Beyond gender and genre

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Winter 1996 by Hirsch, Marianne

In the conduct books written between 1760 and 1840, Fraiman finds two areas of deep ambivalence about the course a girl's life should take, ambition and affiliation: the inherent conflict between the desire to achieve and to write, to gain authority, and the concomitant desire to build familial and communal ties.

Thus even here, in the texts that underwrite tradition, we find the germs of the antiromantic plots that will predominate in the fictional works, the homosocial communal rather than heterosexual and individual narratives that women inscribe. "Unable to represent a girl's entrance into the world as a simple graceful passage, attending in diverse ways to its dangers and insisting on its deprivations, they manage collectively to question the routines of growing up female and male and at moments to imagine they could be otherwise" (31). These counternarratives take different forms in the four popular novels Fraiman discusses in detail. Evelina, she argues, would like to tell a positive tale of progress and growth but is haunted by submerged plots of rage and frustration and ultimately by the narrator's silent contentment-a silencing of other possibilities and, in Fraiman's reading, a form of gagging. A similar downward spiral defines the development of Elizabeth Bennett in Austen's Pride and Prejudice where the inadequacy of fathers ruins the opportunities for the daughters who are hopelessly constrained by their dependence on them. Elizabeth is a mediator between two paternal figures, Mr. Bennett and Mr. Darcy, and thus she also becomes a mediator between classes, the bourgeois Bennett household and the aristocratic Darcy estate. In reconciling these conflicting social forces, however, Elizabeth surrenders much that she values about herself, a surrender paralleled by the disastrous story of her sister Lydia from whom Elizabeth cannot sufficiently distinguish herself. Ultimately, and at the expense of Elizabeth, Pride and Prejudice depicts the bonding between men, facilitated by women, and bridging ever-growing and potentially dangerous social divides- "a marriage of two classes no less than a marriage of two minds" (87.) It is no surprise to read of Jane Eyre's concern with class structure, but Fraiman satisfyingly examines the relationship of women and work in the novel and focuses on Jane's connection not to Bertha Mason but to Grace Poole. In becoming Rochester's caretaker, Jane becomes Grace, a worker as well as a wife, "the happy, rich, and conventionally respectable lady and the overworked, always potentially irate nurse" (120). She remains connected to the other working women, the other servants of the novel, however, and this is a form of connection and community that radically undercuts the individualistic nature of the Bildungsroman and the marriage plot. The Mill on the Floss constitutes Fraiman's paradigmatic text because it illustrates most convincingly the author's own quarrel with this inadequate genre. Eliot knows the Bildungsroman tradition and invokes it in Tom's plot. Maggie's story, however, is not just a foil, it is a parody of Bildung. Using the story of Aunt Pullet's bonnet, Fraiman demonstrates the "claustrophobia, inconsequentiality, and desperate consumerism of Victorian women's lives" (134) and reveals the consciously parodic elements of Eliot's plot. But in the novel's end, Eliot may well signal, as Fraiman suggests, that this gendered bifurcation of plots is in itself lethal, that Tom and Maggie's stories, like their bodies and souls sinking into the river, need to be seen in relation to one another and not in opposition. With this assimilation of female Bildung to male, and this assertion of a relational identity and subjectivity, Fraiman points to a new direction in feminist scholarship, its move beyond gender. In the past decade, feminist critics have begun to revise gender-specific paradigms by establishing other forms of difference-class, race, sexuality, nationality-that inscribe gender into a larger network of determinants. More recently still, and here Tom and Maggie are particularly relevant, feminists have found similarities as well as differences in the stories of women and men. Both, they have said, are concerned with assimilation, both with ambition, however differently. Fraiman's emphasis on class throughout her book, and on the interdependence between Maggie and Tom in the last chapter begins to adumbrate such a set of revisions. Where that will leave the Bildungsroman and the analysis of gender and genre will remain to be seen.