The New Woman in Charlotte Yonge’s 'The Clever Woman of the Family'

A literary research paper on Victorian women

Lopa Banerjee | University of Nebraska | [email protected]

Research article draft November 28 2012

The New Woman in Charlotte Yonge’s The Clever Woman of the Family: An Offshoot of Althusser's Ideological State Apparatus

 

              In the Victorian English literature of the 1860’s, the ideology of the domestic angel collided head-on with an alternate feminine reality, which in its own way, challenged the typecasting and normalization of the woman as a domestic angel prompted by the heterosexual norms of the society. In this regard, Charlotte Mary Yonge’s The Clever Woman of the Family (1865) happens to be a remarkable piece of fictional work by a mid-Victorian woman author in which we can discuss the characterization of the woman protagonist as the representation of a woman apparently opposed to the typecasting, yet ultimately defined by the patriarchal ideology.

Feminist critics like Kim Wheatley in Death and Domestication in Charlotte M. Yonge’s ‘The Clever Woman of the Family’ illustrates how Yonge, in her projection of the heroine Rachel Curtis, starts out with defying the traditional definitions of the female, while she ultimately succumbs to the acceptable forms of feminine activities, as she surrenders to marriage and motherhood towards the end of the novel. At the start of her argument, she states: “The Clever Woman of the Family (1865) critiques its heroine, Rachel Curtis, a most egregiously clever woman, for performing charity in an individualistic and less than wholeheartedly Christian spirit. Married and a mother by the end of the novel, Rachel is “much more really useful and effective than ever [she] could have been alone.’” 1 My essay will explore some of the ways in which The Clever Woman of the Family manipulates disparate novelistic conventions to make the point that a woman’s cleverness requires both masculine and divine guidance.”  (Wheatley 895)

                 Analyzing the anti-feministic elements of the novel that have tempted feminist recuperation for a long time, Wheatley categorically proves that Yonge’s energies in creating the content of the novel had been entirely on the side of domestication. Janice Fiamengo in Forms of Suffering in Charlotte Yonge’s The Clever Woman of the Family, while demonstrating the various forms of suffering portrayed through the woman characters in the novel, including Rachel, points out that such feminist criticism does not always take into account the historical context of such works of fiction. Analyzing the characterization of the protagonist Rachel Curtis in the novel, Fiamengo in argument actually attempts to trace the complexities in the lives of women in the nineteenth century, while also seeking to answer questions regarding the complexities of responses to gender in Yonge’s novel.  In her analysis, Fiamengo demonstrates how Rachel, the heroine is projected as the unconventional, insubordinate heroine who re-educates herself about the position of women in society through feeling agony and humiliation, which in a way, proves to be beneficial for her in the end of the novel.

“The unconventional heroine Rachel Curtis, is a zealous social reformer and women’s rights advocate whose long process of re-education through humiliation is represented as a triumph of her true nature; marriage and motherhood decisively cure her insubordination” (Fiamengo 1).

Fiamengo’s argument here centers on the ultimate oppression of the heroine who tries to find her individual voice in society through defiance, and how the social culture of Yonge’s times forced her to tone down the female voice in the end as a submissive one. While Fiamengo’s argument here amply demonstrates the gradual process of subservience of the heroine as she treads the path of surveillance and punishment through marriage, she somehow fails to define how and why in Yonge’s novel marriage becomes a catalyst that eventually enforced surveillance and repression. In the novel, while the heroine is initially projected as an individual with an astonishing amount of autonomy, there is a conscious interplay of dichotomy between women’s societal roles governed by the domestic ideology and the newfound sense of independence and power. While analyzing the role of the woman protagonist in the novel, I will seek to analyze the very nature of women’s subjectivity and the ways in which it is represented in the novel through this dichotomy. At the same time, I will attempt to explain that because of the overarching ideology of the heroine’s subservience to marriage as a catalyst and a social force, even with the dichotomy and the choice of free will in the heroine, the outcome of her life becomes inevitable and inescapable.

