Victorian Literature and Culture (2007), 35, 385395. Printed in the United States of America.

Copyright C 2007 Cambridge University Press. 1060-1503/07 $9.50

WOMEN AND DOMESTIC CULTURE

By Talia Schaffer

I WANTED TO WRITE a review essay about recent studies of Victorian domestic culture because I had noticed that an unusual number of books on this topic have been published within the last few years. Both Lynn Alexanders Women, Work, and Representation: Needlewomen in Victorian Art and Literature and Beth Harriss Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century address needlework. Beth Sutton-Ramspecks Raising the Dust: The Literary Housekeeping of Mary Ward, Sarah Grand, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Kristine Swensons Medical Women and Victorian Fiction focus on caretaking. Jennifer Phegleys Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation and Mary Wilson Carpenters Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies; Women, Sexuality and Religion in the Victorian Market describe mass readership practices. I began to wonder whether this publishing trend indicates that we are in a new feminist cultural studies moment, and if so, how might we characterize this new kind of work? In order to gure this out, I will rst give a brief overview of the theoretical and practical inuences shaping recent books, then turn to specic analysis of the books under discussion here, and end by evaluating what they mean for contemporary domestic-culture criticism. When I started reading, I was curious about what kind of theoretical afliation these books would display, since, as I see it, there are three main ways one can approach domestic culture. First, the dominant line of cultural-studies analysis, descending from Michel Foucault, reads objects as histories of complex negotiations of self-denition. From parsing an advertisement or an antimacassar, one can elicit the way its construction and its circulation articulated its periods social, sexual, and economic anxieties. While the artifact often invites alternative identications, ultimately it conrms its owner in a socially and ideologically acceptable situation. Although this approach is frequently critiqued for insisting on a narrative of inevitable co-optation, this very fatalism seems to make it especially suitable for an era which taught nonconformists to repress themselves in order to conform to dominant social and moral rules. Not surprisingly, then, Foucaldian cultural work has been a powerful presence in Victorian studies, and many of our best critics owe something to this line of thought: Nancy Armstrong, Mary Poovey, Kate Flint, Catherine Gallagher, and Carolyn Steedman. Pierre Bourdieu has inuenced a second and somewhat different theoretical way of reading objects: thing theory. This style engages centrally with Marxs commodity theory and theorizes about the nature of the object; its most eminent practitioners include 385

386

VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Arjun Appadurai, Bill Brown, Michael Thompson, and Mihaly Czikszentmihaly. Thing theory tries to dene the thing itself, analyzing the extent to which we endow the inanimate with unsettling, uncanny agency; the contemporary Western commodity and display systems that construct the value of things; the relative meaning of things in different cultures, especially non-Western economies; even the nature of materiality itself. As this summary shows, thing theory is strongly grounded in economic and philosophical work, and today it is more prominent in anthropology, art history, and American studies than in Victorian studies. Indeed, thing theory is somewhat problematic for Victorianists, since it often assumes a contemporary American viewpoint for analyzing commodities. However, Elaine Freedgoods forthcoming book, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel, may make thing theory more accessible for Victorian studies, as she explicitly develops a new idea of objecthood that is keyed to the very different way Victorians understood the artifacts with which they lived. The third way of approaching domestic culture texts is what I would call the traditional, in which I include a particular type of both historical practice and feminist recovery work. In a traditional historical analysis, the object is milked for its signicance as key to larger social and economic trends (its testimony to the owners income level, local buying patterns, larger trade routes, social status, and so forth). By calling this style traditional, I dont mean any disrespect; I just want to differentiate it from more explicitly experimental post-Hayden White historicism and New Historicism. Similarly, although there are many possibilities for feminist criticism today, one of the strongest traditions of writing about womens work is that of the passionate defense. The critic claims high status for the domestic artifact and argues that a sexist unfairness has blinded us to its value, while working to establish its centrality to a narrative of Victorian proto-feminist subversion or rebellion. This style, which I call advocacy feminism, is moving, intense, and admirable, but, like Foucaldian criticism, risks incorporating all artifacts into pre-set narratives that may atten out what is actually a much more complicated set of representations. Would the recent work by Alexander, Harris, Phegley, Carpenter, Sutton-Ramspeck, and Swenson turn out to be primarily Foucaldian? Would it show the inuence of thing theory? Or would it hew to older historicist and feminist styles? In fact, this new work does not share any noticeably new theoretical framework. As one might have predicted, the most theoretically interesting (Carpenter and Phegley) are loosely Foucaldian, although they also engage with theoretical work not described here, especially postcolonial theory and queer theory, and, in Carpenters case, psychoanalysis. Nobody uses thing theory, partly because most of these critics are analyzing textual representations of things rather than things themselves. Historicist and feminist writing is still very strongly present, especially in some of the articles in Harriss collection. At the same time, I found that most of these books do follow a specic template and, interestingly, that template is an experiential one, shaped by the exigencies of academic careers and publishing more than by deliberate theoretical self-positioning. Real economic and market pressures are, of course, no less worthy of analysis, and it struck me that outlining the de facto style that has arisen from the current situation of academic feminism might be a valuable thing to do. (It also struck me as rather nicely ironic that my own review of cultural history has turned into something like a minor cultural history itself.) We all know the process. It begins with a dissertation at a research university, in which one compensates for the obscurity of ones subject by ferocious diligence in researching it.

