The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett. Thomas Recchio
in the May 1896 issue of the British journal Pall Mall Magazine, the novelist and playwright Israel Zangwill offers the most complex and sensitive reading of A Lady of Quality of any of the reviews I have seen. Most reviewers responded to the heroine, Clorinda, with either praise or blame, basing their assessments on a standard of conventional morality and psychological plausibility. Zangwill, in contrast, suggests that the novel reveals “the latent Byron in Mrs. Burnett’s breast”; he argues that Clorinda embodies a “Nietzsche-like individualism,” and in a gesture I find both illuminating and exhilarating, he observes that the story is “a story of ‘Tess’ triumphant, of the one woman who has conquered Fate.”33 While I object to the metaphor of “Fate” (I would have used the less elegant but more accurate word “patriarchy”), I find Zangwill’s defense of the right of Burnett’s heroine to defend herself from male violence without having subsequently to pay for that defense in moral condemnation and legal judgment bracing. Reading Clorinda “in the spirit of the Symbolists,” Zangwill sees her as a vehicle through which Burnett “says her say on the great problems” (154), but he never says precisely what those “great problems” are. He alludes to the potential influence of the “new woman” novel—“There are [those] who will think the new Mrs. Burnett has caught the infection of the ‘new woman,’” he writes—“But this,” he observes, “will be unjust. Mrs. Burnett has undergone a slow evolution. They were all Clorindas in embryo—that Lass O’Lowries, Rachel Ffrench, little Sarah Crewe, Bertha Amory, that brilliant Bird of Paradise agonizing in an inward hell” (154). Undefined and rejected as not new, the “great problems” must point toward the long-standing problems for women living in a patriarchal society that subjects them to complex structures of constraint and a moral double standard in behavior and judgment. Clorinda’s response to those problems is to redefine herself “as vixen, mistress, and murderess” and wife, “yet remaining withal the matchless Clorinda.” So her core integrity, the various placements of her body in the world, where the placements change but her sense of being in her own body remains the same, enables her to find “her soul and her womanhood through all the stress and storm,” which, Zangwill observes, “is indeed a bold conception” (154).
Zangwill’s praise for the strength of Burnett’s “virile, mannish, almost swashbuckling say” through Clorinda on the “great problems” for women is qualified by his perception of an undercurrent of “feminine sentimentality below,” which transforms some tragic moments in the novel into “inverted sentimentality […] something of womanly weakness” (154). What he construes as weakness, however, may be the result of how Burnett redefines strength less as grounded in hardness, gendered as masculine, and more as unfolding expansion of capacity brought out by circumstances; strength is supple, like the power of flowing water, which is an image gendered as feminine. I would then revise Zangwill’s closing assessment—“Few lady novelists among her contemporaries have excelled her, either in virility or in femininity, and A Lady of Quality, a modern symbolic poem in the guise of an archaic romance, will add a new field to her already ample province” (154–55)—by removing the “or” between virility and femininity and reformulating the expression to “virility in femininity and femininity in virility.” What Zangwill’s language reflects is a glimmer of understanding of how Burnett’s heroines draw on the fullest conception of human capacity, fusing qualities gendered as masculine and feminine in different proportions depending on circumstance, human need and the possibilities of growth.
In contrast to the physical strength of Joan Lowrie and Clorinda Wildairs is the moral strength of Emily Fox-Seton. In the lightly titled “Trips to Book Land” section of the Los Angeles Times, Julian Hawthorne reviewed The Methods of Lady Walderhurst in a piece called “Frances Hodgson Burnett Creates a New Type in Fiction—and of a Woman, at That.” Hawthorne registers a form of strength in that review that seems the antithesis of Joan Lowrie’s and Clorinda’s virility in femininity, and the way he frames the review seems the antithesis of what became the orthodox critical assessment of Burnett as a writer who sold her genius for money and whose work was unworthy of mention after Fauntleroy. With a nod toward That Lass O’Lowries, the publication of which “was the beginning of a reputation which has held its own, and has ever and anon increased its stature ever since,” Hawthorne offers this assessment of Burnett as an author:
For although Mrs. Burnett has written a good many books during these thirty years, she has never permitted herself to compromise with her art for the sake of feeding on her popularity […]. She would want as much as anyone, of course, to make a living: but she could not forecast the flights of her muse or consent to limit them to suit the market. She must write as the god bid her, or not at all. The germ of the idea dawned and gathered force in her mind. It must be developed according to the laws of its own being. She would stretch it upon no bed of Procrustes, to be drawn out or curtailed as the exigencies of publication might make expedient. (Italics added, n.p.)
One’s first response in reading a passage like the one above may be to think that Hawthorne doth protest too much; why bring up notions like “feeding on her popularity” and limiting ambition “to suit the market” unless those notions were already associated with Burnett. But if we take Hawthorne seriously as a reader of Burnett’s fiction (and the fact that he was writing for the Los Angeles Times suggests we should), we might find that he helps us to understand what seems to be contradictory impulses in her novels: one will celebrate a woman’s defiance to convention, another will insist on passivity and acceptance of the status quo. For readers to take one type as representative over the other type requires that we limit Burnett’s choices as a writer according to our own ideological bias. If, for example, I celebrate the audacity of Burnett’s conception of Clorinda Wildairs as I do above, I must then be appalled by the characterization of Emily Fox Seton. Here is Hawthorne’s description:
The type to which she [Emily] belongs is new in fiction. She is not brilliant intellectually, not clever, not quick or ready, but in all things she manifests a gentle unworldliness, like that of a good and innocent child, a sweet slowness of mental movement, a naïve and unquestioning faith in things and persons which render her unprepared for evil or hostility. The controlling passion of her tender and pure heart is her worshiping love of her husband. (n.p.)
Such a passage, with its conflation of woman and child and its fissuring of woman and intellect, could be inserted in John Ruskin’s “Of Queens’ Gardens” (1865) with only minimal editing for grammar. Despite Hawthorne’s title, his description reflects the most conventional Victorian female characterization grounded on the ideology of the separate spheres, confirming unambiguously Zangwill’s detection of the “sentimentality below” A Lady of Quality that takes center stage in The Methods of Lady Walderhurst. But if we take seriously the idea that Burnett developed the germ of her narrative conception “according to the laws of its own being,” we might ask in the context of her narrative world, how does Emily’s character find a path of development that helps her realize her capacities in a way that feels true to her own sense of being, even if that path seems unappealing to us? We might further ask how we might take the depth of Hawthorne’s affective response to the novel:
There are some books which come into one’s heart and mind quietly, without knocking at the door, without herald or introduction; there comes with them a sphere of friendliness and sympathy, an assurance of well-doing, a subtle breathing of truth and goodness, which, if there be in us any goodness, truth and human faith and tenderness, draw it forth, and the book thenceforward seems to have become a part of our inner life, a voice out of nature, always speaking to us, but till now never recognized. (n.p.)
Whether we are put off or not by the vocabulary of goodness, well-doing, sympathy, faith and so on in an evaluation of a serious literary work, and whether we are skeptical about Hawthorne’s response because it smacks of a socially constructed gender ideology that he is assuming as natural, the idea that reading the novel brought to the surface for Hawthorne an affective dimension of his character that he otherwise would not have recognized speaks to how the heroine takes possession of the reader through the power of narrative.
What I am describing does partake of sentimentality, but it also has a quality of Wordsworth’s “unremembered