            In the first part of the novel, Yonge presents the heroine Rachel Curtis, a refined, pedantic lady of her times, equally well-versed in literature and homeopathy, who pities the ludicrous blunders of femininity represented by her young, widowed cousin Fanny. Here, she rightfully stands as a symbol of the ‘new woman’, later coined by Sarah Grand in North American Review to represent a social force that liberates women from the domestic ideology. Rachel’s disdain towards archetypal feminine values embraced by her mother Mrs. Curtis and her cousin Fanny, especially those centered on women’s societal roles, gradually wears off in the latter half of the novel where she realizes that her confidence in her own emancipation and in her acts of philanthropy was actually her own folly. In the end, Rachel is seen to accept the institution of marriage as a reward, surrendering to a life as the wife of an elderly man she had first scorned. Towards the end of the novel, when her husband finally claims that she is not ‘the clever woman of the family’, after all, a remark that she readily accepts, she is ultimately chained into the same domestic ideology she had tried hard to evade.

              While analyzing the characterization of the woman protagonist in the novel and viewing this oscillation between a woman’s new emancipated role and her age-old familial role shaped by patriarchy, I have been seeking answers to Rachel’s gradual shift of values by drawing on the theory of hegemony and the ideological state apparatus illustrated by Althusser. Analyzing how Althusser defined hegemonic structures, I intend to reveal the underlying structure of power in the novel which ultimately compelled Rachel to enter a system of coerced self-regulation that in turn, encouraged surveillance, punishment and reward through the institution of marriage. In spite of placing the heroine in an intellectually superior position, Yonge as an author finally serves hegemony through Rachel’s self-surrender. Repression, in the form of accepting marriage is actually projected as a reward for the heroine as she is gradually brainwashed into believing in the patriarchal norms. In doing this, Yonge, the author ultimately valorizes the image of the domestic angel, while condemning and punishing the woman who fails to conform to the hegemonic societal norms.

                Feminist critics, while evaluating the representation of women by women writers of the Victorian era often claim that the perception of feminine identity by the women authors is often shaped by a conflict between the newfound emancipation of women and the age-old domestic ideals of women which happened within their own minds. In A Literature of Their Own, author Elaine Showalter has analyzed how women’s literature in the Victorian period had started with the ‘long period of imitation of the dominant structures of tradition’ and an “internalization of its standard of arts and its views on social roles.” While, according to Showalter, the fictional works of the Brontes, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot are characterized by this conflict, she adds that the later generation of female writers including Yonge and Elizabeth Lynn Linton also manifest the same conflict in their fiction. While Showalter explains that these women authors attempted to integrate themselves into the public sphere, they felt a conflict between the extremes of ‘obedience and resistance’, which is often reflected in the representation of women by these women authors. In analyzing the representation of the female protagonist Rachel Curtis in Charlotte Mary Yonge’s The Clever Woman of the Family, it is this conflict between ‘obedience and resistance’ to patriarchal norms that defines the novel, while in the end, ‘obedience’ wins over ‘resistance’. At the start of the novel, Rachel clearly comes across as a smart, indigenous ‘old maid’ of Avonmouth who is proud of her intellect as well as of her single status. In the first chapter, she haughtily rejects the traditions of patriarchy as she appears along with her unmarried sister Grace and flaunts their being together as something worth celebrating. She mocks the idea of matrimonial vows between heterosexual couples as she remarks in banter:

“From this moment we are established as the maiden sisters of Avonmouth, husband and wife to one another, as maiden pairs always are." (Yonge 4)

Rachel, the heroine, is also shown to have her own agency and freedom, the apparent traits of masculinity in the first part of the novel, as she thrives on her own independence and intellectual superiority. In the first chapter, she takes sufficient pride in her intellect as well as in the tasks of philanthropy she undertakes which she perceives as her duty towards her fellow beings, and by virtue of which she assumes that she is gifted with a distinct identity:

“"And this is all I am doing for my fellow-creatures," she muttered half aloud.”One class of half-grown lads, and those grudged to me!  Here is the world around one mass of misery and evil! Not a paper do I take up but I see something about wretchedness and crime, and here I sit with health, strength, and knowledge, and able to do nothing, nothing--at the risk of breaking my mother's heart! I have pottered about cottages and taught at schools in the dilettante way of the young lady who thinks it her duty to be charitable; and I am told that it is my duty, and that I may be satisfied. Satisfied, when I see children cramped in soul, destroyed in body, that fine ladies may wear lace trimmings! Satisfied with the blight of the most promising buds! Satisfied, when I know that every alley and lane of town or country reeks with vice and corruption, and that there is one cry for workers with brains and with purses!” (Yonge 5)

               Here Rachel appears as the frustrated social reformer who clearly sees and understands all the sufferings and limitations of the community she serves, while at the same time she acknowledges her unquestioned status as a thinker and philanthropist in the sea-side town of Avonmouth.

