[In the following essay, Hanson argues that female short-story writers of the late nineteenth century reoriented the conventional narrative construction of the feminine.]

The short stories of the 1880s and 1890s were written in a period of emphasis on the moment and on the ephemeral, a spell of relaxation from the developmental narrative forms of the nineteenth century. It has often been argued that the popularity of the short form at this time was connected with the fact that this was a period of rapid social change, but Elaine Showalter makes the suggestion that the short story form may also have had a special significance for women writers:

For late-nineteenth-century women writers in particular, the short story offered flexibility and freedom from the traditional plots of the three-decker Victorian novel, plots which invariably ended in the heroine's marriage or her death. In contrast to the sprawling three-decker, the short story emphasized psychological intensity and formal innovation.¹

It could be argued that the demise of the three-decker novel coincided with a challenge to the narrative of femininity which had been dominant earlier in the nineteenth century. The argument that gender identity is constructed largely through codes of representation is a familiar one, but consideration of these codes has tended to see them as static or iconic. The role of narrative in enforcing and stabilizing gender identity has as yet received little attention. Could it be that the turn to short fiction which is so marked among women writers in the period from 1880 to 1910 functioned in a fashion similar to the turn to fantasy and science fiction of women writers of the 1980s? Both shifts show an attempt to think ‘beyond the ending’, in Rachel Blau DuPlessis's phrase, beyond the fictional ending of the heroine's marriage or her death.² In both cases, it could also be argued, there has been an attempt to think beyond or outside what Kristeva would call the sacrificial nature of the social contract. Such an attempt might cause these writers to call into question not just specific narratives of femininity, but the very principle of narrative itself. As Kristeva puts it in ‘Women's Time’, women's exploration of the constitution and functioning of the social contract can lead to ‘attempts […] to break the code, to shatter language, to find a specific discourse closer to the body and emotions, to the unnameable repressed by the social contract’.³

I want to argue here that women writers of the early modernist period were particularly concerned to expose the disjunctions between the (then) dominant narrative of femininity and the experience of those subjected to it, and that it is this which accounts for their turn to the short story form. This is not, of course, to suggest that longer narratives cannot embody resistance and challenge to the dominant order, but to propose a particular emphasis and intensity of interrogation in these texts. Women writers such as Olive Schreiner, George Egerton, and Charlotte Mew were concerned with the revelation of autonomous female desire, which is represented in their work as disruptive, excessive, and destabilizing. Indeed, it is precisely because this desire is perceived to threaten both social and narrative order that such intense anxiety surrounds its disclosure. This anxiety is displaced and represented textually through the male narrator, who figures with surprising frequency in works written by women in this period. The male narrator is, I would suggest, a dramatization of the male reader whose disapprobation haunts the imagination of these writers. It is as though desire can only be expressed in texts which anticipate male criticism and in dramatizing it, to some extent contain it.

Several of these stories are structured around the encounter between a male narrator or protagonist and a woman who is presented in iconic terms, frequently with explicitly painterly references. An example is in Charlotte Mew's ‘Mark Stafford's Wife’, in which the central character, Kate, is first described in terms of a painter's model, ‘posing for a master’. The text then juxtaposes moments in which Kate seems to have control of her own image (as when she is watched by her benevolent guardian) and moments in which she is captured and fixed by the appropriating gaze of her husband. This kind of structure is familiar, of course, from other contemporary texts which explore the dynamic of the male gaze, most notably The Portrait of a Lady. However, writers like Mew seem to respond with particular sharpness to the phenomenon of the commodification of women in this period. The commodification and fetishization of women in the decadent period has been explored by feminist scholars such as Janet Wolff, who finds the locus classicus of this attitude in the work of Baudelaire. Wolff quotes a passage from The Painter of Modern Life (1859-1860) which expresses, she contends, ‘the classic misogynist duality, of woman-as-idealized-but-vapid/real-and-sensual-but-detested’:

Woman, in a word, for the artist in general, and Monsieur G in particular, is far more than just the female of Man. Rather she is a divinity, a star, which presides at all the conceptions of the brain of man; a glittering conglomeration of all the graces of Nature, condensed into a single being; the object of the keenest admiration and curiosity that the picture of life can offer its contemplator. She is a kind idol, stupid, perhaps, but dazzling and bewitching, who holds wills and destinies suspended on her glance.⁴

We can find a still more powerful feminist (re)reading of the masculine art of this period in the short stories of Angela Carter, who returns obsessively to the fetishistic construction of femininity in the work of writers such as Poe and Baudelaire. Consider this passage from her story ‘Black Venus’, which explores Baudelaire's use of the body of his mistress Jeanne Duval:

She sulked sardonically through Daddy's sexy dance, watching, in a bored, fascinated way, the elaborate reflections of the many strings of glass beads he had given her tracking about above her on the ceiling. She looked like the source of light but this was an illusion; she only shone because the dying fire lit his presents to her. Although his regard made her luminous, his shadow made her blacker than she was, his shadow could eclipse her entirely.⁵

Carter's metaphors articulate her sense that Baudelaire sees Jeanne as secondary and reflective, without autonomous identity.

