En278: Ends and Beginnings
Seminar Room: H543
Seminar Tutor: Emilie Taylor-Brown
Office Hours: Mon 11-12pm, H512
Ends and Beginnings:
Late 19th & Early 20th Century Literature & Culture
Eliza Lynn Linton: The Rebel of the Family (1880)
The readers attention is roused… by an ardent desire to find out
whether what seems at moments, the author’s advocacy of
strange views is serious or not, whether she means to sympathise
with or to laugh at her heroine’s convictions and inconvenient
theories, or whether or not she thinks the Perdita’s example a
desirable one, on the whole, to follow.
--- The Saturday Review, 20 Nov 1880.
Bell Bount, however, the masculine lady who inviegles Perdita
into her friendship, is a character too odious, and the scenes in
which she appears too repulsive, even for comment.
--- The Academy, 19 Feb 1881.
Marriage, Duty, Commerce
Being the most beautiful of the three, [she] was the best investment of maternal hopes and the
family future. (24)
Her smile was one of the finest bits of facial artistry to be found within the four seas… it was a
smile that counted for beauty, like a good complexion or a fine figure; and this and her manner
and her style made the best assets in her personal treasury. (25)
When she heard a newcomer say in a loud whisper: “what a charming smile that Miss Winstanley
has!” … then has soul was satisfied because her existence was justified. She had done her duty to
herself, her mother, her future and family fortunes. She had therefore earned the right to be well
dressed and taken out into society, as fairly as a workman, who has laid his tale of bricks has
earned his pint of beer and his stipulated week’s wage. (25)
1. Explore the idea of “marriage” in the text.
2. How and why are social relationships enmeshed in the discourses of commerce?
En278: Ends and Beginnings
Seminar Room: H543
Seminar Tutor: Emilie Taylor-Brown
Office Hours: Mon 11-12pm, H512
Women’s Emancipation Movement and Intellectual Influence
Something in Mrs Bount’s face chilled and repelled her, she did not know why, she only felt that
this was not the ideal for which she was looking, and that supreme good did not lie in the lending
of that soft milk white caressing hand…[ she felt an uneasy sensation] analogous to that which
we may imagine a saint might have when there appeared before him the prince of darkness clad
as an angel of light–a clever disguise and the cloven hoof well covered by the shining garments,
but only a disguise at the best–not the real thing! (54)
[Connie Tracy] lived with Mrs Blount on those terms of dependence and subserviency, which the
champion of her sex found so infinitely degrading when they exist between men and women.
(56)
“If you want love”, said Bell, putting her arm tenderly round Connie Tracy; “you have it here –the
best and truest that the world can give, the love between women without the degrading and
disturbing interference of man.” (57)
Who was she yielding to unwise temptation, or honestly following the light sent to her for only
guidance? (145)
[Mrs Crawford] felt as if the girl had been given into her hand by the Lord himself, to direct and
guide aright. Providence works by mysterious ways, she thought, and no law is absolute. The
whole thing looked so like an overruling will–so like divine direction! (168)
Bell Blount was to her one of those living enigmas, the true value of which we cannot determine–
one of those sphinxes which are beast and human in one, divine for the one part and Satanic for
the other. (174)
3. Consider the portrayal of women’s rights and the emancipation movement. How
does Linton undermine their cause?
4. How is religious discourse employed to highlight good and bad social behaviours?
Gastronomic Motifs
Perdita, the unlucky sandwich (32)
…but for all their beauty, teeth that somehow suggested the eating of flesh. (32)
Perdita gasped. That dish of meat was terribly crude and strong! And her mental digestion was
not trained for the assimilation of such upsetting food. (53)
All this, however, made the girl’s portion of that banquet of life where hitherto she had been such
an unfortunate guest, richer and more delicious than she had ever anticipated. (181)
5. What is the purpose of the returning motif of food, consumption and digestion?
En278: Ends and Beginnings
Seminar Room: H543
Seminar Tutor: Emilie Taylor-Brown
Office Hours: Mon 11-12pm, H512
Love and Artful Deception
It is so delightful to see one’s ideal realized in flesh—though that realization be only a chemist
and druggist selling nasty compounds over the counter and with a wife somewhere about the
world! Why should we moderns be denied the joy that Pygmalion knew? He created his supreme
delight in marble and we make ours out of living man. What the hammer and chisel were to him,
gratitude and imagination were to Perdita; and to each the ideal was perfected. (169)
6. How are love, truth and deception negotiated in the text? Consider Perdita’s “selfdeception”, Eva’s deception by M. le Comte Bois Duval and the Winstanley’s
orchestration of marriage proposals.
