Wow, these novels on my domestic list are frustrating! They're frustrating partly because they're not necessarily very good--they're potboiler novels written by working women writers to make money, mostly, and they're full of the elements that give nineteenth-century novels--and particularly women's novels, probably--a bad name: sentiment and sensation to begin with, and comic relief that isn't quite so comic, and renunciation, or punishment for non-renunciation, and picturesque landscapes, and bonnet-strings, and all the things Joyce Carol Oates inaccurately objects to in Jane Austen. But that's why I'm interested in them, right? I'm interested in vindicating writing that's about women's worlds and women's concerns, and yet reading these books sometimes makes you realize why people don't like to read these books and why women's concerns are boring (and I can give you a lot of reasons why that isn't true, but these books don't necessarily make that case as well as they could) and also anything interesting that can be said on that subject probably gets said in Elaine Showalter's A Literature of their Own, which I might try to read [excerpts from??] tomorrow.
Rhoda Broughton's 1883 novel Belinda frustrated me in a lot of ways, but also is pretty interesting. I didn't know anything about it when I started reading it; there's very little information on the internet, and I chose it for this list because it was one of a few novels my examiner mentioned when I asked her for typical domestic novels I should look at. I may have even specifically asked for a Rhoda Broughton novel, since I read Cometh Up as a Flower in a class in college (I think I was reading it the week Paul and I started dating, over spring break; I have a memory of reading it aloud from one of those course packets to Paul and Laura on the sofa at their house, although I remember nothing of the plot. Interestingly--but maybe not coincidentally--the (post-doc?) who taught that class did her dissertation with my examiner for this list! But I only got an A- in that class, which is kind of pathetic in retrospect. Anyway!) I included Belinda, The Daisy Chain, and Miss Marjoribanks along with David Copperfield and The Angel in the House in a section of my list I called "The Angel in the House: Home and Courtship," because I expected those texts to be the most conventionally-domestic of the texts on my list. And in many ways they are--but about half of them contain examples of disastrous courtship, that either doesn't end in marriage or ends in a terrible marriage, and two of them--Daisy Chain and Miss Marjoribanks--weren't really about marriage plots as much as they were about family life.
Belinda starts off with a very conventional courtship plot--so conventional, in fact, that I all but skimmed the first quarter of the novel. It's slightly unconventional, I suppose, because it takes place in Dresden among traveling Brits, so the love scenes take place on group excursions to public gardens and during parades where there are sort of contemptible German royalty floating around, and bouquets being tossed to everyone, and concerns about chaperones. The local color about the Germans and the daffodils and the Schloss I found about as boring as the lovemaking, which helped with the skimming. But of course a continental town overrun by vacationing Brits is a totally acceptable place to meet your husband; there is the concern, of course, that class and wealth and family get a little flattened out abroad, where everyone rubs shoulders with everyone else who can speak English--Belinda's sister Sarah teases her that her admirer's father could make artificial manure for a living--but Belinda seems to have a pretty good head on her shoulders and falls in love with a young man just finishing up at Oxbridge (Broughton calls it Oxbridge throughout the whole book, which is kind of stupid and annoying--is she really worried that some Oxford don is going to sue her for libel? maybe she just doesn't want to go check up on the architecture of Balliol, or put one of those notes in that Dorothy L Sayers puts in Gaudy Night where she's like, "uh, sorry, I got rid of a cricket-field to make my fake college." Also, Girton exists in this universe, which is confusing) whose father is an "iron-master," which I think means he runs an iron factory like Mr Rouncewell in Bleak House (or like Mr Rouncewell's kid maybe because now it is 1883 and presumably this is an even better job) and whose mother is totally a Lady somebody.
Belinda and her admirer, David Rivers, have a hard time coming to an understanding because Belinda always says something weird and cold in response to compliments, out of an easily-misinterpreted awkwardness and shyness. Her sister Sarah doesn't have this problem: she's always engaging herself to random strangers, and at the beginning of the novel she's sort of inadvertently engaged herself to a gross old annoying Oxbridge professor of Etruscan, Professor Forth, and she's trying to get Belinda to get her out of it. Apparently this is something she does all the time, and Belinda's like, "this time you need to get yourself out of it." Meanwhile the time of their visit is running out--their youthful and morally-lax grandma is only planning to stay through June--so Sarah tries to get Belinda to turn on the heat with Rivers so he'll propose. And Rivers almost does, going so far as to rub his lips on the palm of Belinda's hand (steamy!) before they're interrupted by local terrible nosy expat Englishwoman Miss Watson (who has a red neck and a "grizzled fringe"). Then Rivers doesn't show up at an assignation he arranged with Belinda in a public garden, and it turns out he was called home because his father committed suicide after iron prices fell and he was ruined; B & S find this out in the newspaper, but also eventually get a note from Rivers asking B to forgive him for missing their assignation. Meanwhile S gets rid of Professor Forth, but not before B sort of accidentally prepares the way by eagerly taking some dictation from him and asking him about how to make Greek letters and showing him that S isn't really interested in his scholarly life, and we the readers are like OH DEAR please don't marry Mr Casaubon I mean Professor Forth, and Belinda is like "whoa, I would not want to be married to that guy" and we are like "phew."
