Plotting the Mother: Caroline Norton, Helen Huntingdon, and Isabel Vane

Abstract

The proper Victorian heroine neither acts nor plots. Heroines as disparate as Fanny Price of Mansfield Park and Gwendolen Harleth of Daniel Deronda prove their virtue by failing as actresses.' When Fanny protests, Indeed, I cannot act, we know that it is because she cannot be other than what she is: virtuous.2 Gwendolen Harleth's aborted attempt to make a career as an actress seems, in Daniel Deronda, to signal her essential difference from Princess Halm-Eberstein, mother who has abandoned Daniel in order to pursue her acting career. Gwendolen is flawed, but at least she is not an actress. In dominant literary form for women writers, courtship novel, heroine is a modest woman, usually passive, unconscious of her sexuality, in transition from father's house-or a substitute therefor-to husband's house. We follow her gradual awakening as others plot and act around her-for her marriage, for its frustration, for money or power or influenceuntil their plots finally converge with her (heretofore unarticulated) desires, and she is married. Or, perhaps, their plots prevail, she transgresses, and she dies.3 In either case, her story usually ends when she must cast off one roleusually that of daughter or eligible young thing-for another-usually that of wife, although sometimes (in case of transgressive heroine) mother or mistress. Heroines of Victorian novel must, it seems, be one thing only; they must not act roles, but embody them. Motherhood is particularly problematic, then, for as Marianne Hirsch notes, the multiplicity of 'women' is nowhere more obvious than for figure of mother, who is always both mother and daughter-and often wife and/or lover as well.4 This difficulty about motherhood provides one possible explanation for why heroines of Victorian novels are so rarely mothers.5 As Hirsch continues, the nineteenth-century heroine ... tends not only to be separated from figure and story of her mother, but herself tries to avoid maternity at all costs.6 Victorian heroines, especially heroines of novels by women, such as Jane Eyre, Dorothea Brooke, or Maggie Tulliver, tend to be motherless or