Women and Domestic Culture

387

The research process, in fact, becomes so all-consuming that one loses track of the original justication for the project. The data all apparently has value, since it is all previously unknown. Moreover, one gets fond of it. That data has been acquired so arduously, over such a long time; it is charged with so many nostalgic memories; plus the writer, who is fresh from the devastating critiques of the graduate seminar, is terried of having perhaps inadvertently left something out. So, insensibly, the focus shifts, from investigating an issue to guring out how to pack all this information into ve chapters. The resulting dissertation does not tell narratives so much as trace patterns, map trends over time, and match quotations from disparate references. That is the raw material of the rst book. No matter how much one sharpens the argument, updates references, and reduces some of the data, its original nature remains indelible. Moreover, the writer is often motivated to publish by the urgent deadline of the tenure clock rather than by any deep wish to reveal an important truth to a waiting world. The dissertation may be keyed, with anxious specicity, to the members of the dissertation committee, but the book is too often issued with only the vaguest sense of who the readers are and why they might need this information. (The writer may have come up with a good rationale for publishing it, but that is not the same as a reason to read it.) Indeed, the common phrase, turn it into a book, itself reveals the extent to which the work gets conceptualized as a product, a raw material to be rened into a commodity, instead of discourse or a dialogue with an imagined interlocator. I do not know for sure that all the books I am reviewing here were once dissertations, though I suspect most of them were. But because this paradigm has become the norm among academic books, it affects all writers, regardless of where they are in their careers. It constitutes the shared expectation of readers and writers. Thus books today including the ones discussed here have been marked, in ways big and small, by the paradigm I have just described. They have meticulous scholarship, comprehensive research, a revelatory quantity of information about something I had never thought about much before. But I think it is fair to say that in reading each one, I encountered at least one moment when the critic was so deeply buried in her research that she failed to make an obvious connection or to formulate a necessary justication. It may be a situation where the data bore afnities to other texts of which the researcher was unaware. It may be a situation where the data cried out for analysis when the researcher only wanted to categorize. It may be a situation where a competently performed study simply does not offer any real reason why I need to read it. We have a dominant style for academic books, and getting rid of it (if indeed we want to get rid of it) is not so simple as advocating an end to publish-or-perish, or hoping that people will simply heed a warning and stop writing this way. For the data-heavy tenure book suits us. It wouldnt exist if we didnt want it. It establishes us, when we write it or read it, as masters of the esoteric information that conrms our professional expertise. It transforms what generally seem to be rather non-marketable skills into a recognizeable, quantiable commodity. Perhaps we even want its aws, since detecting them in seminars or reviews reafrms our superior critical acumen. The data-heavy tenure book deeply involved in its own status as commodity or thing, redolent of anxieties about professionalism and academic employment is the representative artifact of our academic culture today. Let me hasten to add that this generalized description does not apply specically to any one of the books under review here. Each book needs to be addressed separately, since each has its own merits. Indeed, what convinced me that I needed to look somewhere other than theoretical afliation to explain this cultural-studies moment was the fact that six such

