Sisters and the English Household

Anne D. Wallace

Description

A literary critical discussion of sibling relations in nineteenth-century England.

Sisters and the English Household revalues unmarried adult sisters in nineteenthcentury English literature as positive figures of legal and economic autonomy representing productive labor in the domestic space. As a crucial site of contested values, the adult unmarried sister carries the discursive weight of sustained public debates about ideals of domesticity in nineteenth-century England. Engaging scholarly histories of the family, and providing a detailed account of the 70-year Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister controversy, Anne Wallace traces an alternative domesticity anchored by adult sibling relations through Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals; William Wordsworth’s poetry; Mary Lamb’s essay “On Needle-Work”; and novels by Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Dinah Mulock Craik and George Eliot. Recognizing adult sibling relationships, and the figure of the adult unmarried sibling in the household, as primary and generative rather than contingent and dependent, and recognizing material economy and law as fundamental sources of sibling identity, Sisters and the English Household resets the conditions for literary critical discussions of sibling relations in nineteenth-century England.

Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Alternative Domesticities: Revaluing the Sibling in the House; 2. "Out into the Orchard": The Departure of the Sibling in the House; 3. The Problem of the Sister in the House; 4. George Eliot’s Natural History of the English Family; Notes ; Works Cited; Index.

Sujets

• Women
• Literary criticism
• Woman
• The Women

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 15 septembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783088478
• Langue: English

Extrait

Sisters and the English Household
ANTHEM NINETEENTH-CENTURY SERIES
The Anthem Nineteenth-Century Series incorporates a broad range of titles within the fields of literature and culture, comprising an excellent collection of interdisciplinary academic texts. The series aims to promote the most challenging and original work being undertaken in the field and encourages an approach that fosters connections between areas including history, science, religion and literary theory. Our titles have earned an excellent reputation for the originality and rigor of their scholarship and our commitment to high-quality production.
Series Editor
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst—University of Oxford, UK

Editorial Board
Dinah Birch—University of Liverpool, UK
Kirstie Blair—University of Stirling, UK
Archie Burnett—Boston University, USA
Christopher Decker—University of Nevada, USA
Heather Glen—University of Cambridge, UK
Linda K. Hughes—Texas Christian University, USA
Simon J. James—Durham University, UK
Angela Leighton—University of Cambridge, UK
Jo McDonagh—King’s College London, UK
Michael O’Neill—Durham University, UK
Seamus Perry—University of Oxford, UK
Clare Pettitt—King’s College London, UK
Adrian Poole—University of Cambridge, UK
Jan-Melissa Schramm—University of Cambridge, UK
Sisters and the English Household
Domesticity and Women’s Autonomy in Nineteenth-Century English Literature
Anne D. Wallace
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2018
by ANTHEM PRESS
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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
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Copyright © Anne D. Wallace 2018