So then B & S go home to London & B waits 18 months and doesn't hear anything from Rivers and assumes he doesn't like her anymore. It's pretty obvious to we the readers that he is probably financially ruined and doesn't feel like he can ask a young lady to marry him anymore, but if B realizes this she doesn't let it keep her from becoming dead inside and immune to the charming antics of the family's three hilarious dogs (important characters throughout the novel) & her high-spirited sister and catty grandma. B runs into old Professor Forth at some kind of poetry reading and they talk about Browning and B is inexplicably like "maybe I could drown my sorrows in scholarship" and convinces Professor Forth to teach her Greek and Euclid and stuff and it's pretty obvious that she doesn't like it but that it can distract her in a kind of uncomfortable numbing way from her broken heart. And then she is going to marry Professor F even though he is gross-looking and old and has a demented old mother at home, and she's like "listen, this is a business arrangement, Professor Forth. I don't love you but I can be your secretary and take care of your mom and you can teach me Latin or whatever and maybe I will grow to like it" and he's like, "I guess, but maybe stop calling it a business arrangement" and she's like "no" and he's like "fine." The sister is horrified, but the grandma is like, "Great, this means Sarah & I can go to Monaco and not pay for Belinda"--actually the grandma's desire to go on vacay w/o Belinda may have precipitated the engagement--and the sister is like "come on, just wait a month to see if Rivers calls you, just think how miserable you will be if you're married to that old guy and he shows up" but of course it's one of those weird self-immolating suicidal girls thing where Belinda just wants to get the marriage over with, so they get married and go on a horrible honeymoon to Folkestone where it rains, and it turns out her husband is just awful, like not just boring and intellectual but cheap and wanting to keep their own supply of bacon in their hotel room and insisting on wearing carpet slippers everywhere and not having a fire, and during one miserable nor'easter she gets a letter from--you guessed it!--Rivers, saying "we didn't have any money and I was doing hard labor because I can't stand office work but now we have some money and I can marry you darling darling darling, don't those three darlings look so pretty, I know some women wouldn't have waited but surely you have waited" and she is so happy about the darling darling darling but then remembers she's married and is so sad and she goes out in the snowstorm to send him the notice of her marriage to a guy they'd both ridiculed on their vacation in Dresden, and when she gets home she collapses in a faint.
Then it's like a year later or something and she's living in the suburbs of Oxbridge with him and his demented mom and life isn't so bad because when you're young and healthy life is enjoyable, but life with the husband specifically is terrible: he overworks her as his secretary, and he's peevish and old. Sarah comes to visit with her dog and he doesn't really let belinda entertain Sarah, but at some mandatory event with a duke at it they all run into Rivers, who's back to finish his degree, and you can imagine. Sarah can tell Belinda is still into Rivers and warns Belinda not to go to the devil with him, but Sarah also has her own responsibilities as a coquette to think about, and there are all these river parties with all the undergraduates Sarah has seduced, and Rivers and Belinda get to hang out during those, and during one of them Rivers is like, "what if I came to visit every weekend during the long vacation when your husband's gone" and Belinda is like "uh maybe not every weekend" and Sarah figures this out and tries to stay with Belinda during the long vacation, but Belinda says no, and then Belinda feels guilty and tries to get Prof Forth to take her to Switzerland but he, Casaubon-like, thinks it's too much trouble to change his plans, and so Belinda has a delightful long vacation where the house is her own, and she gets to enjoy living on her own. This part is interesting because it's very clear that Belinda wouldn't enjoy living on her own without the prospect of her lover coming to visit--and that part is very cognitive-dissonant, with Belinda constantly making sure she hasn't technically done anything wrong, and doing little projects for her husband that she doesn't need to do, like making a catalogue of his papers for when he comes back (this reminds me a lot of me cleaning the bathroom before going out to secretly drink 40s with my high-school friends)--but also it's a reminder of the pleasures of having a home of your own, and having some control over it, a pleasure that maybe you don't get unless you're a widow or a woman whose husband is on vacation, right? Or maybe you don't get it if you're a member of a certain class. Her life is hanging out with her dogs, gardening, taking walks, working on projects, visiting her demented mother-in-law when the nurse takes a break, and having bi-weekly dates with her long-distance boyfriend where they just sit on a bench and talk to each other. It's not exactly my life when I was 24, because I didn't have dogs or a garden or a mother-in-law, and my boyfriend and I were allowed to kiss each other, but it's close. It's what it's like to be a single lady now. I guess her sister has exactly that same life but with a catty but fun grandma instead of a demented mother-in-law in the attic.
