Hidden hands: working-class women and Victorian social-problem fiction

Abstract

Johnson, Patricia E. 2001. Hidden Hands: Working-Class Women and Victorian Social-Problem Fiction. Athens: Ohio University Press. $55.00 hc. $24.95 sc. 224 pp. It has always seemed to me imminently obvious that a literary scholar whose interest focuses on nineteenth-century British industrial and social-problem novelsthose most mundane of stories, in no demeaning sense of the word-should have as a corollary interest the relationships of the novels to the world outside literature. It seems only consistent that a fascination with such novels should be paired with a deep consciousness of the life conditions which give rise to and in turn arise from the narrative force of the novels examined in Patricia E. Johnson's Hidden Hands: Working-Class Women and Victorian Social-Problem Fiction. Such seems to be Johnson's original intent, but Hidden Hands is an uneven examination of relationships between fictional and public discourses of working women's social and political roles, moving between a firm placement of literary representations in their social context and a stubbornly literary-in the more demeaning sense-close reading of the novels.Yet within these bounds, it is a useful resource which will engage the attention of those wishing to know more about images of working women in a number of novels, in particular, Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna's Helen Fleetwood, Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil, or Two Nations, Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, and Charlotte Bronte's Shirley. introduction covers Chapter One, The Death of the Factory Girl; and Chapter Two, Naming the Unnameable: Sexual Harassment and Working-Class Women in Novels of Industry, merely adds more detail to the introduction. What one sees there is a description of the impact on the narrative possibilities of social fiction by the 1842 report of the Children's Employment Commission on industrial working conditions. For with the official reconstruction of working women as sexually dangerous and economically and socially threatening, the interdependence of class and gender norms made it virtually impossible to make factory girls the heroines of their own stories; they had to be written into the class/gender ideology of the time, that is, domesticated, or, if not, punished for their failure to be confined to the labor of the house. Narrative retribution can take the form of disease and death or mutilation, as in Gaskell's North and South; unmarried solitude as in Sybil; invisibility as in Shirley and George Eliot's Felix Holt; victimization by brutal husbands as in Charles Dickens's Hard Times, George Gissling's Nether World, and Rudyard Kipling's Record of Bedalia Herodsfoot; or even editorial deletion, also in Hard Times. As Johnson says in reference to Hard Times, The dead factory girl in heaven becomes the image through which all conflict-both domestic and political-will be magically resolved (41).Alternatively, the factory girl can be singled out as better than her peers and thus amenable to reformation to middle-class feminine ideals: a disguised aristocrat in Sybil, a daughter of a factory worker apprenticed to a milliner by her idealistic father in Mary Barton, an anomalous moral figure in the midst of degradation in Frances Hodgson Burnett's That Lass O' Lowries. As Johnson points out, pre-1842 industrial novels such as Helen Fleetwood (183941) presented powerfully detailed descriptions of factory girls' lives and created images of strong women who claimed autonomy, but, with the exception of Mary Barton (1848), after the Commission's report, both such realities and such women became unnarratable (27). As we see in Chapter Three, Sybil (1845), for example, ambiguously figures women as both particular, classed subjects and as the ideal woman but ends by containing Sybil within the domestic sphere; an unencumbered representation of autonomous working-class women would have exposed only too clearly the contradictions within and between class and gender ideologies. …