7. According to Linton what is a woman’s “duty”?
8. Explore Eva and Thomasina’s finesse for artful deceit. In what ways does this reflect
their success as ladies?
9. How does Linton use heteroglossia and polyphony to satirize and expose the
weaknesses of her own characters? How does this complicate the narrative voice?
Points to Consider
- Explore the role and characterisation of gender.
- How does class intersect with gender performativity?
- How do notions of natural (inherited) and artificial (i.e. clothes, jewellery, hairstyles)
correspond to respectability?
- Consider the contrast between “traditional” and “new” women. Who does Linton Sympathise
with?
- How does Linton approach the topic of “mercenary marriages”?
- How does Linton use heteroglossia and polyphony to satirize and expose the weaknesses of her
own characters?
- Consider the public versus the private space. How does Perdita’s job expose her to the dangers
of public spaces? What is the significance of Perdita looking for “family” affection in the public
sphere?
- Consider the discourse of lesbianism.
- What is the significance of literary and classical illusion?
- Why does Linton use so many French and German words?
- How are romantic relationships and business relationships made synonymous?
- Consider Perdita’s wish ‘that she had been born a boy’.
- Consider Perdita’s success in maintaining financial order (through working and then through
marrying Leslie).
- How does Perdita’s desire to work and be useful, in contrast to her sister’s idleness and
emotional artistry, foreshadow her entering into a good and meaningful marriage? Consider the
“wifely” models that Perdita has access to: weak, exploited Connie Tracy; reckless, demanding
Eva; dutiful, but deceptive Thomasina; estranged and “mad” Florence.
En278: Ends and Beginnings
Seminar Room: H543
Seminar Tutor: Emilie Taylor-Brown
Office Hours: Mon 11-12pm, H512
Eliza Lynn Linton
-- Early supporter of Women’s emanicipation
-- Lived in London in boarding house to follow a journalistic career
-- Wrote for Dicken’s Household Words among other journals and became first women journalist
to be salaried in England at the Morning Chronicle
-- Wrote in support of Mary Wollstonecraft A Vindication on the Rights of Women as bravest thing
ever written
-- love affair with Irish Catholic Doctor, Edward McDermott, did not marry because of religious
differences
-- very controversial novel Realities (1851) slammed by critics for its advocation of free love
-- married widower William James Linton, very unhappy and they separated. He moved to UA
and they never saw each other again
-- became increasingly conservative and wrote critique modern women’s social behaviours and
supported women’s rightful place as in the home
-- anti-women’s suffrage
The Girl of the Period (1868)
-- some intense emotional relationships with woman of undeterminable nature
known as staunch anti-feminist writer.
Consider:
Leslie Chatsworth’s position as retail not wholesale. Gentleman – conduct or heredity?
Use of natural imagery to narrate Perdita’s uncouth, emotional character
Bell Bount’s messy, traditional household/relationship. Just transplanted man. How the
Emancipation of Women does not extend to mixing classes or removing class boundaries
Money versus Class
Why does Linton not explicitly tell you what happened with leslie’s wife?
Communication; Perdita as clay to be moulded, never quite right, always wrong. The need to be
understood. She is eventually understood by a man, Leslie who does not strive to change her
drastically.
Anxiety that middle class women will become like men or working class.
Heteroglossia – “different speechedness” Mikhail Bakhtin; hybrid utterances = blending of
world views in one language; co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions
Narration of the author, of the characters, of society in novel form. Conflict between narrative,
authorial voice and character dialogue.
"another's speech in another's language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a
refracted way." – satire, irony, parody. Double-voiced discourse
Polyphony – many voicedness: different perspectives in the novel - how reality appears to each
character denotes the different stratas (social, professional, dialects, jargons etc) in the same
language, prefigured in language itself.