What do I want to remember about The Daisy Chain for my exam? Well, since I read this as part of my domestic list, I need to start thinking about what "the domestic" means--which is rough, because I've become less interested in what the domestic means! but anyway, my comments are going to gravitate toward that question, I guess.
So what does "home" mean in The Daisy Chain? One thing it might mean is renunciation. At the end of the novel, Ethel is thinking about her past and her future:
Norman Ogilivie's marriage seemed to her to have fixed her lot in life, and what was that lot? Home and Cocksmoor had been her choice, and they were before her. Home! but her eyes had been opened to see that earthly homes may not endure, nor fill the heart. Her dear father might, indeed, claim her full-hearted devotion, but, to him, she was only one of many . . . she had begun to understand that the unmarried woman must not seek undivided return of affection, and must not set her love, with exclusive eagerness, on aught below . . .
So here home is what Ethel has given up everything else for--romantic love, "undivided return of affection," as well as the possibility of a literary career--but within that renunciation is more renunciation. She can't just rest on the knowledge that she's done a good thing in devoting herself to her family; she knows she's going to actively suffer from loneliness and rejection by making this choice. But of course there's the final object of a heavenly home, which unlike good things "below" is OK to look forward to--and yet Ethel doesn't say heavenly home, or think of heaven as a telos, but in fact imagines grace as a continual progress: God will direct her path.
And then other people in the novel--specifically Norman and Flora--renounce the comfort and peace of "home" to do work in the larger world: Norman because he can do more good as a missionary than as a country clergyman, Flora because she already messed up and got involved in national politics and now she has to stay there. In a sense, these exiles are both weirdly punishments--Flora wanted a London life for the wrong reasons, and her only penance is to suffer through it and try to do good, while Norman came up with this missionary idea partly to forestall the recurrence of religious doubt caused by too much self-contemplation and maybe too much mixing with Oxford intellectuals. But also in this novel punishments are not really punishments, but necessary curbs on individual natures--that's maybe why Ethel has to stay home and be an angel in the house, because in a wider world she'd be impulsive and "harum-scarum" and so on? Or else it's just important that whatever you do, you're making some kind of sacrifice--even Meta giving up her maid for a couple of weeks was a valuable sacrifice, and one that prepared her later on to make the much larger sacrifice of becoming a missionary with Norman.
All of this has to do with the gendered concept of separate spheres AND with class location. Meta feels bad that she can't sacrifice as much as the poorer Mays, and they convince her that any sacrifices she can make APPROPRIATE TO HER STATION are good enough (although they can never be quite as satisfying as giving up your last penny to feed a poor child.) So the novel is able to celebrate Christian renunciation and sacrifice and make lower-middle-class readers feel good about themselves while also completely upholding the class system in England--something it also does by making all the actually poor people kind of repellent and childlike, creatures who require constant spiritual guidance from ladies and gentlemen. Flora's baby nurse meant well, but her class has a tendency toward deceit and Flora was kind of a bad mom what with going to so many balls etc, so the baby dies of an opium addiction; all the pupils and their mothers at Cocksmoor are kind of gross and grasping and are a real trial to Ethel as students, but it's worth teaching them because sometimes they have spectacular Little-Eva-like death scenes and also they eventually appreciate the church. On one hand, this is realistic: most poor people aren't tragically beautiful and innocent Little Match Girl victims, and learning to deal with them must be hard for well-bred Christian teenagers. On the other hand, it's uncomfortable, and it makes you realize how unusual Elizabeth Gaskell's treatment of the workers in Milton is in North and South (but those are factory workers, not miners like these grubby guys.) And of course there's the comparison between the English working classes and the "heathens" in British colonies overseas, something that comes up in both British and American novels of this period: the abolitionists, of course, are always talking about how we should pay attention to the horrible abuses and ignorance in our own country (preach to the slaveowners, not the Maori), and there's Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House sending all her money to Africa while her own house is in shambles. The Daisy Chain doesn't really clearly come down on this issue: Norman says he can do more good in New Zealand than in a comfortable parish at home, but at the same time Cocksmoor, where Richard ends up becoming the curate, is obviously _not_ a comfortable parish. We do get a sense of racism towards the colonial subjects, mostly from Tom, which gets put down by Norman and by Harry, who won't hear anything bad against his converted islander prince friend David, but that's about as deep as the novel gets into this debate.
