Victorian Novel 1, Apuntes de Idioma Inglés

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The INFLUENCE OT 19708 FEMINISM / novelists as fem 3 Feminism and the Victorian Novel in the 1970s Ellen Moers — Elaine Showalter — Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar The nineteenth-century novel, with its key female practitioners and enormous ¡terrain, proved particularly susceptible to the critical agenda of the New sm in North America in the 1960s and 1970s, and the Victorians were sufficiently close in time for critics in this field to read the female Fem: st precursors and to see in them admirable models of protest and dissent.] The feminist critical work of the 1970s was energized by political commitment and was far-reaching in its influence on the practices of univer= sity literary criticism and its assumptions about gender, as well as in its more E e . + P local effects on the study of the nineteenth-century novel) Indeed, it is almost impossible to read some individual Victorian novelists “how, especially E work of the Brontés, without being conscious at some level of the critical approaches defined with vigour in the United States in the 1970s,] So extensive was the influence of this feminism on reading the Victorian novel and imagining the gender politics of the century that readers may now bo familiar with the outlines of the arguments without having 1cad the source texts atall, Some of the ideas of the North American movement, dynamized by Kate Millett's powerfully trenchant Sexual Politics (1970), have entered the general critical consciousness and its assumptions about the oppressed state of female creativity in the nineteenth century. The arguments have not gone mes of the Now Feminisra's views 0: postcolomialists, cultural historians and feminist revisionists in the 1990s — but ictorian fiction came from post-strueturalists in the 1980s, an they have proved tenacious. For some, too much so. Their main points of significance were as follows. They projected a view of the Victorian period as 'patriarchal”, as ruled by men to their own advantage in all aspects of public life. They argued that women, accordingly, were multiply oppressed but con= centrated on the oppression of artistic creativity and self-expression. They saw. Victorian women writers struggling against the prohibitions of patriarchy and Feminism and the Victorian Novel in the 1970s 67 inventing strategies to overcome it. The New Feminism also argued that Victorian fictión by women authors was autobiographical in its reflection of female oppression, seeing episodes of conflict in the novel as dramatizations of tlic wider cultural scene of patriarchys oppression of women. Á lasting effect of North American feminism was to propel the question of female ercativity and the notion of patriarchy into the centre of Victorian studies. "The two most consequential works of 19705” feminism as far as Victorian fiction was concerned both became classics of innovative literary criticism (toughrtheir-aurhors would "point to the izony of books originally radical in aim becoming classics in the literary establishment). They were Elaine Showalters A Liserature of their Own: British Woman Novelists from Bronté to Madiwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Ninetecnth-century Literary Imagination (1979). The projects of these gynocritics (literary critics concerned with women writers) were distinct but had important common purposes in constructing a view of the Victorian period as one in which women writers truggled with the forces of patriarchy towards self-expression. An important precursor of Showalter's book, and a high-profile text from the women's movement more generally, was Ellen Moerss Literary Women (1976). A witty and lively study, this ushercd the notion of a woman's tradition, a canon consisting of female writers in negotiation with other — female writers only and distinct from the tradition of men, into the critical _— AA a e community. Literary Women was a celebration of this corpus of women writers, concentrating on the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, le debate with each other across the centuries. Moers described her study as “olainly a celebration of the great women who have spoken for us all'. Moerss work, popular in its day, fell out of favour with later readers whosÉ feminism was different from the distinctive ideas and needs of the 19705/Tn seeking to recover lost voices of female experience, Literary Women took for granted a universal female subjectivity — “spoken for us all' — and a straightforward relationship between text and author that feminist critics in the 19805 "under the influence of post-structuralism with its rejection of the author as central producer of meaning, found hard to take. Helen Taylor said in her 1986 prefaco to the reissued book (Móers died of cancer in 1979) that it was problematically a liberal humanist text which accepts as unproblematic the relationship of author and