A decade ago, Nina Auerbach’s boldly original book probably could not have been written. Her critical daring has been made possible by at least three significant developments in recent literary study. First, feminist criticism has matured as an interpretive method. This method passes beyond the necessary but negative task of exposing the stereotypes and misconceptions of women that patriarchal writers and critics have fostered, moving toward positive alternate readings that disclose the undervalued strengths of female authors and characters. One aspect of this evolution has been an increased concern with myth and archetype among feminist critics, exemplified in Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s important study The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979) and Annis Pratt’s Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction (1981). Auerbach herself began moving in this direction in her earlier book Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction (1978), which uses female communities in Greek mythology to examine novelistic depictions of matriarchal power in groups such as families and schools.
A second crucial development has been the dramatic growth in Victorian studies as an interdisciplinary field. This field encourages eclectic methodologies and admits evidence freely from history, literature, art, and the social sciences in order to reconstruct and revalue an entire culture. Auerbach fully exploits this cross-disciplinary freedom in her own work.
Finally, one must note the indirect influence of Deconstructionist critics, following the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who destablize literary texts by asserting that the individual reader, not the author, establishes meaning, often by decoding hidden subtexts of which the author himself was unaware. Auerbach speaks intelligibly to a large, diverse audience and staunchly affirms that literature is relevant to life (beliefs that deconstructionist critics seriously challenge). Her insistence, however, that many standard works of Victorian literature and art contain beneath their official messages an opposite, radically subversive one shows the effect that this controversial movement has had on the general critical climate.
Auerbach examines the Victorian cultural imagination, which she considers to be deeply mythic, despite the period’s apparent scientific and moral bias. The most compelling myth the age produced, however, is unarticulated. The myth underlies one of the culture’s most cherished ideals: woman as the egoless, submissive, and sexually pure “Angel in the House.” In fact, Auerbach argues that Victorians devised this repressive stereotype in a subconscious reaction to woman’s explosively vital, demoniac nature, which constantly threatened to break free of the confining but socially sacred boundaries of home and family. The very restrictiveness of the ideal, in other words, signaled the Victorians to the existence of dangerous energy that had to be controlled in women.
Auerbach seeks to liberate this vibrant, magical vision of woman from the subtexts where it supposedly belongs. She compares herself to an archaeologist piecing together shards of a lost culture; an artist assembling a collage; and most suggestively, a weaver of tapestry—much like Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s sibylline Lady of Shalott. Moreover, Auerbach genially invites her readers to collaborate with her in this quest to revive the myth of transcendent womanhood. She urges them to add their own examples, which, she implies, will inevitably produce a “richer portrait” than she alone can describe. It is a tactic at once ingratiating and cunningly disarming, for Auerbach sweeps so freely, eloquently, and provocatively through the period. She presents evidence ranging from Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) to Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum; from Florence Nightingale’s journal to Punch cartoons. Readers must constantly resist being overwhelmed by her contagious vitality and confidence.
Auerbach organizes her study around the female stereotypes she seeks to revise. Her opening chapters treat two prevalent myths illustrating the extremes of weakness and power that define the Victorian woman’s basic identity: victim and queen. Beginning with material from the 1890’s, on the grounds that the image of woman as helplessly submissive is strongest then, Auerbach sees George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and Sigmund Freud’s case history of “Dora” as emblematic. In each instance, she maintains that the oppressed female eludes her disdainful creator’s efforts to control her, displaying an endless capacity to frustrate him by her continual metamorphoses. Thus, the monumental Trilby outlives her mesmerizing Svengali; Dracula shrinks as Lucy Westenra expands, and Dora deserts Freud. These seeming victims draw on inner sources of demoniac energy that enable them to triumph.
Auerbach’s discussion of queens is similarly inventive. She looks both at obvious figures, such as Queen Victoria or those encountered by Lewis Carroll’s Alice, and at unexpected ones, such as those embodied in Victorian variants on the theme of Sleeping Beauty, as in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting Beata Beatrix, in which Rossetti’s entranced beloved is simultaneously victim and queen. (Auerbach’s categories, like the women they contain, constantly transmute into their opposites.) Such powerful depictions, implying woman’s latent capacity to preside over a world in flux, are even found in the linguistic structures of the age’s nonfiction prose. Through ingenious stylistic analyses of passages on women from essays by John Ruskin, John Stuart Mill, and George Eliot, Auerbach reveals that active verbs are consistently applied to women. They seize control of sentences to become self-creating subjects, while men are “relegated” to passive constructions, functioning as objects. These venturesome opening chapters, then, establish the poles of woman’s iconography in the period: passive/active, ruled/ruling, stabilizing/profoundly disruptive.
Auerbach’s focus now narrows to four significantly interdependent subdivisions of her basic categories—angel, demon, old maid, and fallen woman. These types responded specifically, she maintains, to Victorian society’s deepest, most anxiously felt needs. Pointing out that traditionally, angels were male, martial, and energetically mobile—unlike the claustrophobically caged female angels the Victorians postulated—Auerbach suggests that this unprecedented shift in gender signaled a revolutionary displacement of men by women in the period’s cultural imagination. Moreover, the female angel did, in fact, still possess the energy of her male antecedent—an assertion Auerbach validates by an audacious reconsideration of two of the age’s quintessential angel-women: Charles Dickens’ long-suffering Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) and Agnes Wickfield in David Copperfield (1850). Little Nell’s sentimentalized passivity just before her death has been unduly stressed; for most of her brief life, she is actually intensely purposeful, full of the stamina and willpower of male angels. Agnes’ very stability, on the other hand, is the source of her angelic power; through the determined strength of her patient goodness, she succeeds in making David Copperfield a new person, as he himself eventually perceives.
