The Real Heroine of the Story: Female Rivalry in the Victorian Novel

Abstract

This thesis seeks to challenge the thinking that led Virginia Woolf to dismiss fictional representations of female rivalry as “simplified, conventionalised”, uncomplicated and uninteresting. Using close readings of novels by Charlotte Brontë, Anne Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Ellen Wood, I look at the ways in which female rivalry functions in the Victorian novel; at the tensions and currents of narrative it creates; at its force for forging relational structures between characters; and at its part in the distribution of narrative interest, affect and sympathy. Whether it manifests as maternal rivalry, fledgling professional rivalry, sororal rivalry, or the romantic rivalry so often associated with the nineteenth-century marriage plot, female rivalry is central to Victorian narratives about women because it translates female homosocial bonds into narrative effect. I argue that rivalry is both a structural and thematic concern in narrative. Narrative conditions us to read rivalry. It teaches us to derive meaning through the oppositional frameworks in which it sets characters and their stories up against each other: as foils; as relative points of moral or aesthetic value; as rival points of interest. By encouraging us to read and evaluate narrative elements relative to each other, narrative structures generate rivalry. And rivalry, in its turn, generates narrative. The idea of female rivalry has tended to attract the kind of cultural stigma that Sianne Ngai associates with “ugly feelings”, and feminist debates on the subject have typically attempted to rehabilitate this image. I seek neither to assign negative or positive values to female rivalry, nor to suggest new ways in which to accept it into the fold of feminist criticism. Instead, I want to stake a claim for rivalry’s part in the reading and writing of narrative, and more specifically, for the role female rivalry plays in the formation and the consumption of the Victorian marriage plot.