work, and uses biography and history in fairly simplistic and unmediated ways”? Cognate problems were found in the 1980s in Showalter's study, discussed below. Critics working with the terms of identity politics in the 1990s also found difficultics with Moers's approach — as with much work from the women's movement of the 1970s — and deplored its ethnocentricity and heterosexism (see also the reception of Gilbert and Gubar, below). ELLeN Mozrs's LrreRARY Women (1976) ELAINE SHOWALTER AND THE FEMALE TRADITION 68 Feminism and the Victorian Novel in the 19705 Ellen Moers's conception of the female tradition contested previous con= structions of the canon as patriarchal, as having excluded women from the ranks of prestigious literature, and insisted that the gender of the author played the determining role in literary production. The question of recon- figuring the canon provided the point of contact with Elaine Showalter's work. The impulse of 71 Liferatave of their Own was to challenge the notion of a tradition of British fiction dóminated by men (orofa canon tivat did not acknowledge gender as a significant element). Taking a narrower chrono- logical field than Moers, Showalter (b. 1941) presented the case for an explicitly female tradition in nineteenth and twentieth-century writing. George Saintsbury and the literary historians at the beginning of the twenti- eth century (see pp. 21-9 above) had, of course, considered the function of tradition, understood as generic relationships between literary texts extracted from their non-literary historical context, when mapping the Victorian novel. FR. Leavis (see chapter 2) had invested the concept with serious moral gravity. But neither approaches had paid attention to gender and, more particularly, to the way in which traditions had habitually excluded most women writers. In the 1980s and 1990s, the literary canon would be chal- lenged across the board for excluding colonial literature, gay literature, working-class writing, popular literature and regional writing. But in the 1970s, the most urgent task was to include the work of women. Elaine Showalter made gender a priority in revising the idea of tradition. She agreed with Ellen Moers, and more specifically with Patricia Meyer Spacks in The Female Imagination (1975), that there was a “special female self-awareness [...] through literature in every period”? and endeavoured to show “how the development of this tradition is similar to the development of any literary subculture..* Showalter did not explicitly argue for an innate difference in female and male experience or imagination, but none the Jess said that there was a marked and continual difference between men's writing. and women's. This was a fundamental feature of her gynocritical revisionism. that helped change the map of Victorian fiction. But it seemed to fudge an important question. Feminist readers of the 19805, having taken on board Foucauldian ideas about the formation of subjectivities, certainly found prob= lems with exactly what Showalter's position on gender was, and — this was to happen to Gilbert and Gubar in the post-structuralist revolution also — asked whether she was hiding essentialist statements about differences between men and women. Concentrating on writers who were united by their gender alone, Showalter also conflated differences, contests of viewpoints, and the social and historical specificities of each author. Showalter's criticism assumed a relationship between fiction and personal experience that was straightforward. Her work was thus open to criticism. similar to that levelled in the 1980s and 1990s at the biographizing approach Peminism and the Victorian Novel in the 1970 69 of Moers and Gibert and Gubar as the critical agenda in the academy changed to become suspicious of authorial presence. Showalter perceived nineteenth- century literature by women as expressing with eloquence the social and political situation of female writers in the reign of Queen Victoria and beyond. She was staking out a clear relationship between literature and the society from which it emerged, necessary because she was writing in the early stages of a radical movements self-definition. Accordingly, she was not concerned t explore complex, ambiguous or contradictory relationships between literatur and experience or between literature and ideology; nor was she interested 1 thinking of the reader as a producer of meaning. Án example of her perception of the correspondence between litorary productions and the position of female authors in society is the assumption in the extract below that the fate of Dorothea at the end of George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-2) directly corres- ponded to Eliot's professional position and sense of compromise necessitated by her position as female author. By extension, Showalter made Dorotheas plight refer to the situation of female novelists through the whole of the early and mid-Victorian period (for a related