REDESIGNING FEMININITY:MISS MARJORIBANKS'S DRAWING-ROOM OF OPPORTUNITY

Abstract

Margaret Oliphant's work has of late received renewedattention for her portrayal of heroines who struggle against the confines of proper middle-class femininity – who are at once sympathetic and yet do not fit the model of the submissive Victorian domestic angel – andMiss Marjoribanks(1866) is no exception. Without fully discounting the Victorian notion that there is a proper place women ought to occupy,Miss Marjoribanksraises complex questions about how that place is defined and limited. Recent scholarly attention to the novel highlights Oliphant's sustained engagement with the issue of how far propriety and custom circumscribe a woman's place. Such examinations, however, fail to address the extent to which Oliphant demonstrates the flexibility of cultural notions of a woman's place by focusing the action ofMiss Marjoribanksalmost entirely on the heroine's creation of a very specific physical place for herself – her drawing-room. ExaminingMiss Marjoribanks's portrayal of how a Victorian woman might capitalize on the centrality of the drawing-room in shaping cultural notions of feminine identity, this essay argues that once Lucilla Marjoribanks has established the drawing-room as a physical and ideological space that will contain her actions, she uses this space and all it represents to expand the boundaries of her cultural place. By focusing specifically on the work its heroine undertakes within her drawing-room and by asserting that a woman's power lies in the possibility for feminine taste to accomplish action, Oliphant's novel, like her heroine, operates within the “prejudices of society” while simultaneously offering a means to exploit those prejudices. This architecturally-motivated re-reading of Oliphant's novel in turn suggests a re-reading of Oliphant's own career. For I would argue that novels operated for Oliphant the way that drawing-rooms do for Lucilla: they provided a culturally-sanctioned place in which to locate herself, and thereby reaffirm her respectable feminine position, even while she undertook projects that challenged Victorian assumptions about gendered identity.