388

VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

different books, each valuable and some outstanding, nonetheless shared certain attributes, whose recurrence cannot simply be explained by coincidence. An account of the books themselves should clarify what I mean. Lynn Alexanders Women, Work, and Representation: Needlewomen in Victorian Art and Literature is an extremely detailed and conscientious survey of archival materials on a specic subtopic: Victorian representations of impoverished needlewomen. Alexander does an impressive job of summing up what surely must be every obscure novel, short story, painting, and article relating to seamstresses from the 1840s to the 1890s. As she argues, I came to realize that such a study presented the unique opportunity to study the evolution of a symbol, from its beginning as a literal presentation, to its symbolic manifestation, to its acceptance as a cultural commonplace (2). In seven chapters, Alexander traces this semiotic life cycle from the 1830s through the 1890s, discussing the way in which conventions of representing seamstresses developed. Because Alexander has amassed an enormous compilation of data, she is able to notice even the smallest shifts in the distressedseamstress genre. In one passage, for instance, Alexander points out that in 1842 seamstress literature gives accurate, but unsupported, depiction of conditions; in 1843 writers begin to cite government documents and address readers directly to urge solutions; and in 1844, the seamstress narrative uses narrative techniques and characters to create verisimilitude, instead of appealing to the reader or using documentation (51). Detailed as she is on the development of seamstress writing, she is, perhaps, even more tireless in cataloguing the varieties of seamstress iconography in Victorian art. In fteen pages at the end of her chapter on the n de si` cle, for instance, Alexander discusses no less than nineteen seamstress images, e ranging from John Everett Millaiss Stitch! Stitch! Stitch! to Punch cartoons. After reading all this it is hard to know what to wonder at more: Victorian artists insistence on using the same ve or six iconographic elements every time, or Alexanders energetic persistence in nding them and noting every divergence from the model. For anyone working on a text featuring a distressed needlewoman, Women, Work, and Representation is an invaluable source for nding the exact state of contemporary depictions of this gure and for providing detailed information about how this dominant iconography altered, year by year. The problem is that Alexanders intensive research has pushed her too far inside the needlewoman narrative. She does not, for instance, discuss how the needlewoman compares with other Victorian symbols of the female working poor: the governess, the female mineworker, the servant, the prostitute, the factory-worker, the shop-girl. Nor does Alexander examine the seamstresss work conditions as part of changing ideas about labor, employment, business practices, or womens work. I wanted her to address the issue of the seamstresss relation to the amateur sewing woman, either ideologically (how did Victorians regard women who professionalized natural domestic labor?) or economically (how were needlewomen affected by the competition from leisured middle-class women who could do fancy-work for free?). What about looking at the actual products those seamstresses sewed oddly absent from this book as part of changing ideas about aesthetics, textiles, or fashion? It would be especially relevant to show how needlework changed as a result of technological innovations like new dyes, new structures such as crinolines and redesigned corsets, and new machines that could churn out heretofore labor-intensive decorations like lace. But even when Alexander explicitly records something that seems to be crying out for analysis, she simply records its existence and moves on. She points out that the needlewoman narrative includes indignant reproaches to vain female consumers, whose selsh demands