As for separate spheres: the colonies play into this interestingly, I think. In most Victorian novels, the British empire is this enormous unseen backdrop, somewhere where characters disappear to and sometimes return from, a source of income and gorgeous fabrics and cursed gems and unexpected legacies, a mechanic that allows plot developments like mistaken identity and bigamy to be at least sort of plausible. The word "domestic" in the context of the British empire is, of course, Britain itself, and most of these novels are highly domestic both in the sense that we never leave England, and that we're concerned with the "feminine" sphere of family relationships and the home, and trying to end each novel with the establishment of the cozy Victorian nuclear family. In this sense, the novel usually follows the characters who stay at home, and all the crazy adventurous dangerous colonial travel happens offscreen. In The Daisy Chain this certainly happens, both on the national/international and home/public life level: Alan and Harry go off to the South Seas, and we don't hear about their adventures until Harry gets back, but we also often stay home with the women and children of the house while the father or brothers go off to try to accomplish some goal--to convince the town directors to choose a new rector, to get a scholarship for Oxford. What is kind of interesting about those moments is that, while we sometimes get some of the suspense and anxiety of the people who have to stay home, we sometimes don't; sometimes Yonge is like, "the dad went out, and everyone wondered what would happen! then he came home and told them." The effect of this is to make you realize how much important stuff happens out in the world, outside the realm of women and children or (on the global level) the English population, and how little these people have to do with it.
And yet the novel certainly messes with separate spheres in interesting ways. Just as the self-contained island of Britain is always implicated in the larger workings of empire, the seemingly closed, feminine, private domestic sphere is always permeable to and reaching out into the wider, more public world. In many ways this translates to "the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world," of course. Margaret, whose paralysis renders her a literalized version of the home-bound woman, is deeply involved with the Cocksmoor project, even though she's never seen it: her brothers make her models of the church, she sends kind words and messages out to the poor people that touch them more than anything anyone else can say (of course in this sense Margaret is a figure for the sainted-dead-mother figure who is already present in this novel, the figure who watches over you after she dies and asks you to emulate her sainted example; and since the "daisy chain" is figured as a kind of chain of being, being lifted up into heaven by the dead mother herself, Margaret, who lives upstairs and is half-dead already, is definitely half-angel, half-human); at the end of the novel she hears the churchbells from Cocksmoor in her own room and is able to die. I'm really interested in the ways in which public life and male professional work penetrate the domestic space through sound in a lot of the novels I'm reading--the doctor's bell in Miss Marjoribanks, the horrible cries of the vivisected animal in The Beth Book. Then of course there's the Cocksmoor project in general: Ethel chooses "home AND Cocksmoor," suggesting that taking care of your own home is only valuable if you take care of someone else's as well. And there's Richard, who is better at making tea than Ethel is, while Ethel is better at teaching the children than he is--there are different skills that make up "domestic" labor, and those skills may not be differentiated along obviously gendered lines. And there are the ways in which Flora and Meta's marriages take them outside the domestic sphere--in Flora's case, she forces her marriage to take her out, I guess, since she manipulates her husband into having a political career--and both of them are examples of my obsession with how the wife almost always has her husband's job.
I'm getting tired of talking about this but I have by no means thought this stuff through enough! I'll end with the obvious remark that Victorian novels domesticate both men and women, so we shouldn't feel so extra bad that Ethel has to give up her literary ambitions because so does Norman! but Norman is at least allowed to be a genius, and to have manic episodes of extra creative genius, and to get married, and everyone's like, "ha ha Ethel a girl could never REALLY write Latin poetry" and also who is even writing Latin poetry in 1856? Come on guys, get with the vernacular already. Milton I can excuse, and even he went over to English. Also I guess Ethel's crazy last meditation is pretty brave, especially when you compare this novel to Little Women (which I keep doing--I wonder if the Alcotts read Yonge? surely they read novels like this.) Jo has the same thoughts about spinsterhood, although I suppose she's comforted by her work (but so is Ethel, it's just an EVEN MORE self-effacing work than Jo's, as all good work is in this novel--personal satisfaction in a job well done is not okay), but then she's rescued by a total deus-ex-machina fake marriage, and Ethel isn't; she's rescued by her dad, which is KIND OF like Jo being rescued by Bhaer, but at least Yonge isn't pretending that hanging out with your dad is exactly the same kind of satisfying as marrying Laurie.
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