               In the following part of her speech, it is she who acknowledges her limitations as a woman bound by the dictates of a patriarchal society. A close reading into this part of her speech will also reveal that while she is aware of her power and autonomy within her own community, she also subtly acknowledges that she is a misfit within her own society, the town of Avonmouth:

“And here am I, able and willing, only longing to task myself to the uttermost, yet tethered down to the merest mockery of usefulness by conventionalities. I am a young lady forsooth!--I must not be out late, I must not put forth my views; I must not choose my acquaintance, I must be a mere helpless, useless being, growing old in a ridiculous fiction of prolonged childhood, affecting those graces of so-called sweet seventeen that I never had--because, because why? Is it for any better reason than because no mother can bear to believe her daughter no longer on the lists for matrimony? Our dear mother does not tell herself that this is the reason, but she is unconsciously actuated by it. And I have hitherto given way to her wish. I mean to give way still in a measure; but I am five and twenty, and I will no longer be withheld from some path of usefulness! I will judge for myself, and when my mission has declared itself, I will not be withheld from it by any scruple that does not approve itself to my reason and conscience. If it be only a domestic mission--say the care of Fanny, poor dear helpless Fanny, I would that I knew she was safe,--I would not despise it, I would throw myself into it, and regard the training her and forming her boys as a most sacred office. It would not be too homely for me. But I had far rather become the founder of some establishment that might relieve women from the oppressive task-work thrown on them in all their branches of labour. Oh, what a worthy ambition!" (Yonge 6)

               Here, as Rachel sees herself in search of a mission, be it educating her townsmen with her wisdom and intellect or raising her cousin Fanny’s boys by providing them with proper education, she is constantly reminded that she is on the fringes of patriarchy, in spite of her unwarranted confidence in her own power and emancipation as a woman.

              Thus, while analyzing Rachel’s speech in the first part of the novel, what strikes me is how Yonge, the author creates a sense of being a misfit in Rachel’s own mind that is otherwise replete with unusual strength and positive energy. As the novel progresses, Yonge lets the readers realize that this unusual mental prowess of Rachel is encountered in her own family and also in Avonmouth to the mingled admiration and irritation of her neighbors, Mrs. Curtis, her timid mother, her even more timid and docile cousin Fanny and her ‘sensible’, conventional sister Grace. The community that Rachel encounters in the form of these women, Fanny’s charming, indisciplined boys, as well as the child lace workers of the town, all of whom question and challenge her power and ultimately make her realize her own limitations as a teacher, social reformer and philanthropist, actually prove that Rachel did not have the sufficient tools to be autonomous as a woman. Both through the plot structure of the novel and the characterization of the female protagonist, Yonge ultimately illustrates that the heroine Rachel, in spite of starting out as challenging the prototypical image of the women and the familial roles they portrayed with her autonomy, eventually gives in to the inability of the domestic ideology to accept and encourage her autonomy. As one may rightfully question why Yonge at all had to do this, this question may bring us close to re-evaluating the role of Rachel in the novel and the social and cultural milieu that she has been a part of, while seeking to examine the perceptions of femininity she has unfolded in the novel. This would also help in seeking answers to why the heroine is ultimately idealized as the self-sacrificing ‘angel in the house’, an image which the author consciously tried to evade at the start.

            In answering the question regarding Yonge’s deliberate decision in getting the heroine, Rachel trapped into patriarchy, I wish to draw on the theory of hegemony by Althusser, while I examined the characterization of the woman protagonist in Yonge’s novel in the light of the struggling, oppressed ‘domestic angel’ ideology.

             In “Lenin and Philosophy and other essays” published in 1970, Althusser defines the ‘State’ as a repressive apparatus serving the ruling class to ensure their power over the oppressed, the working class:

“…the state is explicitly conceived as a repressive apparatus. The State is a machine’ of repression, which enables the ruling classes (in the nineteenth century the bourgeois class and the ‘class’ of big landowners) to ensure their domination over the working class, thus enabling the former to subject the latter to the process of surplus-value extortion (i.e. to capitalist exploitation)….The State is thus first of all what the Marxist classics have called the State Apparatus. This term means: not only the specialized apparatus (in the narrow sense) whose existence and necessity I have recognized in relation to the requirements of legal practice, i.e. the police, the courts, the prisons; but also the army, which (the proletariat has paid for this experience with its blood) intervenes directly as a supplementary repressive force in the last instance, when the police and its specialized auxiliary corps are ‘outrun by events’; and above this ensemble, the head of State, the government and the administration.

