The Flat Heroine: Flat Character and Agency inMiss Marjoribanks

Abstract

Critics of Miss Marjoribanks are divided about whether Margaret Oliphant's eponymous heroine's performance of social conventions, particularly those pertaining to gender roles, is consciously subversive or an unreflective embodiment of those conventions. This scholarship implicitly equates agency with critical detachment: if Lucilla does not critique the conventions she uses and the constructions of gender they reflect, she must lack the capacity to think strategically about her desires, a capacity necessary for agency. It's true that Lucilla is neither critical nor detached. Oliphant characterizes her as fully invested in social norms and as lacking the psychological depth that typically marks agential characters. In fact, I argue that Lucilla is a flat character and that Lucilla's flatness is precisely what makes her excel as an agent. Lucilla's nigh-emotionless thinking, combined with her ruling qualities of good sense and self-satisfaction, promotes agency. Untrammeled by mixed feelings or self-doubt, she has nothing to do but rationally calculate how best to achieve her interests. Reconsidering Lucilla's agency in light of her flatness thus allows us both to value that agency as Oliphant portrays it and to understand how characters can have agency at all.