view of Middlemarch as a novel about female authorship, see N. N. Feltes's work, pp. 284-5 below). Showalter's influential and often-repcated argument at the beginning of the extract that the adoption of the male pseudonym was a sign of patriarchal oppression and the role-playing required by women to succeed in the Victorian literary market- place was problematized by Catherine Judd in 1995 (see pp. 289-302 below). Showalter, now a professor at Princeton, divided the nineteenth-century female tradition into three categories which she saw common to all “iterary subcultures* “First, she said: tradition, and internalisation of its standards of art and its vicws on social roles. Second, there is a phase of protest against these standards and values, and ( there is a prolonged phase of imitation of the prevailing modes of the dominant ) S advocacy of minority vights and values, including a demand for autonomy. Finally, there is a phase of se/f-discovery, a turning inward freed from some of) the dependency of opposition, a scarch for identity.? j For the female novelists of the ninetcenth century, these stages were best labelled Feminine, Feminist, and Female? This taxonomy determined her view of the century. In the extract below, Showalter argues for the characteristics of the first two of these three categories in the “subculture' of nineteenth-century literature by women (the third falls mostly outside the Victorian period). The feminine novelists of the period, including Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brontés and George Eliot, she proposes, were working against their society's understanding of what a woman should do and against their own internalized anxiety about social transgression. She divides this group itself into three, but, throughout, Discussion OF SHOWAL- Ter's A Lrr ERATURE OF Trier Oww (1977) SIGNIFICANC Or GILBERT AND GUBAR'S Tue 82 Feminism and the Victorian Novel in the 1970s Meynell calls upon her fathers spirit in the poem to arm her “delicate mind) give her “courage to die; and to crush in her nature “the ungen= erous art of the inferior? between 1880 and 1900, moved beyond feminism to a Female phase of courageous self-exploration, but it carried with it the double legacy of teminine self-hatred and feminist withdrawal. In their rejection of male society and masculine culture, feminist writers had retreated more and. more toward a separatist literature of inner space. Psychologically rather than socially focused, this literature sought refuge from the harsh' realities and vicious practices of the male world. lts favorite symbol, the enclosed and secret room, had been a potent image in womenls novels since Jane Eyre, but by the end of the century 1t came to be identificd with the womb and with female conflict. In children's books, such as Mts MoleswortlYs The Tapestry Room (1879) and Dinah Cr: The Little Lame Prince (1886), women writers had explored an extended these fantasies of enclosure. After 1900, in dozens of novels. from Frances Hodgson Burnett's 4 Secret Garden (1911) to May Sin: clair's The Tree of Heaven (1917), the secret room, the attic hi caway, the suffragette cell came to stand for a separate world, a flight from men and from adult sexuality: [....] Notes 1 For Catherine Judd's argument against this asscrtion, see pp. 289-302 below. 2. Forarcply to thís views see Linda Peterson, 'Rewriting 4 History of he Lyre: Letitia Landon, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the (Re)Construction of the Nineteenths century Woman Poet” in Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain, eds, Moment Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre, 1830-1900 (Hound= mills: Macmillan, 1999), 115-32, 3 "This is the perception developed by Gilbert and Gubar, pp. 85-91 below. 4. Tor feminist discussions about female power in social-problem fiction, see pp. 186= 90 below. 4 5 The New Woman novelist, Sarah Grand's real name was Frances Elizabeth Bellenden McFall, nóe Clarke. 6. For the history of the three-volume novel in the nineteenth century, sec pp. 266-84 below. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, now professors of English at the universities of California at Davis and Indiana respectively, join Elaine Sho- walter as key figures in the propulsion of feminism into the centre of Victorian fiction studies. Where Showalter provided readers of the Victorian novel with The literature of the last generation of Victorian women writers, born! Feminism and the Victorian Novel in the 1970s 83 a well-defincd history in which to situate individual texts, Gilbert and Gubar, who were more positive about a wider range of Victorian fiction than Showal- ter, offered a compelling model of female experience and protest, and a view of the consciousness of the woman novelist (and literary writer more generally) in the nineteenth century, struggling against the oppression of 'patriarchy”. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination (1979) articulated a view of the conditions in which nineteenth- century women wrote and the inventive strategies of mask-wearing they adopted to defeat those conditions. Like Showalter, Gilbert and Gubar read Jirerature as expressive of authorial experience and saw gender as the central determinant of that experience. Again, like Showalter, th y S individual Victorian texts dramatizations of wider truths about the experience _ “of womerandtixetr seruggle for selfexpression. Their criticism extrapolated general arguments from local instances and again, sometimes, lost the specifi- city of the original in the trajectory to the general. Similarly, they perceived literature by women as distinctive by definition of it being by a woman; they offered their own version of a literature of their owrY. They also encouraged readers to see women's writing in the period as a/ways dissenting in some way. lt was an assumption that has been hard to break. In The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar argued that women writers in the West had been inhibited by a patriarchal literary culture that privileged male creativity and denigrated or denied the female. Women throughout that culture, they said, were constrained by the images meñ had of them, the mythic masks male artists have fastened over [a woman's] human face both to lessen their dread of “inconstancy” and — by identifying her with the “eternal types” they have themselves invented — to possess her more thoroughly'+* In the _nineteenth century, the most deathly of these masks were the monster (mad- nd the “angel in the house, the phrase Gilbert and Gubar took from Coventry Patmores poem 7% Angel in 1hé Hoise (1854-63) to express an woman) a acsthetic, moral and sexual ideal of Victorian domestic femininity. Gilbert and Gubar recalled Virginia Woolf's declaration of revolt against what she saw as the sexual politics of the Victorians. Woolf said that, before an early twentieth-century woman could write, she must rid herself of this inhibiting model of domesticity, she must “kill” the “angel in the house”? They argued that all constraining models of femaleness that hindered literary creativity had to be so killed. They were slain by Victorian novelists, Gilbert and Gubar ( Proposed, through inventive duplicity, through the use of s —stercotypes thar were subverted; emplo! The Madwvoman in the Artic argued that Victorian female novelists engaged with patriarchy by subversively adopting patriarchy's own images of women and turning them to their own advantage (a comparison can be made here with the ideas of mimicry proposed by Luce Irigaray in the 19705). lóyed, not toinhi bit, but to articulate female writers” voices. MADWOMAN IN THE Arric (1979) Tre MADWwoMAN DISCUSSED GILBERT AND GUBAR's APPRAISAL O! The MADwomaN 84 Feminism and the Victorian Novel in tbe 1970s The title of The Madiwoman in the Attic comes, obviously, from the plight of Bertha Mason, Rochester's mad wife, in Charlotte Bronté's Jane Eyre and an extract from the chapter on that novel is offered below as a way into Gilbert and Gubars quasi-psychological, biographically based feminism. The ap- proach to Jane Eyre is symptomatic of the booles critical method because it exemplifies what Gilbert and Gubar saw as a novelist's subversive handling of: a common figure (the madwoman) from the so-called patriarchal descriptors of woman. In Jane Eyre, the madwoman served as an articulate expression of Jane's own condition, and, in the extract below, Gilbert and Gubar trace Ways: in which Bertha is an expression of part of Janes (feminist) consciousness. Bronté, they claim, was making serviceable an instrument of female oppres=. sion to articulate Janes selfhood and exemplifying the subversive mimicry exploited by Victorian female writers. What needs to be emphasized in this extract, because it relates generally to. the habit of mind expressed in The Madwoman, is its focus on Jane as on a life=' pilgrimage about self fulfilment and individual happiness, a search for marur= ity, independence, and true equality [in marriage]. Gilbert and Gubars emphasis, together with their resistance to commenting on selÉ-control, self denial or altruistic labour in the novel, hints that they were making of Jane Eyre a late twentieth-century woman, a figure whose aspirations for individual! Liberty and sexual equality were akin to the desires of generations born long, after Charlotte Bronté. Gilbert and Gubar were producing meaning from the. fiction of the nineteenth century that was influenced by the needs of their own Cultural moment. This reading of. Jane Eyre and the narration of the emergence. ofa modern feminist subjectit enabled was challenged by postcolonialistsin the 1980s and 19905 for its ethnocentricity, especially by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in an influential essay in 1985 discussed on pp. 310=17 below. The Madwoman was not only a child of the broader social and political moment, In Gilbert and Gubars own candid reflections