SENSATIONAL BILDUNG? INFANTILIZATION AND FEMALE MATURATION IN BRADDON’S 1860S NOVELS

Abstract

That very childishness had charm which few could resist. The innocence and candour of an infant beamed in Lady Audley's fair face, and shone out of her large and liquid blue eyes. The rosy lips, delicate nose, profusion of fair ringlets, all contributed to preserve to her beauty character of extreme youth and freshness.1It has long been recognized that Victorian women were infantilized in variety of ways. Practices such as doctrine of coverture, withholding of suffrage, and laws preventing married women from owning property, meant that in legal terms mid-nineteenth century woman's position was synonymous with that of child. Restrictions on women's social mobility, cult of dependency, and lack of higher educational opportunities through which women might develop their intellectual capacities, all contributed to this infantilization process. Each of these areas of women's lives became focus of feminist campaigns from midcentury; but perhaps most invidious was cultural dissemination of powerful stereotypes of femininity, which could not be redressed through legal reform or challenged formally in any straightforward way. Though there were multiple competing prescriptions of femininity during period, image of innocent childlike woman continued to exert potent hold over Victorian cultural imagination.In this essay, I want to trace Braddon's literary engagement with stereotype of infantilized woman and argue that maturation is persistent and important theme of her early fiction. Moreover, in their recurrent interest in maturation and development, these novels inevitably echo central concerns of Bildungsroman, genre which has generated great deal of feminist critical interest over past three decades.2 Much of this criticism has largely agreed on impossibility of true Victorian Bildungsroman. Annis Pratt, for example, argues that novel of development is contradiction in terms, and that up female in nineteenth century was actually down, a choice between auxiliary or secondary personhood, sacrificial victimization, madness and death.3 Other critics, who accept tradition of Bildungsromane before twentieth century, nevertheless maintain its essential difference from typical male form, primarily in terms of heroine's inability to develop meaningfully and to achieve full personhood and self-fulfilment by end. Susan Fraiman takes this negative view of potential for Bildung, calling growing up a deformation, gothic disorientation, loss of authority, an abandonment of goals.4 Even critics who dissent from this argument, and who have attempted to demonstrate more positive tradition of Bildungsroman writing in England before twentieth century, have to admit validity of down claim. Lorna Ellis, for example, allows that, on whole, the protagonists begin as self-assured young women who question their subordinate place in society, but endings find them less active, less assertive, and reintegrated into society through marriage.5I am not attempting to argue here that Braddon's novels are Bildungsromane in sense that Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre or George Eliot's The Mill on Floss are often claimed to be. However, embedded within sensation plot (and often crucially reliant on it) is narrative of development, which typically sees heroine's rejection of infantilizing tendencies of her society and traces process towards, and achievement of, maturity. My contention is that by analysing such trajectories of maturation in Braddon's fiction of 1860s against context of an emerging Bildungsroman tradition, it becomes apparent that sensation plot functions, in part, as vehicle through which these heroines are enabled to achieve autonomy, maturation and selfhood. …