Old Heroes and a New Heroine in the Waverley Novels

Abstract

Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse, Jeanie and Effie Deans, Lucy Snowe, Catherine Earnshaw, Becky Sharp, Mary Barton, Dorothea Brooke and Gwendolyn Harleth, Clara Middleton and Diana Warwick, Tess Durbeyfield and Sue Brideshead, Kate Croy and, of course, those travelling Americans, Isabel Archer, Milly Theale, and Maggie Verver. For most of us these names echo powerfully, invoking the great stories told about them and, more generally, invoking one of the most impressive periods of sustained productivity in a genre, British fiction in the nineteenth century. For there are also other names, too many to mention, created by some of the writers who created these and by others less presently familiar. What must strike us about these names is that they all belong to women. I begin with these women, with the phenomenon itself, the fact of them, the sheer weight of their existence. And that weight is more than mere numbers. In their novels they play a major, and often the major, role. They are not a Daisy Buchanan or Hester Prynne, significant, yes, often even central, but only as some combination of myth and pawn. Nor are they a Sophia Western, too straightforwardly luscious to be mythic but hardly the main event. They don't exist as an other, however dynamic, outside the central consciousness of the narrative. And they cannot be summed up as one of those convenient siblings, the light and dark heroines. They are not the reward or the beings about whom or for whom others undergo struggles of conscience. They undergo those struggles, make their choices and live out, or perhaps die of, the consequences of their actions. Like else, they pays their money and takes their chance. So often in literature that everybody else,' at least in the foreground, has been male. But in Britain, in the nineteenth century, in novel after novel, there they are. Now it should be clear that the men are there as well. I need only mention Edward Waverley, Heathcliff, Henry Esmond, Adam Bede, and Michael Henshard. But this essay is not about them.