In the short stories written by women in the decadent period, a recurrent pattern is that of the unveiling of the woman who has initially been presented by the narrator in iconic terms. In ‘Mark Stafford's Wife’, for example, Kate is, as noted above, initially presented as mysterious, fascinating, and inscrutable. She functions in the story as a kind of decorative surface, which all the other characters seek to penetrate. She is watched continually, by her guardian, by her husband, and by the young men whom she collects as admirers. Unsurprisingly, she develops a phobia about being looked at:

‘She thinks, poor child! that there's something, some shapeless horror, looking over her shoulder straight, as she hideously persists, into her soul. Not’, he went on, with a sort of forced irrelevancy, ‘but it won't bear looking into—the clearest pool!—but it's the what—the monstrous thing that's doing it, that's shattering her.’⁶

Not until the end of the story is it indicated that her husband is ‘the monstrous thing that's doing it’. Kate's guardian develops a photographic negative which discloses the positive identity of her tormentor:

It came slowly, and eventually, as I held it up, I slightly recoiled—was suddenly struck with something wrong about it, unexpected, strange! Beside the face I was looking for there appeared, not—and yet after all it was another—or the semblance of another face; twisting round, immediately behind her, close over her shoulder; not at first to me a thing human or recognizable, but gradually growing hideously distinct, monstrously familiar—the face of her husband—of Mark himself!

(p. 193)

It is, of course, Mark and not Kate whose identity is revealed in this negative. Mark is the ‘monster’ who has destroyed Kate by his inability to see ‘behind’ her appearance. For Mark, Kate remains a kind of beautiful vacancy, ‘icily regular, splendidly null’, literally a fetish of femininity. The other characters in the story share his blindness, to a greater or lesser degree. Yet Kate is allowed to ‘speak’ in this text. She speaks to the reader in falling to her death, in a suicide which is her only means of expressing her will or desire. The manner of her death matches exactly the text's narrative method. Kate is travelling to Dover with her husband, and then quite without warning, ‘fails’ and ‘ends’. There is, simply, no more story: Kate's future, her guardian thinks, with its ‘threatening dusk’, has been ‘averted’. Her husband thinks her action ‘violent’ and ‘unnatural’, but the suggestion is that it is only through such violent action that the dominant narrative of femininity can be exposed or contested by women.

Rather similarly, Olive Schreiner's story ‘The Buddhist Priest's Wife’ turns on the inadequacies of the male gaze. The story is told in the third person, with a narrator whose gender is not revealed, although there are strong indications that she is female. The story begins and ends with the narrator contemplating the dead body of a woman who has travelled far and done much, ‘this woman whom so many men loved, and so many women; who gave so much sympathy and never asked for anything in return!’.⁷ Was she really, the narrator asks rhetorically, as strong as she looked? Did she ever cry for something which was denied her? As the narrator considers the body, the pronouns shift between ‘she’ and ‘it’, reflecting the narrator's unease over one who seems to unsettle the boundaries between life and death, and, perhaps, between masculinity and femininity. The narrative then shifts to the last night the woman spent in London, on the eve of her departure for India. The woman, who is never named, has invited the man whom she loves to come and see her for the last time. Schreiner subverts convention here, paying more attention to the man's appearance than to the woman's—if anything, he is commodified, presented in terms of his handsome looks, his evening dress and great-coat. In the conversation which follows, while the two speak in the most apparently ‘open’ manner about sex and marriage, the man completely fails to see the personal bearing of the woman's remarks, and fails to see that she loves him. So sure does she become of his blindness and stupidity that she goes on to advise him over the kind of ‘neutral’ woman he should marry, and then to analyze critically her own position:

If a man loves a woman, he has a right to try and make her love him because he can do it openly, directly, without bending. There need be no subtlety, no indirectness. With a woman it's not so; she can take no love that is not laid openly, simply, at her feet. Nature ordains that she should never show what she feels […]. Therefore she must always go with her arms folded sexually.

(pp. 92-93)

This is a story in which a woman does reveal her desire (albeit obliquely), but the revelation is wasted on the man who can only see her, as Mark Stafford saw his wife, in terms of vacancy and nothingness. He sees her charm, her ‘brilliant parts and attractions’, but thinks that she makes ‘nothing’ of her life. The self, the will and desire which exist outside the stereotype of femininity, are literally invisible to him.

