The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett. Thomas Recchio
indicate and to highlight that whether writing in mid-Victorian realistic mode or later Victorian and modernist romance mode, Burnett’s novels were always engaged with the ideological struggles of their time. And one of those struggles, articulated variously (e.g., the redundant or odd woman, the fallen woman, the new woman and so on) and consistently, concerns the evolving social visibility and broadening range of activity for women. So rather than laying out patterns across the reviews for novels published between 1877 and 1924, which would look in the end like a crazy quilt, a wild mixture of high praise and extreme condemnation with shades or moderation in between, it would be more productive to tease out what Burnett’s contemporary critics had to say about her fictional women with an emphasis on Joan Lowrie, Clorinda Wildairs and Emily Fox Seton, the titular heroines of That Lass O’Lowries, A Lady of Quality, and The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst.
One of the earliest reviews of That Lass O’Lowries was published in the November 1877 issue of Atlantic Monthly. The review opens by observing that the novel’s
essential quality is power. It impresses rather than pleases; it holds rather than entertains; for while it is both entertaining and pleasing in a very marked degree, yet to say that it were simply that would be to give no hint of its masculine vigor, its dramatic intensity, its clear truthfulness to life and the consummate art of its execution. (Italics added, 189)
As an aesthetic judgment, the adjectives “masculine” and “dramatic” refer to the quality of language and narrative focus, but in conjunction with the review’s assessment of the novel’s protagonist, those adjectives become somewhat agitated: “The prominent character is Joan Lowrie; a sort of queen among her people, self-contained, heroic, masculine in proportions both physically and morally. Few such figures have been seen in fiction” (189). The formulation of a “queen” who is both “physically and morally” masculine may be jarring, but it does gesture toward a degendering of the masculine; that is, if, as the reviewer claims, “[T]he motive of the story is the development of the feminine in Joan” (189), that development builds upon a moral and physical force that is culturally associated with the masculine but may be, in the world of Burnett’s novel, the basic ground upon which human beings, men and women, develop in ways peculiar to each individual.
In 1879 in a long review essay in Southern Review on a volume of Burnett’s short stories and That Lass O’Lowries, Mrs. S. Bledsoe Herrick makes a related point:
Whenever the subject matter of her story has been gathered, however it may be told […] she reaches down through the external crust of untrained manner, and custom, and speech, and lays hold upon some primal instinct of the race. In fact, the moral beauty and real strength consists in the portrayal of character, whose determining principle is an unswerving loyalty to love or to duty,—sometimes to one, to the exclusion of the other; and sometimes to both—but the key-note to the music of them all is loyalty; and its presence lends all the tenderness and beauty, its lack all the bitterness. (102)
In the abstract, Herrick’s assessment seems highly conventional: a woman novelist would perforce conform to the conventions of gender by harnessing her narrative to love or to duty, in either case subordinating herself to the needs of others with loyalty to someone or something outside of herself determining her value. But a counter-reading is possible. By “reach[ing] down through […] custom” in an effort to make contact with “some primal instinct of the race” (i.e., the human race), Herrick catches a glimpse of Burnett’s effort to place socially determined gender constructions of masculinity and femininity in tension with each other, if not to erase the distinction at least to destabilize it and in the process to expand the range of human behavior as that behavior emerges from a ground of physical and by extension moral strength. The idea implicit here is that the more attuned one’s body is to the physical realities of being in the world, the moral contours and physical development of the individual life emerge through the interchange between the capacities of the body and the rigors of the material world, a world that includes, of course, other people. So perhaps loyalty of any sort must begin with loyalty to one’s self.
That latter point is implicit in the story about the human original upon whom Burnett based the character of Joan. Here in Ann Thwaite’s telling, the tale begins with Burnett’s observation of a group of factory girls congregated in Islington Square, Manchester:
They were talking loudly, pushing each other, glad to be free. But there was one who was not fooling around. She was knitting a coarse blue worsted stocking. There was something strange and special about her. Frances could not explain it. As she watched, a man came into the Square—a tough-looking man with a moleskin cap pulled over his brow.
“Here’s thy feyther!” one of the girls exclaimed. The group stopped laughing and broke up. But the girl knitting went on knitting. When the man swore at her and bullied her and threatened her with his fist, she went on knitting but started to walk slowly out of the square.
“Dom tha brazen impidence!” Frances heard him say. Frances never forget the girl. Fifteen years later, changed into a pit-girl, she was the heroine of Frances’ first novel. (15)
The details in that anecdote are striking, the knitting of the stocking, the moleskin cap, the raised fist, the composure of “The Junoesque Factory Girl” (Vivian Burnett, 65). Most powerful, however, is the girl’s composure. She responds to her father’s threat of violence (a standard image of patriarchal authority) with composure, self-contained and unafraid. The girl is thoroughly embedded in the physical realities of her social and personal circumstance, and awful as they are, she is undaunted, loyal, it is safe to assume, to herself, to the fundamental integrity of the reality of her body/being in the world. In the short autobiography of her childhood, The One I Knew the Best of All, which she wrote in the third person, Burnett’s reflections on the factory-girl evoke an image of a woman abused, even dismembered, but asserting nonetheless her strength and beauty:
But she thought of her [the factory-girl] often and pondered her over, and felt her power and mystery. Not until she had given some contemplative thought to various antique marbles, and had wondered ‘what was the matter’ with the Venus of Milo, did it dawn upon her mind that in this girl in the clogs and the apron she had seen and been overpowered by Beauty such as goddesses were worshipped for, and strength such as should belong to one who ruled.32
The vision of the factory-girl and Burnett’s comparison of her to a dismembered statue serve as powerful metaphors for Burnett’s sense of how the patriarchal society she was born into keeps women constrained through the implicit and explicit imposition of physical force, an idea reinforced by the image of the armless marble statue Venus of Milo, an image of strength and beauty plucked from the ruins of Greek civilization, its disfigurement a symbol of female suffering and dignity.
But the violence figured in that image need not be restricted to physical violence; it can be economic as well. In fact, the roots of the father’s violence against his factory-girl daughter most likely had its origins in material deprivation as much as patriarchal authority. As a young girl Burnett’s apprehension of that violence was mingled with outrage and a feeling of injustice, emotions that were reinforced in experiences closer to home. She learned first-hand about the economic frailty of women unprotected by a man when, upon the death of her father, her mother took over the family business, which soon thereafter failed. They then were compelled to leave Manchester for the United States, settling near Knoxville, Tennessee, to the place where her father’s brother had emigrated some years earlier. There they lived in the post-Civil War years perilously close to poverty until Frances found success selling stories to magazines. Her biographers chronicle those years in detail. My point here is that the line between her perception of her own economic and physical vulnerability and her imaginative engagement with what she sees as the vulnerable position of women more broadly is very thin. Thus, the imaginative investment she makes in the configuration of her heroine’s efforts to locate themselves in a position of physical stability and integrity against social structures (and in some cases direct threats of violence from men) that insist on their frailty and dependence is drawn from a deep bank of experience. Her heroines, whether placed in