Emma Bovary's Sisters: Infectious Desire and Female Reading Appetites in Mary Braddon and George Moore

Abstract

The grand work of literary genius, Matthew Arnold wrote in Essays in Criticism (1865), is a work of synthesis and exposition [...] its gift lies in the faculty of being happily inspired by a certain intellectual and spiritual atmosphere [...] when it finds itself in them (5). One of the central intellectual-spiritual influences which exercised the Victorians, rather unhappily, was the woman question and, in its specifically cultural configuration, women's troubling engagement with literature.1 Particularly in the latter half of the century the perceived invasion of fiction by the (Pykett, Improper Feminine, 4) raised anxi eties about the potential (ef)ferninisation of culture, the contamina tion of a once virile national literature with feminine and foreign disorders (see Miller 10-38). Fears about the socio-cultural and politi cal repercussions of the increasing prominence of women writers on the literary marketplace coincided with a marked preoccupation with the woman reader and the moral, sexual, and medical dangers of intemperate female self-absorption (Flint 4).2 At the fin de si?cle these concerns culminated in visions of cultural atavism which found their