Women and Domestic Culture

389

for immediate delivery of new gowns supposedly caused seamstresses to suffer and die. But Alexander accepts this merely as one stage in the development of the symbol. She never asks why writers attack female consumers middle-class women who had virtually no contact with the sweated workers instead of government regulations, competition in the garment industry, or even local managers of millinery establishments. The demonization of female consumers seems to be a fascinating counterpart to the idealization and victimization of female producers. And surely it tells us something about Victorians that readers of these needlewomen texts might have preferred to demand moral self-reform rather than agitate for structural social change. The place to nd answers to some of these questions is a collection of articles edited by Beth Harris, Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century. Published two years after Alexanders, it charges ahead with an excellent introduction by Harris that, although only eight pages long, hits hard on precisely the issues Alexander occludes. To write about seamstresses, Harris asserts, is to write about culture, technology, feminism, business, labor, shops and shopping, consumers, employers, and employees (1). Harris points out that the urgent and continual repetition of the seamstress narratives conventions indicates that the narrative was being called upon to negotiate and nd solutions for many of the painful changes wrought by industrial capitalism and cites especially the assessment of the problem (that it was the fault of vain and corrupt women, or Jewish capitalists, or a lack of sympathy between the rich and the poor, or an erosion of the working-class family) to show just what ideological work it performed (23). While space forbids a detailed consideration of all the articles in Famine and Fashion, I would like to single out a few of the best. Ian Haywood has a fascinating analysis of an obscure Chartist novel, Cautley Newbys Christmas Shadows, both in terms of Newbys rewriting of Dickensian elements and in terms of the deeper anxieties provoked by needlework. The Victorian myth of the needlewoman was only a partial realization of the economic and political contradictions of female labor, he explains. Because needlework actually offered women the possibility of economic success, this degree of relative economic autonomy was translated into the myths of needlewomens passive victimization and female consumers vanity, thus rewriting economic aggression as immoral (79). Harriss own article about show-shops is a stand-out. Pairing the slop-shop with the show-shop (just as the impoverished needleworker was paired with the wealthy customer), Harris offers an elegant and informative analysis of Victorian uneasiness about specularity and display, and anxiety about the unseen secret suffering of the working class. She connects this anxiety to the antiSemitic rhetoric about Jewish owners of the new clothing emporia, especially the distrust provoked in Victorian consumers by the splendid premises of Moses & Son. Nicola Pullin has an excellent analysis of how the middle class (dressmakers) got erased in the needlewoman story that pitted the very poor (needlewomen) against the very rich (customers). Articles by Arlene Young, Susan Casteras, Rohan McWilliam, and Sheila Blackburn are also ne accounts of their particular subjects. The only really problematic piece, in fact, is Jacqueline M. Chamberss oddly basic article. She argues strenuously that needlework was important to nineteenth-century texts and that women infused needlework into the characters, plots, and images of their works. Needlework serves as a thematic element that helps dene and explain women in moral and social terms (174). Anyone reading this book already knows that needlework was important, but the idea that authors systematically inserted needlework scenes to explain female characters is far too simplistic to be useful.

