Trains of Thought: the Challenges of Mobility in the Work of Rhoda Broughton

Abstract

This article examines women's mobility in the work of Rhoda Broughton, looking closely at her use of the railway as a means of rendering not only the movement but also the drifting consciousness of her heroines. Combining privacy and publicity, movement and stasis, the railway in Broughton's work affects the subjectivity and everyday routine of women, becoming a literary means of exploring woman's complex response to the transitory nature of experience, the rapidly shifting states of consciousness, and modernity's fleeting images -all of which are reflected in Broughton's idiosyncratic style.

THE FALSE CLUES OF INNOCENT SENSATIONS: ABORTING ADULTERY PLOTS IN RHODA BROUGHTON'S NANCY (1873)

“…The scene in which Nancy first encounters her future husband is emblematic of her shifting status: she is precariously poised on top of a garden wall after her brother Bobby has taken away the ladder, leaving her no choice but to leap into the open arms of her father's former school friend. Nancy describes the leap with blunt self-irony: ''With arms extended, like the sails of a windmill, I hurl myself into the embrace of Sir Roger Tempest'' (23). Despite this sarcastic undercutting of sexual allusion, the scene is rich in metaphorical suggestiveness.…”

“…In a recent essay, Anna Despotopoulou has suggested that this stylistic choice of present-tense narration alerts the reader to a speeding-up of events, experiences, and emotional ups and downs*of sensation itself. 23 Modernity, Despotopoulou argues, heightened or quickened ''female bodily and emotional experience''. 24 The resulting enhancement of the sensuous, of a particularly ''erotic'' sensationalism, however, is not the only effect of this stylistic technique.…”