“Self-sacrifice may be Quite Wrong”: Women’s Education and Finances in The Odd Women (1893) by George Gissing

Samiya Alam,Aimillia Ramli

doi:10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.9n.5p.119

Abstract

In late-nineteenth-century Britain, the surplus number of single women presented an internal crisis that accumulated in a number of debates on the subject in various fields, such as economy and education. While much have been written about these in relation to the social context of the time, little have been said specifically about the way single women and their educational and financial positions are presented in late-nineteenth-century English novels. This paper focusses on George Gissing’s (1857-1903) novel The Odd Women (1893) and its portrayal of single women and the parallel roles played by money and education in the women’s decision to remain unmarried. The method applied in this study is based on contextual as well as textual analyses and interpretation of the novel in light of feminist and Marxist literary theories. This study investigates the impact of socio-economic conditions on the lives of single women towards the end of the nineteenth century. The result of this study shows the novel makes a correlation between women’s level of education and financial situation with their choice to remain single.

Highlights

This paper focuses primarily on the status and treatment of women in George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893) that is written and set in late-nineteenth-century Britain within the context of women’s education and financial position
We argue that Gissing was deeply concerned with the issue of women’s education as shown in The Odd Women and that the narrative implies that only through education by way of vocational training that women could find financial independence and freedom, from forced marriages
Gissing’s novel, according to Patricia Ingham, in her “Introduction” to The Odd Women, is best illuminated by showing how it engages with all the major social and sexual issues that were fiercely debated as the nineteenth century approached its close

Summary

Introduction

This paper focuses primarily on the status and treatment of women in George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893) that is written and set in late-nineteenth-century Britain within the context of women’s education and financial position. It would not be too far-fetched to argue that The Odd Women depicted rapid transformations in the lives of women in the late nineteenth century as, by this time, they had begun challenging established social norms by working in offices and shops and, in some instances, gaining the right to attend university or college in fiction as well as in reality (Ledger, 1997; Richardson, 2002) For some of these women, complete autonomy was an aspired yet radical goal. In “The Literal Heroine: A Study of Gissing’s ‘The Odd Women’”, Karen Chase remarks, “Gissing’s statements on the Woman Question were as awkward and confused as his relations with women” (Chase, 1984, 231) In his portrayal of “The Women Question” in The Odd Women, Gissing, as this paper argues, took the middle-ground as his novel supported neither patriarchy nor the feminist movement. We argue that Gissing was deeply concerned with the issue of women’s education as shown in The Odd Women and that the narrative implies that only through education by way of vocational training that women could find financial independence and freedom, from forced marriages

Methods

Results

Conclusion