The "Revolt of the Gentle": Romance and the Politics of Resistance in Working-Class Women's Writing

Fox, Pamela

doi:10.2307/1345818

NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction

1994

DOI: 10.2307/1345818

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The "Revolt of the Gentle": Romance and the Politics of Resistance in Working-Class Women's Writing

Pamela Fox¹

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“…(ll. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] Carnie departs from the traditional elegy and presents a wordless tribute to her mother by presenting her own limitations as a poet. Therefore, Carnie employs a Victorian form to articulate a Modernist gap.…”

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“…(ll. [1][2][3][4][5][6] Unlike the other fallen women in Carnie's poetry, this unnamed woman's words show her to be naïve and victimized by her love. She tells the narrating speaker: I went to meet my lover in the wood, And found a man who had his looks and voice, Who gripped me till my very heart was crushed, Who would not hear my voice, but took his will, His cruel tiger's will-and then, afraid, Looked shuddering round upon the evening wood, And murdered me.…”

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“…Down, down, as goes the diver through the flood, Where unknown horrors through the waters creep, Alone, for none may follow if they would,Leaving the world with one adventurous leap-Then up and up, flung back upon the shore,Clasping the precious cup of life's pure gold-Forgetting, as the sunlight makes it blaze,The weird, black tides, that o'er the diver rolled. (ll [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]…”

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"Whilst working at my frame": The Poetic Production of Ethel Carnie

Alves¹

2000

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represent the conflicted status of the individual, female, working-class poet acclaimed by the middle-and upper-class readers. Unlike the literary careers of many nineteenth-century male British working-class poets, or even of the American "factory girl" poet, Lucy Larcom, the poetic profession of Johnston and Carnie did not permanently thrust them into the middleand upper-class societies of mid-nineteenth-century and early twentiethcentury Great Britain. Instead, like British factory worker and magazine poet Fanny Forrester, Ellen Johnston, and Ethel Carnie rose to prominence among the middle class and then faded from middle-class view into the obscurity of the industrial community. Johnston and Carnie knowingly wrote to and compiled poems for a disparate audience for their bound volumes. The literary career and production of Ethel Carnie (1886-c.1960), a woman who published three volumes of poetry and ten novels in the early twentieth century, may be compared to and contrasted with the careers and works of her working-class poetic foremothers. Like her working-class predecessors, Carnie, a South Lancashire mill girl, began working in the textile factories during her early adolescent years. Like other women poets, she initially published poems in local periodicals and in labor presses. The poetics and subject matter of Carnie's bound volumes exemplify the poet's anxiety over gender roles and the social position of white working-class women. Although separated by more than six decades from the career of Lucy Larcom (1824-1893), the literary career of this British poet follows a trajectory similar to that of the American factory girl. Just as Larcom's early poetry was noticed by poet and middle-class social activist John Greenleaf Whittier, so too, Carnie's periodical poetry attracted the attention of middleclass male mentors W. H. Burnett and the editor of The Clarion, Robert

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"Whilst working at my frame": The Poetic Production of Ethel Carnie

Alves¹

2000

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WORKING-CLASS SUBJECTIVITY IN MARGARET HARKNESS'SA CITY GIRL

Sparks

2017

Victorian Literature and Culture

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One of the obvious strengths of Margaret Harkness's 1887 novel A City Girl is its comprehensive visual record of London's East End. Harkness depicts Whitechapel's geography and public and residential spaces with an authority derived, as we know, from her voluntary residence in the Katharine Buildings, thinly disguised in the novel as the Charlotte Buildings. The Katherine Buildings were a block of apartments for working class tenants built by the East End Dwelling Company; Harkness lived in them for a few months in 1887 and was one of a wave of middle-class women who ventured into such residences, sometimes as employees (“lady rent collectors”) and sometimes, as with Harkness and her cousin Beatrice Potter (later Webb) as writers determined to document in fictional or non-fictional form the conditions in which the poor lived. Harkness's first-hand experience and descriptive acuity has inspired some rich and productive scholarship on A City Girl, which in the form of two scholarly editions (one recent and one forthcoming) is the subject of a modest renaissance. From a literary perspective, most scholars have grappled with the novel's generic affiliation, describing it variously as a New Woman novel, a socialist novel, a sentimental novel, and an example of English naturalism. Some of these critics – principally John Goode and Rob Breton – combine a study of the novel's generic signs with historical attention to Socialism, one of Harkness's many ambivalent and abbreviated political and institutional affiliations in the 1880s and 90s; they use the literary lens of genre study to better understand the author's political consciousness in the context of late-Victorian reform politics. Pursuing another horizon of inquiry, I turn away from the novel's documentary evidence and generic and political loyalties to its elusive but revealing study of artistic representation. It is not the sociological or political milieu of Harkness's East End heroine, Nelly Ambrose, that interests me, but the link that Harkness establishes between Nelly's impoverished mind and her impoverished world, which I read principally through her unfamiliarity with narrative representation. Harkness sustains two discrete perspectives in A City Girl: Nelly experiences the world in episodic moments, and her inability to shape these moments into a purposeful or predictive sequence makes her effectively powerless to control the events that shape her life. Her distance from a narrative consciousness alerts us to the second perspective in the novel which might otherwise escape special notice: the narrative realism that A City Girl participates in, that the experience of reading the novel activates, and that is self-consciously followed by Arthur Grant, Nelly's seducer. Arthur's class-based narrative advantage over Nelly enables him to write the story of their affair and control its outcome much in the way that the readers of A City Girl have worked to make sense of Nelly's detached and inexpressive character, and have often made their own determinations about the novel's ending. The medium of the novel's hostility to Nelly's particular kind of consciousness is a metaliterary reflection, then, of the subjugation by narrative disadvantage that we see play out in the story.

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Remapping the Present: The Master Narrative of Modern Literary History and the Lost Forms of Twentieth-Century Fiction

Richardson¹

1997

Twentieth Century Literature

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The "Revolt of the Gentle": Romance and the Politics of Resistance in Working-Class Women's Writing

Cited by 3 publications

References 4 publications

"Whilst working at my frame": The Poetic Production of Ethel Carnie

"Whilst working at my frame": The Poetic Production of Ethel Carnie

WORKING-CLASS SUBJECTIVITY IN MARGARET HARKNESS'SA CITY GIRL

Remapping the Present: The Master Narrative of Modern Literary History and the Lost Forms of Twentieth-Century Fiction

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