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-845-4 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78308-845-1 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.
for Todd and Marc
and for Diane, who could not stay
“Like scents from varying roses that remain
One sweetness, nor can evermore be singled”
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Alternative Domesticities: Revaluing the Sibling in the House
2. “Out into the Orchard”: The Departure of the Sibling in the House
3. The Problem of the Sister in the House
4. George Eliot’s Natural History of the English Family
Notes
Works Cited
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
All books have long histories. The ideas and early versions of this book stretch back to my doctoral work at the University of Texas at Austin, to Kurt Heinzelman’s scholarship on William and Dorothy Wordsworth, and to Richard Sha’s unfailing friendship and encouragement through the years since we were students together. Librarians at the University of Southern Mississippi brought me obscure microfilm sources, helped me find the Parliamentary Papers and guided me through the Hansard microfiche files. Colleagues and friends in Hattiesburg listened, and listened: Phillip Gentile, Alison Steiner, Ellen Weinauer—I name only the “most of alls.” Here at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, from among the many who have befriended and helped me, I especially thank: Melissa Richard, who vetted the first complete version of the text; Robert Langenfeld, who came to my rescue more than once with editorial expertise, savvy and general counsel; and Nancy Myers and Lydia Howard, who were there with practical and emotional support almost daily over many years.
Parts of Chapters 1 and 2 were first published as “Home at Grasmere Again: Revising the Family in Dove Cottage,” in Judith Thompson and Marjorie Stone’s edited collection Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship (U of Wisconsin P, 2006, pp. 100–23). Portions of Chapter 3 appear in “The Deceased Wife’s Sister Controversy, 1835–1907,” available at BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History , edited by Dino Frano Felluga, https://ravonjournal.org/branch/ (January 2012). Elements of Chapters 1 and 2 are differently articulated in “Family and Friendship,” in William Wordsworth in Context , edited by Andrew Bennett (Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 224–31).
Virginia Vogel Wallace and Sarah Wallace Richert are always with me and ever to be thanked. Without Tony Harrison, this book would not exist. There is the small matter of “the Harrison Fellowship,” which supported me while I thought through and wrote early drafts of Chapters 3 and 4 over the summer of 2002. But then there are much greater matters: Tony’s exceptional scholarly influence and his labors to support other scholars, constant exemplars of what is best in our profession; his unflagging work in reading and editing this book in many parts and versions; his inspiring intellectual companionship, and his sometimes almost stern urgings to carry on; and, more than all, his love. There is nothing to be done but to return it.
INTRODUCTION
In the last decade or so, literary scholars have increasingly explored the significant historical distance between the ways we currently name, plot, and characterize sibling relations, and the quite different ways that pre-twentieth-century writers and readers might have done so. Yet, as Mary Jean Corbett and Naomi Tadmor have separately argued, efforts to historicize our understanding of English families over the crucial transitional period of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have been weakened by scholars’ reliance on terms and ideas that assume stable, universally human familial structures and relations. When we focus on the sibling relation, this reliance proves particularly limiting: even Corbett and Tadmor, who are consciously working against such assumptions, demonstrate continuing tendencies to define “brother” and “sister” in terms of sexual, specifically conjugal, relations that reinscribe these stabilizing, universalizing terms, or to subsume the sibling relation into other categories, eliding its potential primacy in “family.”
Sisters and the English Household works to escape these lingering critical limitations through two innovations: a reframing of efforts to historicize “family” as a further historicizing of “domesticity” that renders it multiple and fluid, rather than monolithic; and a turn toward the unmarried adult sister as a figure of legal and economic autonomy representing productive labor in the domestic space. I argue for the recognition of at least two distinct ideals of domesticity, both functional throughout the nineteenth century, one of which understood sibling fortunes as fruitfully intertwined through the full extent of the siblings’ lives (corporate domesticity), and one of which expected the domestic, material, and to some extent emotional separation of adult siblings from their birth homes and from each other (industrial domesticity). The second configuration, though long counterbalanced by persistent idealizations of the first, sibling-anchored model, was gradually and unevenly ascendant through the period. As households came to be primarily defined by the relations between spouses, and between parents and children, the mutual householding and devotion of siblings, once generally expected features of family life, began to seem extraordinary. More specifically, as a domestic space defined by the apparent exclusion of productive labor was increasingly idealized, the adult unmarried sister in the house became an object of intense cultural scrutiny, her troubling autonomy rendering her the crucial figure in the English nineteenth century’s protracted cultural negotiation of familial, household, and domestic ideals. The sister’s autonomy also drove a gradually increasing imperative to exclude adult unmarried siblings from the households of their married siblings, an imperative often figured as expatriation from the homely, or the national “domestic” space, or both.
By means of these interventions, Sisters and the English Household resets the conditions for literary critical discussions of sibling relations in nineteenth-century England, recognizing adult sibling relationships, and the figure of the adult unmarried sibling in the household, as primary and generative, rather than contingent and dependent; and recognizing material economy and law as fundamental sources of sibling identity, rather than finding the foundation of that identity in some revised or reconstituted version of individuated subjectivity. With the sibling, especially the adult unmarried sister, revalued as a figure of primary significance—economic and legal, as well as emotional, significance—this figure also becomes an index of complex, shifting attitudes toward labor, industrialization, gender roles, and individual and national identities.
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