390

VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

As a collection, Famine and Fashion suffers from an odd set-up. The rst half of the book, and a few articles in the second half, make up a solid set of literary-critical analyses of Victorian needlewoman representations. The second half of the book, however, suddenly diverges into regional histories of American needlewomen in North Carolina, Massachusetts, and Albany, which bear no relation to the rst half of the book or, indeed, to each other. There is also an analysis of needlewomen in Paris thrown in for good measure. I have no objection to these articles, which seem perfectly ne to my untrained eye, but anyone who wants to know about the ideological work performed by the needlewoman myth in the 1840s is not really going to be interested in the curriculum for vocational education in Massachusetts in 1917, at least not unless we are told that it represents something larger than itself. The traditional historicism of the American chapters regionally specic, highly detailed, statistically heavy information comports oddly with the theoretically informed analysis of narratives in the British chapters, and a much stronger editorial hand would be needed to make these two styles speak to one another. Some more editorial guidance, too, would have cut down on the rather tiresome repetitions. Each article reintroduces central gures in the needlewoman narrative (Thomas Hood, Richard Redgrave, Moses and Co., G. W. M. Reynolds, Punch, and so forth) as if the rest of the book does not exist, and even two articles on Chartist depictions of needlewomen, oddly, seem to have no awareness of one another. Famine and Fashion has excellent work in it, but it does not work together. On the other hand, since few people will read the book straight through as I did, this may not matter to most readers, and certainly individual articles are well worth consulting. Along with sewing, Victorian women spent much of their time taking care of the home and the family, and two new books address these activities as fundamental to the evolution of Victorian female roles. I have reviewed Beth Sutton-Ramspecks Raising the Dust: The Literary Housekeeping of Mary Ward, Sarah Grand, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman elsewhere, so I will say here only that it discusses house-cleaning as a metaphor for the New Womens reformist goal: to sweep clean, as Sarah Grand put it, the whole human household. In chapters on motherhood, cookery, sanitation, and, yes, needlework, Sutton-Ramspeck demonstrates that what we too easily dismiss as household drudgery in fact offered a model for imagining valuable and inspiring female labor on the level of national politics. Kristine Swensons solid Medical Women and Victorian Fiction analyzes depictions of medical women in mid- and late-Victorian ction. Swenson starts with Elizabeth Gaskells Ruth, claiming that Gaskell initiates a new tradition of depicting the nurse as a middle-class domestic paragon. But the nurse gure posed a challenge to writers; like the prostitute, she was an independent working woman who worked with naked bodies and risked disease. Moreover, the nurse increasingly threatened the authority of the professional doctor. Swenson thus traces the two dominant representations of medical women: the angelic savior and the threatening harridan. She shows how, in novels by Rhoda Broughton, Anthony Trollope, Charles Reade, and Mary Ward, the threat of nursing gets contained by making the women rened, angelic ladies who take up nursing temporarily and then give it up when they marry. As the ideal nurse became amateurized, however, it was nally becoming possible for women to train as doctors. Swenson gives an informative review of the emerging genre of female-doctor novels in the 1860s and 1870s, discussing the sexual anxieties provoked (and, unexpectedly, resolved) by the female doctor. We are all familiar with the furious opposition to womens medical training, but Swenson reveals that many conservative writers actually supported the notion of female doctors, which would allow female patients to avoid

Women and Domestic Culture

391

exposing themselves to male doctors. Finally, the 1890s show new versions of these two dominant trends. The New Women doctor novels, including two written by actual women doctors Margaret Todds Mona Maclean, Medical Woman and Arabella Kenealys Dr. Janet of Harley Street can then be read in their real context. In their blunt affronts to existing educational policies and behavioral assumptions, they stand in stark contrast to imperial ction by Rudyard Kipling, Hilda Gregg, and H. Rider Haggard, which depicted medically trained women serving in India, Africa, or elsewhere in the empire as emissaries of English ladyhood, nurturing, high-minded, and helpful. Medical Women and Victorian Fiction is a lucid, reliable, and detailed review of depictions of medical women. While it does not pretend to offer earth-shattering new paradigms, it substantially augments earlier studies of medical women and provides an interesting analysis of changing cultural stereotypes over a century. However, as with Alexanders book, I would have liked Swenson to take a broader perspective that accommodated material artifacts and alternative paradigms. It would have been fascinating to see how the changing design of nurses uniforms contributed to the construction of the medical woman; did the starched, white-aproned and capped uniform afliate her with angels or scientic professionals, or both? Was there any attempt to feminize medical implements and equipment? Finally, although Swenson does mention periodicals along the way, she focuses on ction, as her title shows. While Swenson has, of course, the right to limit her study any way she chooses, is it really possible to get to a denitive account of Victorian images of medical women by working almost exclusively in a single genre? I could not help but wonder how her argument might have been complicated had she, for instance, looked at art or read medical journals and periodicals as alternative sites for the emergence of this myth instead of just background for understanding the novels. Swenson clearly knows her eld, and if she tells me that all these other genres corroborate her central ction-based nding, I believe her. But the study itself would have been a richer and more capacious one had she included more serious consideration of other forms of representation. So it is a real pleasure to turn to a book that does a superb job with the Victorian periodical, and, moreover, with a category of Victorian periodical that has not received much attention. In Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation, Jennifer Phegley focuses on what today we might call middlebrow culture: magazines that published family fare, like Harpers, Cornhill, Belgravia, and Victoria Magazine. These magazines constructed intriguingly contradictory and problematic images of the female reader whom they imagined as their audience. Phegleys analysis is elegantly organized, creating a satisfying sense of progression by moving both chronologically and from least-feminist to most-feminist. It is also carefully thought out and beautifully researched. Phegley begins by arguing that the family literary magazines actually worked to empower female readers by offering them forums for becoming knowledgeable writers, readers, and critics (in contrast to elite male-oriented journals, which depicted women as incompetent readers and therefore validated the emergent male literary critic). Yet Phegley resists the temptation to lump all the family literary magazines together as uniformly empowering. Rather, she treats each as an individual case study. I was perhaps most impressed by her treatment of the American journal Harpers, because it shows an immersion in American cultural and national concerns that is particularly impressive from a scholar of the British nineteenth century. In a nuanced and careful reading, she shows how Harpers praised realism