(Althusser, Louis. “Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays”. Monthly Review Press 1971)

              Examining the characterization of Rachel Curtis in the novel in light of the theory of the ‘repressive apparatus’, we can analyze the system of coerced self-regulation that first challenged her powers and later made her surrender her powers to marriage and subordination. If we look closely into the plot structure of the novel, we will find out that in the first part, Rachel Curtis is introduced along with her sister Grace, while the narrative works in a way to project her as the undisputed intellectual queen of Avonmouth who has reigned the small town with her confident intellectual superiority. The first blow to her power and autonomy, however, comes in the form of her docile, quite loveable widowed cousin Fanny and her half a dozen boys whose pronounced insolence towards her task of educating them meets with no success whatsoever. Rachel, however, is quite confident and hopeful in the first half of the novel that she has the capacity to educate Fanny’s boys and also groom their mother well enough to manage the boys in every aspect of their lives:

“To make Fanny feel that she could lean upon someone besides the military secretary, seemed to be the great object, and she was so confiding and affectionate with her own kin, that there were great hopes. Those boys were an infliction, no doubt, but, thought Rachel, ‘there is always an ordeal at the beginning of one’s mission. I am mastering them by degrees, and should do so sooner if I had them in my own hands, and no more worthy task can be done than training human beings for their work in this world, so I must be willing to go through a little while I bring them into order, and fit their mother for managing them.” (Yonge 35)

The confrontation between Rachel and the defiant boys and their no less defiant mother is the first of many encounters in which Rachel, to the reader’s amusement, realizes her limitations too late. Her discomfiture is made the more absurd by her jealous, ill-founded suspicions of Fanny’s friend and trusted adviser, Colonel Colin Keith, formerly aide de camp to Fanny’s husband, General Temple. She is equally suspicious of another of Fanny’s entourage, Captain Alexander (Alick) Keith, whom she despises as a ‘carpet knight’.

              The ironies inherent in the plot structure of The Clever Woman of the Family unfold during the second part of the novel when the protagonist Rachel, led by Alick Keith’s sister, the charming, deceitful Bessie, invests all her faith and good will in a stranger she meets by chance, the sinister Mr Mauleverer. He encourages her to put her theories of social reform into practice by establishing a school to improve the lot of the child lace-workers of the town, with disastrous consequences. On the other hand, as a parallel to the narrative of  Rachel’s journey towards self-discovery, Yonge has a subplot in the novel that centers on the thwarted love of Colonel Keith and the governess’ sister, Ermine Williams. Ermine though crippled, poor, confined for much of the time to one small room, is not the victim that she seems. Ermine is, in fact, the true ‘clever woman’ of the novel, as the reader eventually realizes. The main plot and the subplot of the novel are gradually brought together as Rachel learns, partly from her own follies, partly from the characters who surround her, that though she is less clever than she originally believed, she is much more human and loveable. Thus, in the end, Yonge ensures that Rachel learns her lessons in life by denouncing defiance and being pliable.

              Looking into the characterization of Rachel Curtis in the novel and the way her transition has been shown from a woman of power to a woman accepting subordination through marriage, we can see her as the symbol of the ‘repressive apparatus’, who apparently is desperate in seeking an outlet for her energies and intellect. However, she is ultimately a product of her social milieu where women are functioning within the ideology of ‘separate spheres’ with the inherent qualities of femininity that had been determined largely by the prevailing heterosexual norms of her society. The narrative of the novel revolves around her journey that traces her gradual downfall from her illustrious intellectuality to her humble acceptance of her follies and limitations as a woman bound by patriarchy. Through the depiction of Rachel, Yonge actually reveals the absurdities and dangers of her assumptions regarding ‘clever women’ who are ultimately proven to be misfits in a patriarchal society. In order to confirm to the patriarchal norms, she is ultimately coerced into self-regulation through the process of punishment and reward in marriage. Marriage, in the end of the novel, serves as a catalyst in Rachel’s life that enforces surveillance, and punishment, which she is forced to believe as a reward, which yet again confirms the hegemonic structure endorsed by a society dominated by men.