It's also interesting that in so many of these novels you can be kind of a morally-terrible lady and have a perfectly fine life--it's only the ladies with consciences who get into these bad situations. Like, Belinda is way more constant and serious and loving and prudish and well-behaved than Sarah, and that's why she's so devastated by Rivers falling out of touch, and that's why she married a crumb, and now she's in serious trouble, while Sarah is doing fine just hanging out with grandma. And in East Lynne & Jude the Obscure there are these trashy insouciant trollops who totally don't get punished no matter how many lovers they have, while these noble serious ladies overthink everything and fall into disgrace and/or die tragically. I guess the trulls are going to hell, so that's not so great. Maybe in Hardy they're not going to hell. You know I don't understand that guy.
Anyway Miss Watson reappears and once again interferes with Rivers & Belinda being together by detaining Belinda at her house when she's supposed to go meet Rivers, and saying she ran into Rivers and he must be in Oxbridge for a louche intrigue, and Belinda finally gets to run to meet Rivers and it's like their positions are reversed--this time he's waiting for her, maybe you get more authority as a married lady--and he asks her to run away with him and they kiss and then she's like, "what are we doing, you'd better go!" Renunciation! and when her husband comes back he works her so hard, and she works herself so hard, that she has a total breakdown (intellectual labor/writing is so bad for you guys, but also I am not even making fun becasue my left hand is totally cramping up right now just like Belinda's) and they have to go to the Lake District for her to recover & hang out with Sarah & grandma. And guess what Rivers shows up there by accident! and there's a lot more of this cognitive dissonance stuff and then some hanging out and then the husband wants to go to a cheaper colder hotel for his own health and so she goes with him and has another work breakdown and goes for a walk and wants to die on the heath but--as she's learned many times--it's not so easy to die of a broken heart as it is for like Lady Isabel in East Lynne, and she runs into Rivers (he followed her) and he's like "All or nothing" and she's like "All!" and he instantly loses respect for her but goes off to make arrangements for their love nest in Yorkshire, and she's really extra toilet-cleaning humble and does lots of work for her husband and writes him a note to say she's leaving him, but when she's almost at the train station to run away with Rivers she remembers her sister on her wedding day saying "it's not too late, it's not too late" and realizes that it wasn't too late then, she could have gotten out of this crummy marriage, and NOW it's not too late to disgrace herself, so she turns the carriage around and runs up to her room and no one has seen her note! hooray! and as penance she's going to show it to her husband herself (what!?) but when she goes in her room he's in a curious attitude at his desk--"he was not occupied" but rather kind of slumped with his head down, very much like Casaubon--and of course like Casaubon he is DEAD! and you guys that is the end of the novel!!! we never know what she did next!!! It's just like, "the professorship of Etruscan at Oxbridge was vacant." Also "I told you he was sick."
This ending was of course super frustrating and annoying. Does she live on as a chaste & chastened widow? Does she marry her sweetheart having lost his respect? Or is everything OK? I think the implication is that everything is not OK, right? but I also think Broughton may be leaving it open on purpose, or even out of a refusal to clean this up neatly: she really wants to resist having something obviously tragic and punishing happen to Belinda, both because she seems to be interested in realism--it's actually pretty hard to die just from being sad, she keeps telling us--but also maybe because Belinda doesn't really deserve to be punished? The novel's tone is so comic so much of the time that it's hard to read this as a morality tale, and yet the narration about Belinda and her sadness and her losing her honor and the hell it is for a woman to lose her honor at the end is pretty East Lynne-ish. I think Broughton is going for affectionate and observant satire, maybe: look at this admirable character, look at the mistakes she makes, look at how those mistakes but also a neglectful and inattentive and poorly-matched husband lead to the warping of her principles, also let us feel fear and pity, also let us laugh at the funny dogs. I mean definitely her purpose here is to entertain a novel-reading audience and give them a kind of unusual story with funny parts and exciting parts and pathetic parts, and what feels like an attempt at a surprise ending. It also feels a little like Hardy's "An Imaginative Woman," which is also kind of about narrative trickery + foolish but sympathetic women + crummy husbands.
I'm also interested in what's going on with the obvious Middlemarch rewrite here. In many ways it just seems like Broughton has lifted the Casaubon/Dorothea marriage as an interesting story to center her own novel around. But what's different? One thing that's different is that Professor Forth is less sympathetic, and less tragic, than Casaubon, possibly becasue we don't get to see things from his perspective, and we don't get the pathos of knowing that his work is doomed and fruitless; also Belinda is less saintly than Dorothea, and also less serious: Dorothea really wants to give herself up to a cause, and she really admires intellectual labor, even if that's not what she ends up being really interested in. With Belinda, it's a weird fad--maybe just a plot device to get her into this Middlemarch situation? I'll have to think more about this.
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