392

VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

and Americanism, while in fact banking on the popularity of its reprinted sentimental and British ction among its female readership. By contrast, The Cornhill, the only quarterly that addressed itself to women, insisted that women must and could be educated and insisted on depicting women as readers of serious ction. Meanwhile, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, the sensation novelist and editor of Belgravia, asserted that her female readers were adults capable of making their own choices. Cleverly, she reversed the values of high and low culture, depicting realism as an inferior style that induced vapid, passive, unrealistic readerly attitudes, while valorizing sensation ction as promoting active, attentive reading practices. But the explicitly feminist magazine Victoria aimed to go even further: to create a feminist literary criticism. Through careful study of Victorias book reviews, Phegley makes a strong case that they developed a form of domesticated sensationalism that maintained an overt moral message that was more covert in the typical sensation novel and thus expanded the function of the family literary magazine (194). Phegleys book is impressive in both research and analysis, but even she suffers from the occupational hazard of over-immersion in her topic and consequent loss of perspective. I see this in two ways. First, she tends to view each of these magazines as a unitary entity intent on promoting a single ideal. She writes as if every story in the Cornhill supported its female-reader-education mission and every article in Belgravia expressed the editors pro-sensation-ction platform. But magazines accommodate multiple points of view, often publishing articles at odds with editorial policy or previously published pieces in order to provoke controversy or appeal to a variety of readerships. The periodical is, surely, the acme of heteroglossia. Second, Phegley sometimes seems to believe that these periodicals invented positions that were, in fact, fairly widespread. For instance, Victorian writers frequently argued that gentlemen must work, or treated ctional characters as if they were real; these really are not startling innovations by the Cornhill, as she seems to suggest. She is also amazed by the correspondence column in Victoria magazine, as though such columns were not already commonplace in domestic magazines like the Englishwomens Domestic Magazine. An equally impressive new book is Mary Wilson Carpenters Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies; Women, Sexuality and Religion in the Victorian Market. Like Phegley, Carpenter wants to analyze a wildly popular middle-class Victorian womens genre that is not taken seriously today. Carpenter has uncovered the category of the family Bible, editions of the Bible with illustrations, commentary, abridgements, and rearrangements of the sacred text. We know that Victorian women knew the Bible, but Carpenter shows us that it is crucially important to know which Bible they knew. Different family Bibles offered widely divergent organization of sacred texts, critical glosses, and editing choices. To Carpenters credit, too, she pays attention to the Bibles as material objects, skillfully parsing their illustrations, inscriptions, size, and colors. As Carpenter points out, the commercial British Family Bible was both advertisement and cultural icon for what the British family wanted to be, but it is also a representation of how what that family wanted to be changed as the nation and its universe changed (5). Carpenter reveals how a consumer Christianity developed, marketed primarily to women, which means that questions about what women should be reading and how they should understand those readings became crucial. For instance, how could producers of Family Bibles parse references to male and female homosexuality? As Carpenter shows, the initial interest in making Biblical knowledge universally available segued into an attempt to split off problematic texts. Often printed in different typeface, set

