cannot become
future, no matter how quickly it moves. The technology of the train marks a historical
shift in consciousness. Exempliﬁed by this passage, the means of connecting worlds to
one another is also the means of disconnecting one ﬂom the ﬂuidity of one’s thoughts.

The selfis notto be realizedjustas the ﬁrture is not to be realized.

28

Part of this destabilization of the subject is revealed in the way the narrative
imperceptively dips in and out of Hadria’s consciousness. When the train stops at a
country station, a little girl gets on and stares “ﬁxedly” at Hadria with “singular
persistence” (295). It is as if Hadria is a mysterious creature that the girl has never
encountered. Her “gaze” is somewhat paralyzed, and the narration suggests this paralysis
stems ﬂom the girl’s perception of Hadria’s disjointed thoughts. To readers, however, it
is unclear which thoughts belong to whom and what constitutes the narrative voice. As
the train takes off again, the ﬂagrnentation of narrative point of view comes into focus:

The patient monster began to move again, with a gay whistle, as if he enjoyed this

chase across country, on the track of Time. He was soon at full speed again, on

his futile race: a hapless idealist in pursuit of lost dreams. The little girl watched
the dawn of a smile on the face of the kind, pretty lady who had given her the

ﬂower. A locomotive ﬁguring as an idealist! Where would one’s fancy lead one
to next? (296).

In watching the narrator watch the little girl watch Hadria who watches and comments
upon her own thoughts, we are made aware of the multiple perspective of this moment.
Hadria’s smile indicates that she has been thinking the description of the train rather than
simply being part of that description. But has this all been an internal monologue? Was
the “patient monster” part of the narration or Hadria’s “fancy”? If so, why do we need
the watchful little girl to make us aware that these thoughts are Hadria’s? It is the little
girl’s gaze that shows us Hadria’s smile, giving us insight into her thoughts—indicating
to us that this narrative description has not been straightforward.

But, more importantly, with whom are we meant to align ourselves in this
passage? Are we supposed to sympathize with the little girl watching this monstrous
collision of metaphors clashing in Hadria’s interiority? Do we empathize with Hadria,

feeling giddy and ecstatic, both in the moment and beside ourselves watching it? Do we

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understand the train’s point of view—both patient and rushing, monster and ideal(ist)?
And what are we meant to make of Hadria’s (or the narrator’s) simultaneous
personiﬁcation of the train (as an “idealist”) and dehumanization of it (as a “monster”)?
Disorientation—particularly via narrative instability—again puts readers in a state of
confusion, but this disorientation, like the previous ones, does not obviously orient us
toward Hadria’s interiority. Instead, it exposes the instability of the categories of interior
and exterior.

In contemporary theoretical debates, instability has become a catchword; it is
oﬁen used to expose the possibility of stepping outside of rigid and imprisoning
categories. The instability in this particular passage gives Hadria a certain ﬂeedom of
thought—mirrored by the ﬂeedom of mobility and the movement of the train. For
Hadria, this ﬂeedom is “intoxicating” (297). But the reality of her situation in Paris is
sobering: the future (symbolized by the train) cannot escape the past no matter how
quickly it moves. Even though she has escaped England, she quickly realizes that “the
past is never past; immortal as the Gods, it lives enthroned in the Present, and sets its
limits and lays its commands” (308). The disjointed consciousness narrated in this train
passage points to yet another failure that Hadria encounters: technology, and the mobility
it affords, do not allow Hadria self-actualization. The “progress” of “Science,” without
the corresponding progress of women’s liberation, holds very little promise as an
alternative to the domestic existence that Hadria wishes to escape. Even in Paris, “where
she seemed so ﬂee, the peculiar claims that are made, by common consent, on a woman’s
time and strength began to weave their tiny cords around her” (322). Even in Paris,

Hadria is still a woman. This novel rejects the possibilities for escape proposed by the

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instability of the train passage. This passage may mark a moment of chaotic
possibility—creative excess breaking away ﬂom convention—but it cannot permanently
change women’s historical conditioning. According to the logic of this novel, that sort of
monumental change can only take place slowly and incrementally with changes in
individual and, eventually, collective sentiment.

Before Hadria leaves Paris, her sister-in—law comes to persuade her back to
England and to her duties as a wife. Refuting those duties, Hadria draws on an
interesting analogy to argue that she agreed to marriage under false pretenses (namely,
that Hubert Temperly promised her ﬂeedom and individuality to get her to agree to
marriage). Speaking to her sister-in-law, Hadria says,

Supposing a wicked bigarrrist had persuaded a woman to go through a false

marriage ceremony, and when she became aware of her real position, imagine him

saying to her, with grave and virtuous mien, ‘My dear, why repudiate the duties of
your position, since there your position is, an accomplished fact not to be denied

(350).

When Hadria’s sister-in-law calls this analogy “preposterous,” Hadria replies, “It’s
preposterous and it’s parallel.” Hadria’s analogy not only exposes what is
preposterous—backward, illogical, monstrous, perverse—about the duties of a wife to
her husband and children, but it also parallels the novel’s appeal to readers’ emotions.
Like the wicked bigarrrist in her own example, Hadria is the novel’s extreme example:
her radical politics are preposterous in a social climate that restricts women to
domesticity. But her failure to overcome those circumstances is also preposterous:
monstrously disappointing to readers who are taught to sympathize with her politics and

root for her liberation. This novel, in its manipulation of readers’ emotions, attempts a

preposterous intervention into the evolution of society, but it also codes those emotions as

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a parallel response to the preposterously backward Victorian convention that refuses to
see women as anything other than animals for breeding. Preposterous and parallel, the

emotionality of this novel is crucial to its political agenda.

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Eagleton, Terry. “The Flight to the Real.” In Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siecle. Ed.
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