The Woman and the Hour: Harriet Martineau and Victorian Ideologies by Caroline Roberts (review)

Abstract

1036 Reviews the unconditional' (p. 23), for 'Such stories are commonplaces of Western cultural inheritance' (p. 24), moving between 'purity and materiality', seeking how to know. It is narrative itself, and metaphor within narrative, a procedure and its tools, that Levine repeatedly identifies as the means by which epistemology works: as forCarlyle, who finds uncomfortably that 'Metaphor is itself a perfect metaphor for the mate? rial, since the material world too?even the bowels?is not detached from meaning, but the divine and human way of articulating it' (p. 76). Though Levine examines both disguised and overt autobiographies (from John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, Anthony Trollope; from Mary Somerville, Harriet Martineau, and Beatrice Webb), it is novels that best work 'not as complicit victims of an ideology but largely if not entirely sympathetic explorers ofthe possibilities and values of that ideology' (p. 295), opening up, perhaps not truth, but the conditions of discovery. Dickens, George Eliot, and Hardy provide the 'epistemological narratives' examined here: Our Mutual Friend, Daniel Deronda, and Jude the Obscure, three rich last novels fascinated both with truth and with death. Through the complications of 'gendered schizophrenia' (p. 171) in Dickens, postcolonial problematics and the Palestinian question forGeorge Eliot, and forHardy the impossibility of an 'ideal rejection ofthe material' (p. 219) when 'narrative fundamentally implicates its characters in the act of knowing', these chapters brilliantly engage with rebarbative, novelistic 'mate? riality' in testing the overall thesis of Dying toKnow. A particular strength here is the attention given to narrative technique, voice, and perspective, which are perceived to offerboth immersion in consciousness and 'objectivity'. Levine is clearly aware of trends in critical theory, generous to other approaches, and scrupulous in avoiding the blunders of naivety over his own critical situatedness, but his thesis allows this book to negotiate those dangers in a way analogous to the scientific epistemologist's quest for truth through the phenomena of circumstance. This makes a virtue of necessity and thickens the rich mixture of an important and stimulating if difficultwork. University of Reading Nicola Bradbury The Woman and theHour: Harriet Martineau and Victorian Ideologies. By Caroline Roberts. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press. 2002. ix + 253pp. $50; ?32. ISBN 0-8020-3595-5. This is a tremendous book. It concerns Harriet Martineau (1802-76), writer,educationist , reformer,intellectual, and celebrity. But it is not merely an analysis of contro? versial writings of a rather remote, ifcontentious, Victorian; rather,it seeks to situate the analysis in the ideological structures and ideas ofthe time, thus illuminatingboth the intentions and scope of Martineau herself,critical responses to her published work, and the circumstances in which certain ideas and discourses were able to emerge and catch the popular imagination. Martineau was an extraordinarily successful writer,on 'masculine' topics such as political economy and history as well as more conventional 'feminine' topics such as children's tales and education. Her earnings amounted to over ? 10,000 over her lifetime. Indeed, the work which made her famous, Illustrations of Political Economy, vastly outsold John Stuart Mill's more 'authoritative' work. To declare my interest in this book, I am one of an increasing number of Mar? tineau scholars attempting to make the case forthe recognition of Martineau as a key literary and intellectual figure, an early and notable observer, researcher, writer,and journalist, active in a wide range of fields. George Eliot commented on her status as the firstwoman journalist in England, and more recently, since 1996, a Harriet Martineau Sociological Society has focused on the sociological work of Martineau and other early women sociologists. MLR, 99.4, 2004 1037 However, as Roberts points out, Martineau's greatest challenge to modern scholar? ship has been her eclecticism, which resists simplification. Her prolific literary output means that it would take a lifetime to read all that she wrote, while the 'immersion of her work in the immediate' (p. 5) has led to its being considered relevant only to the Victorian age and of relatively minor interest elsewhere. However, Roberts superbly challenges this limited view of Martineau's work by a close reading of selected texts, using Foucault's illumination ofthe construction and orderingof knowledge to guide the analysis...