Women and Domestic Culture

393

off in brackets, and prefaced by explicit instructions to skip them in reading aloud, stories about sexual deviance, the body, and even legalistic passages become matters peculiar to the Jews (36). Carpenter discusses the way illustrations increasingly singled out a female readership, with sentimental depictions but also, interestingly, phallically powerful images of a vengeful Judith. The Family Bibles also constructed a vision of Britain as a domestic nation and reconstructed the British Empire as the extension of domestic blessings to the heathen. Carpenters eye-opening account of the family Bible is matched by her deft, bold readings of major canonical texts: Aurora Leigh, Jane Eyre, Villette, Daniel Deronda. The problem is that the links between the Family Bible material and the readings of novels are often too hasty. It is, I think, a bit of an overstatement to say that the aim of the New Women movement was to suppress the Family Bible (66). Carpenter is right to draw our attention to Villettes fascination with oods, but I am less convinced that all of that novels references to uids derive from the fairly recondite menstruation debate in Biblical critical controversy. Similarly, I am intrigued by her argument that Daniel Deronda reveals a fearful desire to inict circumcision on the female body, but I have to hesitate when part of the evidence for this theory is that the midpoint of the narrative details the events of January 1, on which date the Anglican Church celebrated the Feast of the Circumcision. The encounter between Daniel and Gwendolen on that date seems to construct a Protestant interpretation of the circumcision as the bond that unites Jew and Christian, past and future, history and prophecy (103). Is it carping to suggest that the date of January 1 has other associations, which come to mind much more readily and carry a much more obvious signicance? This trend towards hasty overstatement can sometimes derail an argument. Carpenter rests an entire reading on Jane Eyres famous last words, asserting that Jane is position[ing] herself as the apocalyptic seer who speaks with the authority of the great prophet of the New Testament, creating the impression that the narrative is a feminist apocalypse (138). Only two pages later does Carpenter admit that Jane is quoting and afrming St. John, a male prophet of apocalypse, and even then, she does not seem to register that this fact undermines her argument. Similarly, in her reading of Aurora Leigh, Carpenter uses someones quotation as if it represents the characters (or authors) own idea. She cites Romneys satirical summary of the vicars sermon: the vicar preached from Revelations (till/ The doctor woke), and found me with the frogs/ On three successive Sundays. Romney is therefore a frog, she argues, a foreign contaminant of English purity. Yet it is clear that Romney is poking fun at the Vicar, and that we are supposed to share his contempt. It hardly corroborates his identication with the frogs; it holds it up for laughter (142). Carpenter and Phegley both do superb work on the archival materials on which they have chosen to focus. I will never read a family literary magazine, or a Family Bible, the same way. But both get so buried in their research that they assimilate other aspects of Victorian culture to it without granting the variation and complexity with which cultural assertions operated, and they both get so caught up in the interpretive charge of the editors they analyze that they fail to see when authors actually satirize or rewrite those dominant ideas. Similarly, Alexander and Swenson both give comprehensive and reliable coverage of important Victorian representations of womanhood. I know much more about the needlewoman and the medical woman than I did before, and that knowledge will inform my

