A selective reading of the reviews of Burnett’s novels could be done to arrive at radically different conclusions about the thematic emphases and literary qualities of her work. I could have looked at other reviews and drawn other conclusions about Burnett’s novels more broadly but not necessarily about her heroines. They remain in the body of reviews as a whole various and contradictory, similar qualities celebrated or condemned. Joan is strong, Clorinda versatile and physically adept, Emily stoic, long-suffering and immovable. But whether those heroines are read as “reproducing or heroically resisting a univocal dominant ideology” (Felski 142) is not the point. Rather reading Burnett’s novels with close attention to her heroines in the context of her originating Victorian context and tracking how that context changes to what recent critics have discussed in terms of popular modernism enables us to recognize in her novels what Rita Felski has claimed for women’s popular fiction in the period of high modernism: “popular fiction,” she writes, “can more usefully be read as comprising a variety of ideological strands that cohere or contradict each other in diverse ways” (142). The reproduction/resistance dichotomy becomes a way to simplify and, depending on the ideological position of the critic, to praise or blame. In writing about the work of Marie Corelli under the category of “the popular sublime,” Felski emphasizes ambiguity, the tension in Corelli’s work between “a critical response to irresolvable tensions within the social” and “conservative affirmations of the eternal verities of sexual and racial otherness which are less easily reconciled with any form of resistive impulse” (143). (One’s mind might move not unfairly upon reading those quotations to T. S. Eliot, a point I will address at length in the last chapter.) As noted earlier, Burnett’s work has not been addressed in the recent reassessments of popular fiction. It should be. For not only do Burnett’s novels have the same tensions between resistance and accommodation critics have been exploring in popular modernism, their origins are squarely within the practices of Victorian realism, which Burnett both relies on and reinflects in a way that we might recognize today as Neo-Victorian.
Consider the contrast between Burnett’s emphasis on the literal bodily size and strength of Joan Lowrie and Clorinda Wildairs, for instance, and the emphasis in Victorian domestic fiction on the airy, disembodied heroine as angel in the house. Helena Michie addresses that point as follows: “Even though some Victorian works on beauty espouse ‘plumpness’ in young women, the most positive female characters in nineteenth-century novels are most often frail and weak.”34 She then addresses a gallery of characters from Charlotte Bronte (the contrast between the ethereal Lucy Snow and the voluptuous Ginevra Fanshawe in Villette), George Eliot (the plump Hetty Sorrel and the increasingly thin Dinah Morris in Adam Bede) and Anthony Trollope (too many characters qualify to list), and draws these conclusions: “bigger, more strikingly beautiful women are somehow suspect” (think of Blanche Ingram in Jane Eyre); and “[T]he aesthetic of weakness and hunger only thinly disguises an ideology of male dominance” (22). Thus, male dominance depends on the diminishment of the physical realities of the female body, which must be deprived in one way or another to weaken it, making women fundamentally dependent and subservient. Michie locates resistance to that ideology of male dominance through denying the physical realities of woman’s bodies in the poetry of Adrienne Rich in the 1970s. “For Rich,” Michie observes,
the “abstract” that must be ‘broken through’ is identified with metaphor and figuration […]. In “Natural Resources,” she insists on literalness […]. In describing the work of a female miner, she says:
The miner is no metaphor. She goes
Into the cage like the rest, is flung
Downward by gravity like them, must change
Her body like the rest to fit a crevice.
In resisting metaphor, Rich, along with many other feminists, aligns it with denial of the body. (139)
Rather than a metaphoric “angel,” Burnett’s first novelistic heroine Joan Lowrie is a miner, who works as hard as any man and has the physical strength beyond the capacities of most of her male peers. There is no way to deny the physical capacity of her body for productive labor. She even has a physical courage beyond the others in the mine, demonstrated by her heroism during a mine accident. And like the pit-girl recollected in Burnett’s youth, Joan is under constant physical threat from her brutal father. So even though she is the romantic lead in the narrative, an object of male desire, she too “goes/into the cage like the rest, is flung/downward by gravity.” Burnett, in 1877 not 1977, gives expression to the literality of the female body as a human body, expressive in its capacity for productivity and potential for emotional, imaginative and sexual fulfillment.
IV
In the chapters that follow, I have organized my readings of Burnett’s novels based on their generic variety and rough chronology: Victorian domestic realistic novels of the 1870s and early 1880s, American regional fiction in the early to mid-1880s, historical fiction in the 1890s, transatlantic novels in the early twentieth century and post-World War I modernist romance in the early 1920s. There is some overlapping of categories and unevenness in the chronology, which will become apparent in the details of my discussion in each chapter. For the purpose of this introduction, I will lay out the contours of each chapter.
Three of Burnett’s first four novels are clearly in the tradition of Victorian domestic realism, a tradition still very much alive in the 1870s. Two are located in industrial settings and the third in an English village. That Lass O’Lowries (1877) is an industrial novel, one of a number of subcategories under domestic realism, and is set in a Lancashire mining town. It focuses on the domestic life of Joan Lowrie, who works in the mines, and her drunken brute of a father. Its concerns most broadly are with the plight of the working class. Haworth’s (1879) is also an industrial novel, but its focus is on the owners of a factory, and the tension between their efforts to develop technology that would displace workers and the workers’ resistance to losing their jobs. A Fair Barbarian (1881) is an English village idyll, with a difference; it is visited by a brash American girl, whose father had been born in the village before emigrating to the American west as a young man. The girl’s arrival threatens the equilibrium of the village. Placing those novels next to the pattern of novels in Elizabeth Gaskell’s early career, the parallels are striking. Mary Barton, with its focus on working-class suffering; North and South, with its focus on the moral tensions among factory owners and between factory owners and workers; and Cranford, with its concerns about a traditional English village struggling to maintain its identity in the face of social change arguably provide a pattern of development for an aspiring woman novelist from the very place where Gaskell lived and worked. In this chapter I will explore the relation between Burnett’s and Gaskell’s early novels in the context of American literary culture at a time when that culture was unsure of its own center of gravity. In order to demonstrate the productive influence Gaskell’s work had on Burnett’s, I will address the American reliance on British literary precedents in literary culture, notably in Scribner’s Magazine, which became The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine in 1881; how Burnett deployed those antecedents to establish her literary authority; and then how she may be said to have spoken through those antecedents as she shaped her own identity as an important literary figure even as she created heroines defined more by their vitality than their “wise” passivity.
The fourth of Burnett’s novels was published between the industrial and village novels and is a rural American story entitled Louisiana (1880), the name of the novel’s heroine. That novel has