Romance's Rival

The Flat Heroine: Flat Character and Agency inMiss Marjoribanks

“…He might even, if he were so far left to himself (though Miss Marjoribanks smiled at the idea), fall in love with Barbara; or, what was more likely, driven to despair by Lucilla's indifference, he might pretend to fall in love; and Lucilla reflected, that if anything happened she could never forgive herself. (54)(55) Here we see Lucilla weighing her goals: keep Tom from pining over her, employ Barbara's musical talents to make her "Evening" a success, and, more generally, create social order in Carlingford. Oliphant gives this minute description of Lucilla's mental processes in a mix of indirect discourse and free indirect discourse, which Oliphant uses liberally throughout the text.…”

“…53 By emphasizing female suffering and failure, liberal feminism rejected the conservative figure of the married woman empowered within the domestic sphere, though this ideology, as Schaffer notes, originated in late eighteenth-century feminism and had made real gains for women. 54 "The move to liberal feminism," Schaffer concludes, "instituted its powerful rhetorical campaign by insisting that happy, successful, working married women could not exist. To some extent, suffrage, coeducation, marriage reform, and employment law came to depend on the constitution of women as suffering, suppressive victim[s]."…”

“…To some extent, suffrage, coeducation, marriage reform, and employment law came to depend on the constitution of women as suffering, suppressive victim[s]." 55 Lucilla's defining traits are the very characteristics that liberal feminists were denying. In her brief discussion of Miss Marjoribanks and Oliphant's later novel Phoebe Junior, Schaffer comments, "Ironically, it was perhaps Oliphant's hostility toward the Langham Place writers that enabled her to formulate a narrative of female vocational success .…”

“…to show a woman triumphing and finding a robust career-and valuing her career more than her love life-was, oddly, a sign of one's non-allegiance to the feminist narrative of female suppression." 56 By crafting Lucilla as a flat character who does not and indeed cannot suffer and who overcomes every obstacle she faces, Oliphant repudiates the woman-as-victim schema offered by her liberal feminist contemporaries. Unlike the later Dorothea, Lucilla is not doomed to be "foundress of nothing."…”

Victorian Feminist Criticism: Recovery Work and the Care Community

“…Community, too, is historically associated with women; as I have argued in Romance's Rival, women were cast as the socially enmeshed, emotional, nurturing alternative to the rational, autonomous, advantage-seeking individualism granted to men in the seventeenth century. 76 This is still the case today, Lisa Baraitser reminds us, for women (and particularly mothers) "remain disproportionally involved in the production of communal activities, support networks and other activities that may appear as 'leisure,' but in fact can be thought of as part of maintaining the supportive structures in which mothering can remain viable, and require a certain kind of 'work-time' to make happen." 77 To read for care is to insist that "women's work"-traditionally disrespected, unpaid work-is crucial to political life, social relations, and literary analysis, and this remains a feminist declaration no matter how egalitarian a culture might become.…”