on the conditions that produced The Madwoman in the Introduction” to the second edition (2000), they also acknowledged the personal nature of their enterprise, the connection between the intellectual project of the book and their own lives as young female academics and mothers in the 1970s, Both recalled arriving at the University of Indiana at Bloomington to be confronted by various forms of institutional sexism that denied their significance as professional critics. The Madtwvoman's assault on the constraining powers of patriarchy grew out of, this experience. And both recognized the significance of their own mother- hood to the project. Indeed, Sandra Gilbert described the link between | mothering and the books interest in female creativity as a driving force. “Mothering, motherhood, and mothers” she wrote, “as 1 look back on the years when we were researching and writing 7%e Madtwoman, 1 realise that maternity was always somehow central to our project. Resisting “patriarchal Feminism and the Victorian Novel in the 19705 85 oetry” and poetics, we struggled, like all feminist critics of our generation, to find alternative tropes for creativity.*? Responsive to the needs of a femninist generation seeking independence in male-dominatod professions and a secog- nition of sexual equality, Gilbert and Gubar, whose interest had always been in the links between written texts and authorial experience, encouraged. their readers twenty-one years after The Madwoman's publication, to see it in- «cribed by their own personal historics. The Introduction' to the second edition of The Madwoman was generous in acknowledging how the feminist agenda had altered since its first publication, and how Gilbert and Gubar's approach seemed to many subsequent readers unsatisfactory. In the changing years following the completion of the book, Sandra Gilbert wrote, they were faulted “for intellectual crimes whose linea- ments most of us would never have recognized in that blissfully naive dawn of the 19708,* including that of “essentialism, racism, heterosexism, phallogo- centricism.!? Gilbert and Gubar acknowledged the extent that their assump- tions about the connections between a literary text and its author in the 1970s did not suit 1980s' ideas about authorship or the identity politics of the 19905, The second edition did not attempt to address these criticisms, and the body of the text was unaltered. Rather, Gilbert and Gubar modulated their reflec- tions on the condition of the modern academy into a lament for the financially impoverished state of higher education in the United States, and then into a buoyant statement that enthusiasm for the writers with whom they had been concerned many years before — the Brontés, Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson — would one day return. It was an elegantly silent acceptance of the many differences between the feminist critical agenda and canon of the 1970s and the 1990s and a quiet statement of hope for the return of more common-sense criticism that valued the author as creator. Its irony lay in its construction of late twentieth-century feminism, rather than patriarchy, as The Madwomars most energetic assailant. p Extract from Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination (New Haven, Conn. and Londo: Yale University Press, 1979), 356-62. That Rochester character and life pose in themselves such substantial impediments to his marriage with Jane does not mean, however, that Jane herself generates none. For one thing, 'akin' as she is to Rochester, CnaPpMAN's Forms or SpeEcH (1994) RELATION OF ARGUMENTS "TO THINKING ABOUT REALISM 198 Language and Form ¡ts appreciation of style: Phillipps characteristically said of Thackeray thay of the novelists peculiar excellences [is] his fine ear in prose compositio a long-breathed impetus in sentence structure, a quiet mastery of the ebp; flow of sentence and paragraph',* and this genial manner of evaluatig through the study. Raymond Chapman' analysis of Thomas Hardy's dis ive (and controversial) use of language accepted as a starting-point a pri of evaluation: [Hardy] was more concerned with theme and approa literature than with the minutiae of style,* This emphasis linked the des Victorian Philology (1993) was a very different kind of study, setting language usage in a widely rescarched nineteenth-century context of set language study, including discussion surrounding the compilation o Oxford English Dictionary. Work on the general corpus of Victorian fiction also included critica not of the whole body of language in the novel but of the more local its representation of speech. In the mid-1990s, this chimed with the of language historians in accent and pronunciation in Victorian speech policing in primers and promunciation manuals (see Mugglestone Further Reading section). Raymond Chapmanis Forms of Speech in Fiction (1994) was the most extensive coverage of the topic of speech, some of its critical approach from Norman Page's earlier