[In the following essay, Broughton examines what Martineau's Autobiography reveals about Victorian beliefs on death and the practice of autobiography.]

In her Autobiography, Harriet Martineau twice claims, using almost identical phraseology, that she ‘hoped for, and expected early death till it was too late to die early’.¹ This has long struck me as a most elegant, economical way of expressing the autobiographical dilemma facing mid-Victorian, middle-class Englishwomen; indeed the trope it evokes so pithily—the trope of self as martyr manqué—is a common feature of women's literary self-representation.² The phrase haunts me. It seems to me that if our reading of Victorian women's autobiography could once fully accommodate its humour, while remaining faithful to its pathos, we would not only have a key with which to unlock a great many of women's efforts at self-representation, but would be a step closer to reconciling the often divergent methods, interests and conclusions of feminist historians on the one hand, and feminist literary critics on the other.

I emphasise here the literariness of the formulation because recent work on the stylistics of autobiography allows us to recognize and re-read as rhetorical many features of the genre which have hitherto been hostage to historiographical fortune.³ How we read women's autobiography—women's attempts at self-representation—has enormous consequences for the disciplines of feminist history and criticism. The route by which autobiography, read as biography, feeds into feminist history is easily demonstrated; and not just along the familiar lines of ‘gaps, silences and errors’. The explanations and images articulated in autobiography, the ground risked in the dangerous and tricky game of ‘reviolating masculine turf’,⁴ is often expropriated in the service of clichéd and finally reductive accounts of the female psyche. Literal readings of remarks like Martineau's have lent weight and confidence to essentializing interpretations of Victorian feminists' lives. Whenever the efforts and achievements of a Victorian heroine threaten to confound her biographer, sooner or later out it comes: the martyr complex. Whether the subject be atheist or Anglican, recluse or demagogue, at the end of the day it is her masochistic, febrile religious temperament which drives her on through physical pain, emotional disappointment, spiritual conflict and social exile to ever greater feats of self-sacrifice, ever wider influence, ever more improbably legendary status. Indeed the legend and the pathology are the same thing. Only a madwoman could so defy convention. Only hysterical strength could overcome such obstacles.⁵ Feminist history has been more circumspect in ascribing to repression and neurosis the complex careers of early reformers, writers and activists. Nevertheless, traces of a romantic investment in images of suffering feminine gentility—and a reluctance to theorize its relationship to our need for active heroines—still plague the writing of women's history.⁶

In the arena of literary criticism, fantasies of premature death have long been recognized as the stock-in-trade of nineteenth-century literary women. They have variously been interpreted as morbidly prophetic when they came true (as in the case of Emily Brontë) or as naïve juvenilia when they were apparently outgrown (as in the case of George Eliot's notebooks). When neither explanation sufficed, because the poet inconveniently both stayed alive and continued to use the image of picturesque female decline in her mature work (and we may cite Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson) then the idea of an ‘aesthetics of renunciation’ has come into play.⁷ The idea is that literary women made a ‘virtue of necessity’: playing out, in a lyrical, sensual, and even sexual language, the pain of renouncing fulfilment through art, the senses and sexuality in the service of womanly duty. It is a way for women writers to have their cake and eat it. Of course it is also a way for literary critics to have our cake and eat it. At a stroke, the idea of an aesthetics of renunciation yields a possible solution to the problem of how women writers overcome the constraints of literary language, while at the same time offering literary critics a way of celebrating women's texts even as we claim that ‘women’ as a group were silenced. Virginia Woolf's sketch of the plight of the Victorian lady poet in Orlando has the heroine penning ‘mellifluous fluencies about early death and corruption, which were worse than no thinking at all’.⁸ We solemnize this modernist spoof at our peril. Rather, I suggest we need to rethink the aesthetics of renunciation as—at least some of the time—an aesthetics of paradox, and a mischievous, transgressive one at that.