In both ‘Mark Stafford's Wife’ and ‘A Buddhist Priest's Wife’, the woman's response to this blindness is self-destructive. In ‘A Buddhist Priest's Wife’ the woman leaves immediately for a life of struggle which she knows will end in death, but it is a death which she welcomes because through it she will finally be freed from the constraints of gender:

Death means so much more to a woman than a man; when you knew you were dying, to look round on the world and feel the bond of sex that has broken and crushed you all your life gone, nothing but the human left, no woman any more, to meet everything on perfectly even ground.

(p. 93)

Her being seen as ‘nothing’ forces the woman to what is in effect a suicide.

Characteristically, then, the unveiling of the woman in these stories leads to her being perceived as a ‘nothingness’ by the male narrator/protagonist. Characteristically, too, however, a contrasting female figure in the text perceives both the woman's desire and the way in which she suffers because this desire is denied. It is tempting to link this difference in the response of the two sexes to the contemporary myths about sexuality so persuasively analyzed by Freud. As is well known, Freud argued that men had a deep-seated horror and fear of autonomous female desire, linked psychically to their fear of the castrated/castrating female genitals, represented in myth by the Medusa's head.⁸ In texts written by men in this period, women are indeed frequently represented as a paradoxically voracious no-thing, at once threatening and disavowed (the most famous example of such a text is probably Heart of Darkness). Women writers of the period seem to anticipate such a denial and disavowal, which they stage through their male protagonists and/or narrators, providing at the same time an alternative female recognition of the unmet desire which ‘crushes’ their female heroes ‘to earth’.

Freudian theory can, then, shed some light on the themes and structures of these texts. There is, however, one significant difference between Freud's narrative of female desire and the stories told by these women writers. In referring to the Medusa legend, Freud calls up the deeply embedded cultural assumption that the revelation of female desire is destructive to men. However, what is remarkable in these stories is that rather than the male protagonists/narrators being struck down by the revelation of female desire, it is the women themselves who are destroyed or who destroy themselves. Perhaps the most striking example of such a story is Charlotte Mew's ‘A White Night’. This is a story with a male narrator which has many of the characteristics of the male quest narrative (it has features in common with contemporary texts such as Heart of Darkness and Rider Haggard's She). The narrator is travelling in Spain with his newly-married sister and his brother-in-law, in a landscape which seems at first pleasantly exotic, with its ‘strong illusion of the Orient, extreme antiquity and dreamlike stillness’.⁹ They arrive in a remote village, and venture out to an isolated convent which strikes the narrator as ‘impressive in its loneliness, its blank negation of the outside world’. Soon enough, however, the little party find themselves trapped inside the convent, locked within its church ‘of darker stone’, and what seemed at first a journey into something mysteriously and charmingly ‘other’ has turned into a nightmare, an encounter with chaos and the abyss:

The echo of the vast, dark, empty place caught up our cries, seeming to hold them in suspension for a second in the void invisibility of roof and arches, then to fling them down in hollow repetition with an accent of unearthly mimicry which struck a little grimly on one's ear; and when we paused the silence seemed alert, expectant, ready to repel the first recurrence of unholy clamour.

(p. 150)

This ‘shapeless’, ‘breathless’ darkness ‘muddles thought’ and threatens reason: as in Heart of Darkness this is primordial darkness and chaos, figured as feminine in the womblike ‘vast dark empty place’. However, the darkness and silence are broken and the chaos brought under control as fifty or sixty monks file into the church, bearing tapers and chanting steadily. The monks bring light and language (the symbolic) to subdue the darkness, but a cry suddenly cuts across their hypnotic and repetitive chanting. I quote the relevant passage in full:

Heavy and sombre as the stillness which it broke, vaguely akin to it, the chant swept in and gained upon the silence with a motion of the tide. It was a music neither of the senses, nor the spirit, but the mind, as set, as stately, almost as inanimate as the dark aisles through which it echoed; even, colourless and cold.

And then, quite suddenly, against its grave and passionless inflections something clashed, a piercing intermittent note, an awful discord, shrilling out and dying down and shrilling out again—a cry—a scream.

(p. 151)

The chanting can be read as the narrative of patriarchy (which includes, of course, the narrative of femininity). This narrative is cut across by a scream which is like Mew's short story itself: a protest, a challenge to the symbolic order. The challenge is subdued, however, and the cry silenced by the ‘quiet recitation’ of the monks. The grim narrative continues, the narrator having ‘caught the trick’ of the ‘quiescence, aquiescence’ of the woman who is to be sacrificed, and who is eventually buried alive before his eyes.

