Women at Odds: Indifference, Antagonism, and Progress in Late Victorian Literature

by Riya Das

Overview

In Women at Odds, Riya Das demonstrates the limitations of female solidarity for the New Woman in Victorian society. On the one hand, feminist antagonism disrupts the status quo in unanticipated ways, and it helps open new domestic and professional pathways for women. On the other hand, the urban professional New Woman’s rhetoric recycles distinctly sexist, racist, and classist conventions, thereby bringing middle-class Englishwomen dialectically—what Das terms “retro-progressively”—into the labor pool of the British empire.

While foregrounding the figure of the New Woman as a white imperialist reformer, Das illustrates how the New Woman movement detaches itself from the domestic politics of female friendship. In works by George Eliot, George Gissing, Olive Schreiner, Bram Stoker, and others, antagonism and indifference enable the fin de siècle New Woman to transcend traditionally defined roles and fashion social progress for herself at the expense of femininities she excludes as “other.” By contesting the critical notion of solidarity as the only force that brings Victorian women’s narratives to fruition, Women at Odds reveals the troubled but effective role of antagonistic and indifferent reformist politics in loosening rigid social structures for privileged populations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814215722
Publisher:	Ohio State University Press
Publication date:	09/12/2024
Pages:	210
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Riya Das (she/her) is Assistant Professor of English at Prairie View A&M University, where she specializes in nineteenth-century British literature, gender, and empire. She is currently editing the first-ever critical edition of Mona Caird’s feminist novel The Daughters of Danaus. She was awarded an NEH grant to support this book.

Read an Excerpt

Since the late twentieth century, scholars have understood solidarity, especially female friendship, as an intrinsic part of both political progress and narrative coherence in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction. A critical tradition stretching from Nina Auerbach in the 1970s to Leela Gandhi and Sharon Marcus in the twenty-first century has reinforced this emphasis on solidarity in literary studies, focused on both postcolonialism and gender. My book examines the limits of solidarity as a political value, especially in relation to the British fin de siècle, with women’s notable participation in the middle-class professional sphere.

Women at Odds argues that although late Victorian feminism does not challenge imperial ideology, female antagonism and indifference in fiction do disrupt traditional gender structures, and they do so to a greater extent than solidarity does. As Sharon Marcus argued in her seminal work Between Women, friendship between female characters can lead them to happy domestic resolutions. This focus on female friendship in Victorian literary studies can be traced back at least to the 1980s. For example, Tess Cosslett’s Woman to Woman, suitably dedicated by the author to her “female friends,” explores the value of female friendship in Victorian novels. As Cosslett clearly informs at the outset, her book is interested in “precisely the relationship of female friendship to the structure of the conventional marriage plot.” Furthermore, Cosslett claims that the containment of female-female bonds within female-male ones does not devalue the former but rather reveals the function of female friendship at crucial turning points in the narrative: “The coming together of two women is often essential to the resolution of the plot, figuring as a necessary stage in the heroine’s maturation and readiness for the marriage that conveniently closes the action.” Thus, both twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship has demonstrated the vital role of Victorian female friendship in domestic resolutions. However, domestic resolutions were mathematically impossible to achieve for most Victorian women. As Cosslett admits, despite the narrative tendency to privilege successful marriage plots, there was a large and increasing proportion of single women in Victorian Britain.

Thus, the continued critical focus on female friendship has led to two overlooked issues. First, that female friendship could not lead to domestic resolutions for all women, even if we assume that all Victorian women wanted to marry. And second, that connections between women in Victorian narratives have often been misleadingly considered friendly, even when there is clear, strategically deployed antagonism between them. Consequently, late Victorian New Woman novels that abandoned the successful resolution of the marriage plot for open-endedness, such as George Gissing’s Odd Women and Ella Hepworth Dixon’s Story of a Modern Woman, have been read as ambiguous, if not negative and hopeless, by critics. Cosslett, who recognizes the less friendly nature of the fin de siècle New Woman, interprets narratives where the “main alternative to the male-female ending is . . . the woman-alone ending” as ominous. In my view, however, open-endedness spells possibility, not only by freeing women from traditional domestic life and revealing their potential to pursue professional life but also by releasing them from the patriarchal expectation of feminine solidarity aimed at delivering domestic resolutions for a select few.

And Victorian domestic resolutions, I argue, have limits. One, they help maintain the hierarchical gender structure of the Victorian family, which women cannot transcend with solidarity. And two, solidarity comes at a personal cost for women—one woman often needs to set her own fulfillment aside in order to help a friend. For a society that extols female self-sacrifice and highly values marriage and motherhood, therefore, female solidarity is useful for maintaining the status quo. It promotes a social system where women share emotional pain, sometimes at heavy personal cost, to ultimately help only a few achieve a successful domestic life.

Table of Contents

Introduction    Wives and Daughters Leaving Home: Indifferent and Antagonistic New Women
Chapter 1        An Unsympathetic Network: Female Defiance as Narrative Force in Daniel Deronda
Chapter 2        Antagonistic Boundaries: The Woman Professional’s Retro-Progress in The Odd Women
Chapter 3        Settler Colonial Feminism: Unsustainable Indifference and Antagonism in The Story of an African Farm
Chapter 4        In Solidarity with Empire: The Professional Wife and Mother in Dracula
Conclusion      Antagonism and Indifference: Twenty-First-Century Affordances

Editorial Reviews

Das reframes the conversation around social dynamics among women in Victorian fiction, presenting a fresh perspective on oft-studied texts. Thought-provoking close readings informed by a historicist lens on gender, class, race, and other forms of difference make Women at Odds essential reading for scholars of Victorian literature, gender, and narrative.” —Lise Shapiro Sanders, author of Consuming Fantasies: Labor, Leisure, and the London Shopgirl, 1880-1920

“Women at Odds builds on and complicates existing critical conversations in Victorian and feminist studies. Das defies the long-held assumption that solidarity and collaboration are the basis for women’s progress, highlighting instead how some women are marginalized to enable the advancement of others.” —Rachel Hollander, author of Narrative Hospitality in Late Victorian Fiction: Novel Ethics

From the Publisher