The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett. Thomas Recchio

and Burnett’s diversions in her handling of female characterization and the psychology of the fallen women are not, however, registered in the critical history of the Victorian industrial novel. It would be enlightening to place Burnett’s two industrial novels in the context of arguments made in, for instance, Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (1958), Louis Cazamian’s The Social Novel in England, 1830–1850: Dickens, Disraeli, Mrs. Gaskell, Kingsley (1973), John Lucas’s The Literature of Change (1980), Catherine Gallagher’s The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, 1832–1867 (1985), Josephine Guy’s The Victorian Social Problem Novel (1996) and Susan Zlotnick’s Women, Writing, and the Industrial Novel (1998) among others.

6For a discussion of the significance of silence in relation to the fallen woman, see Thomas Recchio’s “Elizabeth Gaskell as ‘A Dramatic Common’: Stanley Houghton’s Appropriation of Mary Barton in Hindle Wakes.” The Gaskell Journal, vol. 26 (2012): 88–102, 127.

7Gaskell too destabilizes gender norms in Mary Barton, but she does so by revealing the nurturing qualities of Jog Legh, who dresses as a woman in his attempt to care for his newly orphaned granddaughter. The cross-dressing Job is also the novel’s amateur naturalist.

8Mark J. Noonan. Reading the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine: American Literature and Culture, 1870–1893. Kent, Ohio: Kent State UP, 2010, p. 49.

9“A Secret Garden of Repressed Desires: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s That Lass O’Lowries.” Dickens Studies Annual, vol. 32 (2002): 363–78 (369).

10The Norton Critical Edition of Mary Barton, edited by Thomas Recchio, 2008, p. 485.

11For an extended exploration of the significance and dangers for women in the Victorian era to be on public display by venturing into the street unaccompanied or being otherwise visible, see Deborah Epstein Nord’s Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City. A willful manipulation and reversal of the dangers of such visibility is enacted by Rachel Ffrench in Haworth’s.

12See Emily Dickinson’s “I Hear a Fly Buzz” and “I Died for Beauty” for the most apt examples.

13“An Ethnography of the Provincial: The Social Geography of Gentility in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford.” Victorian Studies, vol. 41 (Spring 1998): 405–26 (405).

14The Slowbridge of A Fair Barbarian might be productively added to the communities discussed in Nina Auerbach’s Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction (1978), adding it to the literature of village fiction in England and America in the nineteenth century.

15For a detailed analysis of that point, see Thomas Recchio’s “‘Charming and Sane’: School Editions of Cranford in America, 1905–1914.” Victorian Studies, vol. 45, no. 4 (Summer 2003): 597–623.

16Alex Zwerdling. Improvised Europeans: American Literary Expatriates and the Siege of London. New York: Basic Books, 1998, p. 22.

17“Current Fiction.” Literary World, vol. 12, no. 9 (April 23, 1881): 23, 146.

18Clementina Black. “The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett.” Time, vol. 12, no. 1 (January 1885): 72–85.

19R. H. Stoddard. “Frances Hodgson Burnett.” The Critic, vol. 1, no. 25 (December 17, 1881): 345–47.

20James H. Morse. “The Native Element in American Fiction.” Century Illustrated Magazine, vol. XXVI, no. 3 (1883): 362–75.

21Ainsworth R. Spofford. “Directions and Volume of Our Literary Activities.” Forum (January 1894): 598–604.

22Rita Felski. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995, p. 120.

       Chapter Two

       WRITING AS AN AMERICAN: THE PORTRAIT OF A WASHINGTON LADY

      I

      The three novel sequence established by Gaskell and echoed by Burnett sketched out in the last chapter has an echo in a parallel disruption of that sequence: Gaskell interrupted the serial numbers of Cranford in order to write her fallen woman novel Ruth, and between Haworth’s and A Fair Barbarian Burnett wrote “Louisiana, her first American novel” (Thwaite 65). But unlike the three novel sequence, there is little material connection between Ruth and Louisiana beyond the happenstance fact that the title of both novels is the name of the main female character and that the concealment of their family names (and thus identities) drives what there is of a plot since in both novels the revelation of the woman’s true identity constitutes the crisis. The character Louisiana is, like Ruth, young and naïve, but she, unlike Ruth, is not an orphan, nor is she in her innocence deceived into a fallen state for which she must atone by her own self-sacrificing death. Rather Louisiana, a country girl from the hills of North Carolina, allows herself to be misrepresented by a New York female acquaintance whom she meets at a resort within a couple of hours travel from her home. Struck by the freshness and originality of Louisiana’s beauty, the New Yorker, Miss Olivia Ferrol, sets out to enhance Louisiana’s appearance by substituting her country dress with a few of Miss Ferrol’s own, all high fashion designs from New York. Miss Ferrol’s brother Laurence, an aspiring novelist, is soon to follow his sister to the resort. Louisiana agrees to an experiment proposed by Miss Ferrol not to reveal her antecedents to the brother once he arrives, for, as the British periodical Examiner (May 22, 1880) put it in its review of the novel, “She [Miss Ferrol] and her brother are both fond of studying ‘new types’ of humanity” (644). In that way Louisiana becomes an object of analytical interest for the two New Yorkers, a situation with a powerful though implicit harshness.

      The following scene captures that harshness.

      One moonlight night, as they [Louisiana, Laurence, and Olivia] sat on an upper gallery, he began to speak of the novelty of the aspect of the country as it presented itself to an outsider who saw it for the first time.

      “It is a new life, and a new people,” he said. “And, by the way, Olivia, where is the new species of young woman I was to see—the daughter of the people who does not belong to her sphere?”

      He turned to Louisiana.

      “Have you ever seen her?” he asked. “I must confess to a dubiousness on the subject.”

      Before he could add another word Louisiana turned upon him. He could see her face clearly in the moonlight. It was white, and her eyes were