             Feminist critics including Kim Wheatley, in Death and Domestication in Charlotte Yonge’s The  Clever Woman of the Family has noted that although there was a little protest from a reviewer regarding the excessiveness of Rachel’s punishment, no reviewer actually doubted that she needed a punishment in order to change herself (Wheatley 898). If we look into the plot structure of the novel to examine Rachel’s suffering and punishment, we will see that for the most part, this punishment and suffering for her comes in the form of humiliation, as she categorically accepts her intellect and wisdom as signs of defiance. While analyzing Rachel’s characterization in the novel, it becomes gradually clear that Rachel, who initially longed to have a more meaningful life than that generally accorded to ladies of her station, and who also believed that she had the autonomy to do so, is actually coerced into being submissive by the people who surround her. It is not only the men, but also the women in the novel who eventually make her believe that she governs her own life as well as the lives of others with false presumptions, which result in colossal blunders. Half-way through the novel, Rachel, with her spunk and desire for knowledge, loves to research and work on the latest trends on educational theory, which she can put into practice for benefitting the local youth of Avonmouth. However, she is surrounded by a helpless widow Fanny, her fussy mother Mrs. Curtis and a buffoonish curate Mr. Mauleverer, and has to bear with the consequences of her so-called ‘arrogant’ and ‘foolish’ endeavors. While we are faced with Rachel’s sufferings, we, along with Rachel, are forced to accept the ethos of the upper-middle class patriarchal family where Rachel, a provincial daughter, has no choice other than accepting that there is a bare minimum of autonomy for an independent, free-thinking woman passionate about knowledge and emancipation. Rachel, who disagrees strongly with other women who act foolish for the benefit or suitors or the clergy, ultimately surrenders to a heterosexual match approved by her family as she hopelessly discovers that she is the provincial daughter, and what she has valued as her autonomy is actually elusive within the provincial surroundings that she is a part of.

                In view of Louis Althusser’s theory of the ‘repressive state apparatus’, here we can clearly see the provincial surroundings of Rachel based on patriarchal norms as the ‘machine’ of repression, whereas women, including Rachel and Ermine, stand at the receiving end of oppression generated by the ruling class. The ruling class, here, is not constituted by only the men, but the cumulative entity of the lateral familial relationships which coerce her into self-abnegation. However, while Althusser emphasizes on the concept of repression through the means of violence when referring to the ‘repressive state apparatus’ theory, Yonge’s ideology of women accepting repression in the novel is centered on mental and spiritual suffering.

              Again, on the other hand, while examining Rachel’s punishment and suffering, which we can explain as an outcome of the ideology of her society, we can see the subtle workings of the ‘ideological state apparatus’ defined by Althusser, especially those of the ‘family as an ideological state apparatus’. Althusser, in his Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays defines the ‘ideological state apparatus’ as “a certain number of realities which present themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and specialized institutions”(Althusser).  

“I shall say rather that every State Apparatus, whether Repressive or Ideological, ‘functions’ both by violence and by ideology…...This is the fact that the (Repressive) State Apparatus functions massively and predominantly by repression (including physical repression), while functioning secondarily by ideology. For example, the Army and the Police also function by ideology both to ensure their own cohesion and reproduction, and in the ‘values’ they propound externally.

In the same way, but inversely, it is essential to say that for their part the Ideological State Apparatuses function massively and predominantly by ideology, but they also function secondarily by repression, even if ultimately, but only ultimately, this is very attenuated and concealed, even symbolic. (There is no such thing as a purely ideological apparatus.) Thus Schools and Churches use suitable methods of punishment, expulsion, selection, etc., to ‘discipline’ not only their shepherds, but also their flocks. The same is true of the Family.... The same is true of the cultural IS Apparatus (censorship, among other things), etc.” (Althusser).