394

VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

future readings of Victorian ction. But they both end up primarily aiming to summarize how the development of that representation evolves, more than showing us why that representation matters, or justifying why they work on this particular model instead of other, comparable, images of womanhood. In these ways, the six excellent books under review here show the marks of being published in the era of the data-heavy tenure book. It does not matter whether they themselves were dissertations; the point is that they evoke the common assumption that the critic owns a valuable body of information which it is her job to organize and present. Is it possible to change this model? The Foucaldian would say no, that in fact any attempt to do so only ends up reinforcing the dominant paradigm. This paradigm represents us too deeply simply to renounce it and do something (what?) else. Furthermore, we would only end up replicating the paradigms methodology in the service of critiquing it, and therefore we would unwittingly reinforce the idea that these methods are the only ones possible. I am, for instance, aware that this is an awfully data-heavy critique of the data-heavy paradigm, one that is marked strongly by my awareness of my contractual responsibility to produce a review which presents information about a lot of books. In that sense, my very critique of the data-heavy tenure book is exactly what I am describing: a product that shoves together a lot of data because it is professionally required. And indeed, Foucaldians would say, any critique could only replicate, reinforce, and testify to, the dominant paradigm. So at the end of this review, I nd myself confronting that Foucaldian question: is real rebellion possible? Or will any small attempts at amelioration only give the misleading impression that the paradigm can accommodate changes, and therefore actually make us even happier with it? Can I just say fully aware of how nave it is please, think of your work as a dialogue with interested Victorianists who work on somewhat different things? Please, tell us why we should read your ndings and how they relate to the aspects of Victorian culture we already know? If thing theory is the next big move in Victorian cultural studies, I would like to think that future students of twenty-rst-century academic culture see our work as the kind of thing that troubles the line between animate and inanimate, between commodity and conversation. I would like to see more books that imagine their readers as eager and knowledgeable peers jointly engaged in rethinking the nineteenth century. Nowhere would this be more welcome than in work on Victorian domestic culture. The fact is, to do justice to, say, Charlotte Bront s Lowood, we need to know as much as we can. We need to know not only about e Cowan Bridge, Romantic ideas of childhood, and Victorian philanthropical and educational practices, but also that Bront is critiquing an evangelical line of thought to be found in e family Bibles; nodding to the needlewoman narrative of the 1840s in the image of starving girls forced to sew with bad needles; participating in the evolution of the idealized nurse gure as Jane cares for Helen; expecting us to read for high-status realism while covertly satisfying our taste for sentiment and melodrama. To understand one Victorian novel fully, we would have to know everything. And that is why books that get buried in their one small eld worry me. It is precisely because these studies open up a new world that they need to do it justice. Domestic culture is too important to limit. The best way to afrm the importance of domestic culture to Victorian life generally to show it was not just a minor activity undertaken by people who were not involved with canonical novels is to stop giving book reports from the archives and start showing readers how it mattered.
Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY

Women and Domestic Culture

395

WORKS CONSIDERED
Alexander, Lynn. Women, Work, and Representation: Needlewomen in Victorian Art and Literature. Athens: Ohio UP, 2003. Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990. . Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002. Brown, Bill, ed. Things. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004. Carpenter, Mary Wilson. Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies; Women, Sexuality and Religion in the Victorian Market. Athens: Ohio UP, 2003. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, and Eugene Halton. The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981. Douglas, Mary, and Baron Isherwood. The World of Goods. 1979. New York: Routledge, 1996. Flint, Kate. The Victorians and the Visual Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. . The Woman Reader, 18371914. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Freedgood, Elaine, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. U of Chicago P, forthcoming. Gallagher, Catherine. The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Novel. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005. , and Stephen Greenblatt. Practicing New Historicism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001. Harris, Beth, ed. Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Phegley, Jennifer. Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2004. Poovey, Mary. Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 18301864. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. . Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. Schaffer, Talia. British Non-Canonical Fiction Women Novelists, 18501900: Recent Studies. Dickens Studies Annual 37 (2006). Steedman, Carolyn. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2002. . Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998. Sutton-Ramspeck, Beth. Raising the Dust: The Literary Housekeeping of Mary Ward, Sarah Grand, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Athens: Ohio UP, 2004. Swenson, Kristine. Medical Women and Victorian Fiction. Columbia: U Missouri P, 2005. Thompson, Michael. Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979.