Speech in the Novel (1973, second edn, 1988). Chapman developed an interest in the; strata of Victorian society as marked by language discussed in K. C. Phil Language and Class in Victorian England (1984). Phillipps, with an ove sense of the class boundaries of Victorian England, had illustrate language usage was a principal, precise, pragmatic, and subrle way of deb one's [class] position, or having it defined by others” in the Victorian P (for more on language and class, see Ingham, pp. 200-12 below, an Further Reading section). A noticeable feature of Chapman's Forms of Speech was its distance arguments about realism discussed in chapter 4. As a descriptive Chapman did not engage with the theorizations of Victorian literary E that had preoccupied critics from the 1970s, and he took as a startil8 the assumption that realist fiction aspired to represent the real as acculil” possible, Tt was against this assumed singleness of purpose that Chap judged the success of the novels' representation of speech. How real W dialogue? “Even in the most realist fiction”, he said, 'dialogue has an Af quality; trying to read a novel which accurately reproduced real conve would soon be wearisome.” Speech as it was represented in Victorian! was measured against “real” speech, art compared against life, and the Language and Form 199 ping assumptions of the realist project were not considered in relation to the YI ¿ents of George Levine or Catherine Belsey discussed in chapter 4 (se 0% 09-119, 12053 above). PP papman approached the language of speech in Victorian fiction with the urposes of accurate description in mind. As with the early critical stages of E pias or posteolonialism, his interest was in conventions of representa- Ein. A typical example of this procedure was his approach to the depiction of ponstandard speech in a range of Victorian fiction. Chapman wrote of the 0 ges of Victorian novelists for signifying non-standard spoken English, word (ages that indicated in features of spelling or syntax their non-standard identity, even if they were not literal or phonetic transcriptions. A short extract gives a flavour of Chapman's approach to language and class, AL though, he remarked, individual novelists develop their own special features “for the representation of non-standard English in the period: there are certain indicators which are commonly used. The dropped aspirate, together with the hypercorrection of the wrongly inscrted aspirare, is the most common, and one of the easiest to represent visually; examples are found almost eyery time an uncducated character speaks. Trollope's Quintus Slide, showing po other marked speech deviance, is characterised by the misplaced aspirate alonc. He is first introduced as 'a young man under thirty, not remarkable for clean linen, and who always talked of the “Ouse”...though he talked of “Ouses” and “horgans”, he wrote good English with great rapidity (Phineas Finn 1869, 26). It is a sign of the new age that standard pronunciation rather than literacy is considered the mark of an educated man; earlier in history the judgement would have been reversed. In a later novel he asks Lady Eustace, “But “ow do you know?" [,] asserts his respect for the very fountain 'ead of truth, tells Lopez 'you can't 'ide your light under a bushel' and invites him to “go 'and in "and with me in the matter (The Prime Minister 50, 51). Gissing has Mrs Goby announce herself as being “of the 'Olloway Road, wife of Mr C. O. Goby, aberdasher” (New Grub Street 1891, 21). Thackeray's Arthur Pendennis gives Anguistic expression to contemporary social barriers when he says of Panny, She «opped her ys, but she was a dear little girl” (Pendennis 1850, 54). Hypercorrection of the aspirate is particularly common among upper servants a others with pretensions to gentility. Major Pendenniss valet announces A Pages Fokers son' and addresses Pendennis as Mr Harthur (Pendennis E Fanny Squeersexclaims, "This is the hend, ist? and Dickens comments ns excited, aspirated her his ssongly” (Vizholos iekleby 1839, 42), One o aerea is 'a labouring man known to the world of Welland as 000 (the encrusted form of the word Amos, to adopt the phrase of 'gists) (Lio on a Tower 1882, 1). Eh, q Es Apman's analysis of nineteenth-century fiction brought to the fore- nd a variety of linguistic codes. After Forms 9f Speech, however, the OTHER DOCUMEN- TARY WORK ON VICTORIAN LANGUAGE BAKHTIN AND LANGUAGE STUDIES 200 Language and Form Language and Form 201 study of the language of class in self-writing in the Victorian period com cated the paradigms Chapman used. Regenia Gagniers Subjectivities: A tory of Self-representation in Britain, 1832-1920 (1991) and Patrick Jl ¿ovel generally: In Dizkens, Mamen, and Language (1992), Ingham looked ar pickenss use of stercotypical representations of women in his fiction, such as she fallen woman and the nubile girl, and studied the way in which these types yyere linguistically marked, how that marking differed from