Ideologies of Patriarchy, Feminism, and Fiction in "The Odd Women"

Abstract

George Gissing's The Odd Women begins with the death of a father, an event that can be read as the emblematic demise of the Victorian patriarch, and ends with the birth of his granddaughter, perhaps the birth of a brave New Woman. But this is no easy fable in which oppressive patriarchy is vanquished by liberating feminism, nor, for that matter, where feminism is chillingly discredited by the chosen celibacy of its most aggressive spokeswoman, Rhoda Nunn. The Odd Women is a complex and ambiguous novel about the price of social change. Set in London in the late eighteen eighties, it tells two stories: One, with sympathetic irony, describes the struggle for material and psychological survival of three sisters, Alice, Virginia, and Monica Madden. The other story problematically represents the life and work of two feminists, Mary Barfoot and Rhoda Nunn, who, through the training of women for secretarial work, seek to alleviate the social plight in which women such as the uneducated and impoverished Madden sisters find themselves. As the novel develops the relationship between these two groups of female characters, it traces a disastrous marriage between Monica and a pitiable misogynist, Edmund Widdowson, and a politically charged love affair between Rhoda and Mary's cousin, Everard Barfoot. At the end of the novel, which sees the end of the marriage and the end of the