The Space of Optimism: State Fantasy and the Case of The Odd Women

Abstract

It is a commonplace to think of the Victorian period as a hopeful age. Confronted with the life-altering consequences of industrialization, the fluctuations of capitalism and imperialism, and the struggles of gender and class politics, many Victorians devoted themselves to the prospect of social reform. Whether through such measures as philanthropy or legislation, they espoused the belief that their respective solutions could transform collective experience for the better. Meanwhile, for improvement on the individual level, Victorians of all classes often turned to such touchstones of liberal individualism as culture, marriage, enterprise, and religion, which together comprised a kind of bourgeois canon of hope. Appearing in conduct manuals, biographies, Christian tracts, and novels, these touchstones promised in different ways the possibility of achieving a personhood at once fuller and more buoyant—one that could rise above the anxieties, dissatisfactions, and cruelties of everyday life. This essay proposes to investigate specific Victorian objects of optimism and the fantasies in which they unfold by focusing on a rupture in the late-nineteenth-century British popular imaginary. In particular, I will track how this rupture enters the social world of George Gissing's The Odd Women (1893). During this period, placing optimism in objects such as philanthropy and religion was ordinary, if not uncontested. However, by the 1880s and 1890s, these objects' meanings were adjusting to the circulation of a new object of optimism and the fantasy in which it starred: "the State" as a heroic actor. Given the dominance of a nationalist ideology of bourgeois individualism, it is all the more striking that by the end of the century it could become normal to hope that "the State" could transform one's life for the better. In a wide range of late-nineteenth-century British discourses, fiction and nonfiction, writers both statist and anti-statist engaged in hopeful fantasy as they personified governmental social services and [End Page 55] regulatory practices into an acting subject, a kind of meta-liberal individual. The syntax of the sentence "The State ought to x" is the primary enunciatory phenomenon under investigation here. The capitalized "S" of its subject and the ethical imperative contained in its verb refer to the historical fantasy of a monolithic state that could and should intervene in economic and social brutalities. By virtue not only of the transforming powers of the law but also the performative power of its subjects' appeals, the Victorian state in the last two decades of the nineteenth century was garnering a new phantasmatic register, one in which it was imaginatively endowed with the capacity to grant the plenitude that liberal political philosophy and capitalist ideology promised but routinely denied. I refer to this register as "state fantasy." Even critics of state intervention, like Herbert Spencer, were susceptible to it, vilifying and thereby animating this notion of the state. After briefly elaborating what I mean by state fantasy, I will turn to The Odd Women to analyze an instance of its cultural manifestation. Nonfiction genres such as parliamentary speeches and political philosophy attest to increases in interventionist legislation and in references to the state as a kind of person. They also forward arguments about how individuals and their environments are constituted and about how change enters such systems. However, novels not only do the same, but also something else unique to their genre. Committed to representing the everyday, they reveal the uneven paths phenomena such as new laws or municipal innovations take to becoming ordinary: novels model for the citizen-reader how to integrate such phenomena into the experience of daily life. Novels are thus demonstrative, but not in the passive sense to which realist art pretends. Rather, they can demonstrate how historical events shift from being news to becoming taken for granted. In some ways, The Odd Women may not seem like the most obvious of Gissing's novels to select for such a project. Literary critics have...