 While analyzing the way in which the hegemonic structure of familial relationships works to ensure the heroine’s ultimate oppression, we can argue how the concept of the family as an ideological state apparatus plays a vital role in shaping her feminine identity. Rachel’s family in the Curtis household represents her own mother Mrs. Curtis who is almost always irritated by her defiance and subversion, her sister Grace who is more traditional in nature and her widowed cousin Fanny and her boys whose entry in the novel itself provides a foreboding of Rachel’s humiliation and subordination. On the other hand, in the Keith family, there are the men Colin and Alick Keith and Bessie, their frivolous sister-in-law, all of whom in their own way contribute to Rachel’s disastrous experience of her charitable endeavors, at the end of which she is domesticated. Talia Schaffer in Maiden Pairs: the Sororal Romance in The Clever Woman of the Family argues that while the men in the novel, including both the Keith brothers are seen to use their disciplinary skills on women, the heroine, Rachel has to give in to their ways of governing the woman. While her involvement with the Female Employment Training School is termed by Conrad, one of Fanny’s boys as some kind of a ‘mutiny’, men in her life, including her husband Alick turn out to be the colonial rulers trying to discipline her as a “wayward outpost in Avonmouth” (Schaffer 110). In The Clever Woman of the Family, Rachel “felt a certain compulsion in his look” even before tying the wedlock with Alick (Yonge 352). Later, at the end, Ermine remarks in rather good humor that Alick had used irony to make Rachel restrain herself from her philanthropic pursuits. These familial relationships in the novel cumulatively work in the novel as a unit representing the ‘family as an ideological apparatus’ that, through the patriarchal ideology, undermines the subversive voice of Rachel. While apparently, all of these characters contribute to the novel’s redemptive plot in the end, we may question ourselves: why was Rachel’s suffering and redemption necessary in the novel? In order to find an answer to this question, we will have to analyze the hegemonic structure of the novel that is carefully woven around the lateral familial relationships, both in the Curtis household and in the Keith household.

                 In her paper, Schaffer again argues: “The Clever Woman of the Family centers on three same-sex pairs: the cousinly couple of Alick and Colin Keith, the sister duo of Rachel and Grace Curtis, and the sister pair of Ermine and Allison Williams. Each of these dyads has a third member whose family loyalty is troubled and whose return to the more stable couple troubles its dynamics. Yonge hereby reconstitutes “family” beyond nuclear families centered on heterosexual couples” (Schaffer 99). Schaffer, in her analysis of the novel, categorically describes how in the novel, it is the monolithic family where women initially play the lead role that goes through the process of suffering and redemption, so that in the end, the dyadic family structure is the one that wins.

“First, the cousins Alick and Colin Keith are military officers who have difficult relations with their worldly, selfish siblings, Alick’s sister Bessie and Colin’s brother Lord Keith. When Bessie and Lord Keith enter Avonmouth, they disturb the social networks, and although they end up marrying one other, their perturbations are felt long after both of them die. Similarly, the sisters Ermine and Allison Williams have a happy same-sex union, jointly rearing their pretty neice Rose. For their brother Edward, having ruined the family and come under criminal investigation, had fled to Russia, leaving them to care for his daughter. Meanwhile, sisters Rachel and Grace Curtis remain firmly allied on family matters…But their alliance is troubled by the return of the third adoptive sister/cousin Fanny. Fanny arrives with a brood of seven children who express resentment of the Avonmouth clan and insist on preferring alien institutions: a distant landscape, an unfamiliar military organization, an unknown father and an unrelated teacher. Alick scolds Bessie; Colin lectures Lord Keith; Ermine and Alison write pleading letters to Edward; and Rachel tries to discipline Fanny and her boys. But the wayward siblings refuse management, and their unpredictable behavior validates the loving stability of the lateral family pairs by comparison” (Schaffer 100).

            Here, while reviewing the lateral familial relationships in the novel, she is actually analyzing the process in which all the major characters of the novel, including the woman protagonist Rachel eventually attains redemption and bliss by coming out of the monolithic structure of her family, as she finally form permanent bonds based on heterosexual relations. Yonge, according to this idea, is basically relying heavily on male-dependence for restoring an idealized familial union. All of the characters, including Rachel, apparently projected as independent youth, get forced back, through discipline and suffering, into the fiercely dependent bond of marriage, which in turn, promotes a stable and nurturing structure. In the characters’ eventual submission to the institution of marriage, the hierarchy of dependence, rather than romantic union, is emphasized upon. Almost towards the end of the novel, a conversation between Rachel and Ermine would make this argument more clear:

“It must be very odd to you to hear me say so, but I can't help feeling the difference.  I used to think it so poor and weak to be in love, or to want any one to take care of one. I thought marriage such ordinary drudgery, and ordinary opinions so contemptible, and had such schemes for myself.  And this--and this is such a break down, my blunders and their consequences have been so unspeakably dreadful, and now instead of suffering, dying--as I felt I ought--it has only made me just like other women, for I know I could not live without him, and then all the rest of it must come for his sake."