Mew's text offers a powerful reworking of the male quest narrative, and it can also be seen as a response to the contemporary Gothic tales of Poe, in particular ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’. What these texts have in common is the ‘metaphor’ of a woman's being sacrificed or buried alive, although, not surprisingly, the metaphor is differently inflected in texts written by men and by women. Male-authored texts of this period connect the death of the central female figure with extremes of triumph and/or guilt, whereas Mew's text stresses necessity. One of the most striking features of ‘A White Night’ is not so much the male narrator's complicity in this horrific rite, but his conviction that the woman herself acquiesces in it:

She stood compliantly and absolutely still. If she had swayed, or given any hint of wavering, of an appeal to God or man, I must have answered it magnetically. It was she who had the key to what I might have done but didn't do. Make what you will of it—we were inexplicably en rapport.

(p. 156)

We could thus read Mew's text as throwing into relief two separate aspects of the symbolic order. The metaphor of burial suggests, first, its sacrificial aspect. According to Kristeva, the social contract rests on the violence of scapegoating and symbolic sacrifice, just as the linguistic order rests on the violence of psychic separation from the mother. The symbolic order thus rests on necessary violence, for without violence, there would be no order and no meaning. In stressing the antiquity of the rite which her narrator observes, Mew certainly emphasizes its primal, necessary aspect, and the text also stresses the way in which the murderer-priests bring order to chaos. However, the metaphor is specifically that of being buried alive, and here Mew's text points more specifically to the paradox of woman's relation to the symbolic order. ‘Woman’ can only know herself in the terms of an order which does not represent her. ‘She’ is outside language but can only know her alienated condition within it. The image of a woman buried alive catches exactly the ambivalence of this position. It is a metaphor to which later women writers have returned, most notably Virginia Woolf and Luce Irigaray, both of whom have focused on the figure of Antigone.¹⁰

‘A White Night’ offers a concentrated version of a pattern which recurs in many short stories written by women in this period, in which the revelation of female desire is followed by the death or suicide of the female hero.¹¹ It would be possible to read this pattern as a straightforwardly punitive one, embodying women's fears of retribution from men, but it is also possible to take the Kristevan line and to argue that there is a deeper connection between the position which these women occupy and death. If women are in some sense ‘outside’ language, then they are also on the side of death, linked with the chaos of the semiotic and the collapse of meaning and order. As Kristeva points out, ‘a woman has nothing to laugh about when the symbolic order collapses’: her link with the semiotic, with that which is unnameable and repressed, draws her towards death. Kristeva cites Woolf as a writer who was destroyed by the dialectic between semiotic and symbolic which is in her view characteristically feminine. Certainly, in the short stories written by women in the period immediately preceding that of Woolf, the text is frequently disrupted by a death which not only disrupts narrative order but which in itself seems to represent an aspect of ‘the feminine’.

It is my suggestion in this paper that women writers of the early modernist period were (like the modernist and postmodernist writers who followed them) preoccupied with the revelation of something which they felt troubled representation itself. Like subsequent generations of feminist writers and critics, they wanted to express a truth about women's experience and desire which, they felt, challenged the foundations of culture, and therefore potentially of narrative too. Whether or not women were (or are) in fact ‘outside’ language and culture is, in a sense, beside the point, which is that they have felt themselves to be excluded in this way. It was this feeling which led women writers of the early modernist period to reject established narrative forms in favour of less culturally determined forms and sequences. Whether their disturbing, often violent texts actually constitute an early example of the ‘revolution in poetic language’ which Kristeva associates with later writers such as Woolf and Plath is a matter which must remain open for debate.

Notes

1. Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin-de-Siècle, ed. by Elaine Showalter (London: Virago, 1993), pp. viii-ix.

2. Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).

3. The Kristeva Reader, ed. by Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 200.

4. Quoted in Janet Wolff, Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), p. 43.

5. Angela Carter, Black Venus (London: Picador, 1986), p. 12.

6. Charlotte Mew, Collected Poems and Prose (London: Virago, 1982), p. 188.

7. ‘The Buddhist Priest's Wife’, in Daughters of Decadence, p. 84.

8. For Freud's discussion of this see The Pelican Freud, vii, ed. by Angela Richards and Albert Dickson, 15 vols (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973-1987), 311.

9. Mew, Collected Poems and Prose, p. 147.

10. See Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (London: Hogarth Press, 1938) and The Years (London: Hogarth Press, 1937); Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. by Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985) for discussions of Antigone.

11. Other stories which follow this pattern and which are also collected in Daughters of Decadence are Mabel E. Wotton's ‘The Fifth Edition’ and Constance Fenimore Woolson's ‘Miss Grief’.