occasion to for instance, both employed post-structuralist models of language in ; occasion, and how it developed through his oewore. In the Postscript”, she consideration of classed identities. roposed that Dickens's accounts of the real women in his life — Catherine Other documentary work on nineteenth-century language in the 18 Dickens and Ellen Ternan, chiefly — could also be 'subjected to the same kind touched on fiction and provided useful contexts for reading it. Sino of linguistic analysis as preceding chapters have applied to figures in the Victorian period itself, scholarly attention to language, in the academy novel ? Rather than using life to explain art, Ingham, following the post- strucruralists privileging of the textual, argued that there should be no difference in the linguists” approach to textual representations of characters, fictional or real (for more on the language of Dickens, see Sarensen in the Further Reading section). The Language of Gender and Class: Transformation in the Victorian Novel (1996) continued Inghanys investigation of the linguistic signifiers of female «characters. She drew on Mikhail Bakhtin's conviction that “The novel as a “whole is a phenomenon multiform in style and variform in speech and voice, and in it “the investigator is confronted with several heterogeneous stylistic ) out features : guage wities often located on different linguistic levels and subject to different stressing regional and social varietics, spelling and pronunciation, inflec stylistic controls.*" This sense of the multi-voiced nature of Victorian novels syntax and lexis, and analysed material from recipes to grammars to literat _was the guiding idea of her study. She also used the Bakhtinian concept of the History of the English Language (1998), covering the period 1776-1997, wa work, to the idea of the multi-vocality of the novel) as another element of ds, r i word to change its “accent, that is, its ideological connotation, either through language usage. Its bibliography (pp. 708-61) is the best starting-po im, or in different spaces in society. For instance, in recent history, the term - Fadical in social and economic policies, has “acquired a dominant accent that serious research into the Victorian use of language. — ASsiy á A gned its favourable connotations to profoundly right-wing extremism, In the specific area of Victorian fiction studies in the 1990s, ef : a MS >. Ñ made to use a more thcorized approach to language study, influence ¡previous dominant evaluation had ascribed those connotations to pro- cially by Bakhtin (for further discussion of the importance of Bakb Ñ 5 egalitarian positions on socio-economic policies. A change has taken Victorian novel criticism, see pp. 220-4 of this chapter, and pp. —Dáce (though another may follow) as the hierarchy of accents shifred.P above). Accurate linguistic description did not seem enough to Patrici o E e accentuality specifically the accentual shift ona large scale in the key ham and her work in the 1990s, which included studies of Charles D y gains of gender and class, enabled Ingham to trace a gradual dissociation, and Thomas Hardy, brought tools from contemporary literary/linguis int in Hardys Jude the Obscure (1894-5), between ideas of gender alysis to the service of feminist arguments about women and the Gefly 8 á ! ' female) and class (chicfly working and middle) that had previously class, and the politics of their representation in a range of canonical te y Mo 0 li : PA ii Da pss in carlier nincteenth-century literature and culture. inciistica 8 a ic ca ¡versitY k: e Openi h 7 linguistic approach she began her academic career at Oxford Univ dl Balay Pening discussion of The Language of Gender and Class, reproduced medievalist and historian of the language — was not descriptive but inB04 9% Iogham set out the two chief. signs forwomen'ar the begiaring of the by modern notions of language as a site of idcological conflict and c9 al ta od both . A Anos porary interests in identity politics. Sel in the House) and the fallen woman (the prostitute), were initi Lt a e Ea sy » nitially Patricia Inghamis first book on the language of Victorian fiction wál p ) Mao Éned in mi in middle-class and lower-class contexts respectively (for a femini x ' s feminis Dickens but it suggested parameters for her subsequent work on the ViéÉ I9ach in the 19705 to the notión of the Angel E the ne ces 80 in the formal study of Victorian language. This reminded readers how di Victorian English was from the present day, arguing that its simil disguised the gulf between the two forms. Richard W. Baileys Ninete century English (1996) was a readable survey that considered transformatio the language during the nineteenth century, consequent on urbani technology, travel and new opportunities for communication, concent on writing, sounds, vocabulary, slang, grammar and classed voices. The p clearly located in a class category. These, the womanly woman IncHam's VIEWS ON TENDER AND CLASS