"And will make you much more really useful and effective than ever you could have been alone," said Ermine.

"He does talk of doing things together, but, oh! I feel as if I could never dare put out my hand again!"

"Not alone perhaps."

"I like to hear him tell me about the soldiers' children, and what he wants to have done for them."

"You and I little thought what Lady Temple was to bring us," said Ermine, cheerfully, "but you see we are not the strongest creatures in the world, so we must resign ourselves to our fate, and make the best of it.  (Yonge 372)

             In this conversation, it becomes clear that both Rachel and Ermine look upon the idea of marriage as an agent to secure interdependence and the stability of domesticity. What Rachel assumes as a process of falling in love is actually an interdependence on family ties governed by patriarchy, rather than by the idea of romance. As opposed to the first scene of the novel in which I had categorically shown how Rachel had mocked the matrimonial vows of the traditional heterosexual society, here she is evidently tricked into the institution of marriage as she is convinced, entreated to conform to the familial union of marriage. Through this conversation, Ermine persuades Rachel to believe that she has found the male partner who is her ‘fate’, while she must resign herself to her ‘fate’. Here, Yonge is evidently more concerned with the woman establishing bonds of dependence with men. In the opening scene of the novel, Rachel and her sister Grace became “husband and wife to one another, as maiden pairs always are” (Yonge 1), as sisterhood was recognized to her as one of the closest adult ties she wished to explore. However, by now, the union between the heterosexual couples Alick Keith and Rachel Curtis, which unfolds as the outcome of a prolonged, indecisive courtship, has the acceptance of all her female family members. Rachel finds that marriage makes her return to a blissful haven where the real pleasures of the union are based on the familial ties, rather than on the erotic or romantic ones. This tie with her husband Alick, she is coerced into believing, is her ultimate ‘mission’, as she realizes that in due time, she has at least landed herself into a convenient, happy marriage. At the end of the novel, her confession about herself to Alick makes this clear enough:

“But, Alick, I really do not think I ever was such a Clever Woman.”

“I never thought you one,” he quietly returned.

She smiled. This faculty had much changed her countenance.

“I see,” she said, thoughtfully, “I had a few intellectual tastes, and liked to think and read, which was supposed to be cleverness; and my wilfulness made me fancy myself superior in force of character, in a way I could never have imagined if I had lived more in the world. Contact with really clever people has shown me that I am slow and unready.”

“It was a rusty implement, and you tried weight instead of edge. Now it is infinitely brighter.”  (Yonge 453).

It is here in the novel that Rachel openly denounces her subversive voice and autonomy and embraces the dictates of her own microcosm, the Keith household that has coerced her into obedience. Looking into the careful manipulation of the plot that ultimately works to both punish and reform the heroine, we can clearly see the dichotomy between ‘resistance and obedience’ in the heroine that underlies the hegemonic structure of society defined by Althusser. It is this dichotomy in the heroine that actually puts her through the process of coercion and acceptance that Kim Wheatley in Death and Domestication in Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Clever Woman of the Family defines as a process that “promotes the hegemonic power of the idealized Victorian Christian family” (Wheatley 896). It is ultimately this domestication and the process of surrendering to the interdependence of heterosexual ties that have defined the feminine identity in the novel, and made it a battleground for both feminist and anti-feminist discourses.                                   

 

 

                                                   Works Cited

 

Althusser, Louis. “Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays”. Monthly Review Press 1971

Grand, Sara. The New Aspect of the Woman Question. Martha H. Petterson (ed.). Rutgers State University. 2008. Print.  

Fiamengo, Janice. Forms of Suffering in Charlotte Yonge's The Clever Woman of the Family
Victorian Review, Volume 25, Number 2 (Winter 2000)

Lee Elizabeth. “Feminist Theory�"An Overview”. The Victorian Web. Brown University. 1997. Web.

Wheatley, Kim. “Death and Domestication in Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Clever Woman of the Family”. JSTOR. 1996. Web.  

Showalter, Elaine. A literature of their own: British women novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977.   

Yonge, Charlotte M. The Clever Woman of the Family. Macmillan, 1882. Print.