A similar shift in gender occurs in the Victorian conception of demons. For example, William Makepeace Thackeray’s Becky Sharp is consistently associated with sirens both in the text of Vanity Fair (1848) and in his illustrations for it. Further, female demons can be positive, not merely destructive forces, as Becky prods the deluded Amelia Osborne toward happiness with worthy Dobbin. By comparison, male demons in Victorian literature are stunted, like Little Nell’s dwarfish pursuer Quilp, or fragmented, like Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Even Emily Brontë’s brooding Heathcliff is not safe from Auerbach’s revision. She claims that the vengeful hero of Wuthering Heights (1847) is “ineffectual” and unable to exist independently of the women (Nelly Dean, Isabella Linton, Catherine Earnshaw) who create him. Whether angel or demon—each defines and continually elides into the other—woman is active, powerful, and divine.
Old maids and fallen women, another reciprocally defining pair of female types, were viewed by the Victorians as figures both of pathos and contempt, exiles from, and thus threats to, a family-centered society. In her discussion of old maids, Auerbach expands beyond literature and art to biography. She effectively demonstrates how unmarried women such as Florence Nightingale and Frances Power Cobbe sought to live heroically autonomous lives. They created not only independent histories for themselves but became part of the history of their era as well—a pattern exemplified by Queen Victoria.
If the old maid is able to apotheosize herself by rising, so, paradoxically, may a woman gain transcendence by falling. In perhaps her most convincing delineation of a double message running through Victorian literature—“an explicit narrative that abases the woman, an iconographic pattern that exalts her”—Auerbach shows how sinners such as Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and George Eliot’s Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede (1859) display a strength and single-mindedness that confound their male betrayers, who simply dissolve out of the story. The woman is left in sole possession, just as the seducer of the defiant pseudo-madonna in Ford Madox Brown’s startling painting Take Your Son, Sir! shrinks to a tiny figure reflected in a mirror. Moreover, such women have the capacity to disrupt entire societies, as Guinevere does in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859-1885). Her descent becomes a national one as well, which the hero Arthur is helpless to prevent. By falling, woman triumphantly manifests to an unsuspecting world her previously submerged power.
Having revealed the hidden dimensions of her mythography of womanhood, Auerbach then interestingly, if somewhat tenuously, links it to the overt Victorian fascination with literary character, a phenomenon she ascribes to the same cause as the period’s fearful awe of feminine vitality: the failure of religious faith in an age racked by doubt and rapid change. Citing, for example, books such as Mary Cowden Clark’s The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines (1851-1852) and portraits of Dickens surrounded by his characters (into whom he himself metamorphosed during his famous public readings), Auerbach shows how Victorians delighted to imagine characters in literature freeing themselves from their texts to lead extended lives independent of their mortal creators, lives “within yet beyond the human.” This belief in “the metamorphic potential of transfigured humanity” parallels the age’s implicit faith in woman’s divine/demoniac power to renew herself endlessly. In a brief epilogue, however, Auerbach points out that the twentieth century has rejected these galvanizing alternatives to traditional dogma. Modernism has “killed” literary character, while women feel besieged and dispirited, lacking any sustaining myth of their hidden potency. Auerbach’s study is, finally, both a moving elegy for the death of character in literature and a passionate plea for women to discover their “unexpectedly empowering past.”
It is difficult to briefly convey the stimulating complexity of Auerbach’s presentation and the cumulative weight of the wonderful wealth of varied evidence she marshals. Nevertheless, readers find themselves objecting to weaknesses in the book that bond indissolubly with its considerable strengths. The interdisciplinary range of Auerbach’s examples is frequently compelling; simultaneously, it leads her to blur important distinctions of genre, occasion, and audience. She becomes so enthralled with decoding subtexts that she sometimes fails to examine with sufficient care the explicit texts—a problem especially apparent in her discussions of Pre-Raphaelite art.
One such case is her reading of Ford Madox Brown’s painting The Last of England, a circular canvas depicting the emigration to Australia of sculptor Thomas Woolner and his wife. They are shown on shipboard seated next to each other, holding hands, partially sheltered from wind and spray by a tilted umbrella. Protruding from under the woman’s cape are a baby’s fingers, which she grasps. Although Auerbach grants that the painting’s mythic meaning is “initially obscure,” she boldly asserts that every part of the composition subordinates the husband to the “determined” wife/queen. The umbrella functions as her crown (however askew it may be) and accentuates the circle of her arm, a shape to which the man’s arm is merely an “obedient echo.” Auerbach then brings the woman to pulsating life; this “primum mobile” begins to expand across the painting’s space as “her huddled husband recedes”; her bonnet ribbon, blowing directly at him, “conspires to push [him] further into the background.” By the end of the analysis, he has become equated with the hidden babe as a “shrunken figure.” It is something of a shock to turn back to the reproduction of this painting on the preceding page and find that the wife has apparently deflated to ordinary dimensions. One recalls that Auerbach has said nothing of the tears welling up in this pensive woman’s eyes—scarcely the symbol of unswerving determination—and that Auerbach has ignored, among other pertinent details, the sonnet Brown wrote to accompany the painting, in which he celebrates the husband as the wife’s life-giver.
The sheer volume and variety of Auerbach’s examples enable her to abandon one proof and hasten confidently on to the next just as she is about to be challenged. Like the mythic woman she seeks to resurrect, she constantly eludes her pursuers by shifting shape. For Nina Auerbach is herself a myth-maker, a prophetess; she casts spells over texts. Her audacity in assuming this role is breathtaking, but it is also what makes Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth such an exciting contribution to Victorian and feminist studies. Even when one utterly disagrees with her, one experiences the exhilarating engagement in sharp intellectual combat that only the most daringly seminal works provoke.