Ask anyone for their stereotype of Victorian femininity and they will use words like self-sacrificing, passive, self-effacing. Press a little harder on that stereotype, however, and it begins to divide and subdivide into a kaleidoscope of sometimes contradictory images. On the one hand we may be invoking a classic tableau: the sentimental deathbed of a saintly girl-child—little Nell, perhaps—her inner purity intact, her struggles over, her youthful moral and physical beauties crystallized forever in memory. On the other hand, we may be appealing to quite different sets of representations: the mystic, the missionary, the long-suffering mother. These multiple images of resignation redeemed and resistance sanctified point to the ideological contradictions embedded in the Victorian ideal of women as self-sacrificing. Under scrutiny, the ‘natural’ connection between Victorian femininity and self-sacrifice begins to distend. It may be maturity, assertion and action that are sacrificed to an ideal of ‘childlike’ passivity and silence; or it may be the desire for privacy, domestic fulfilment and a quiet life that have to be repressed in the service of a ‘higher’ femininity: the responsibility of femininity to ‘save’ humanity. Though we might wish to associate the first mode with an early or ‘high’ Victorianism and the second more readily with a later notion of women's mission, there remains overlap and tension.

At a fairly rudimentary level, poststructuralist understandings of the multiplicity of the self can help us recognize how this works. If we accept that the ‘self’ is not an indivisible, continuous, self-identical essence but, for the sake of argument, an ever-shifting play of ideologically informed identifications and unconscious wishes, then we can begin to see how the idea of self-sacrifice might serve, as well as constrain women. The ideological imperative that women sacrifice themselves does not always, necessarily prevent women from choosing which ‘self’ to sacrifice; and feminist history of the Victorian period fairly bristles with examples of politically deft women appealing to an ethos of self-denial and self-sacrifice in order to justify extraordinary acts of self-promotion, interference and defiance. Thus from a starkly polarized view of the ideology of self-sacrifice as a mechanism of women's oppression, with women's opportunities and activisms taking place in spite of this ideology—or somehow at a later time—we can come to a more flexible understanding of self-sacrifice as open to negotiation and deconstruction like any other gendered discourse. I use these trendy jargon terms here, not to suggest a kind of progressivist vision of feminist theory, but to hint that close analysis reveals nineteenth-century subjects' participation in the creation of a language of ‘women's role’, and to point out the obvious fact that Victorian women were themselves de facto deconstructionists, manipulating, dismantling and reworking the categories available to them.

My purpose in this study is threefold. First, I want to make the point that the ideal of martyrdom and the language of painful and even violent death remained a common, virtually a necessary feature of Englishwomen's literary autobiography well into the age of secularism, rationalism and science; and that this language is related to, but crucially distinct from, the language of ‘self-sacrifice as woman's mission’ common to prescriptive writing of the period. Secondly, by exploring this motif in some depth, I want to affirm that literary critical methods are vital to our understanding of women's relationship with, and negotiation of, the powerful discourses of their day—the intensively gendered discourses of rationality, duty, heterosexuality, and so on. Thirdly, I hope that this case study will gesture towards some of the debates now preoccupying feminist historians and critics alike: how the study of ideological constraint can take account of the fact of feminist theorizing; whether there is such a thing as ‘feminine’ language, and if there is, how and where it gets spoken; and finally, whether psychoanalytic and poststructuralist methods enhance, or simply obscure, historical understanding. These can, in their different ways, be seen as variations on the contemporary sociological debate about how to represent and account for the relationship between structure and agency. One of my arguments is that, however recent this debate may seem, women have always faced these questions in some form or another, and have found interesting, and sometimes strange, solutions.

Thus three meanings of my title ‘Making the most of Martyrdom’ coincide with the three questions which have informed my enquiry. In the first place the phrase enjoins us to acknowledge that women in any historical period will find creative ways of engaging with discourses that would confine and define them. The relationship between the experience of systematic oppression and the possibility of resistance has been an area of debate in many disciplines, and work on nineteenth-century women has typically been torn between an agenda emphasizing suffering and one asserting active participation. Can they be reconciled? The second meaning of my title corresponds to the debate about women's or ‘feminine’ language. Here I want to suggest that the conventions of self-representation in the nineteenth century offered women few ways to explore, much less to celebrate their experience of difference, and that women ‘made the most of martyrdom’ as a discourse that permitted them to play with the idea of feminine heroism in ironic, paradoxical and theoretically challenging ways while testing to the limit the coherence of socially-sanctioned gender roles. Thirdly, I want to hint that as historians and literary critics we can make the most of Martineau's (failed) martyrdom as a way of unpacking—of disconcerting, perhaps—some of the myths of Victorian femininity. I would like to assess the usefulness of this post-structuralist move as a means of understanding women's autobiography—including, perhaps, our own.

‘ONE OF THE DUTIES OF MY LIFE …’

Before the nineteenth century the practice of autobiography in Britain had been relatively accessible to literate women, mainly because of its relationship with the equalizing mechanism of spiritual conversion. The authority conferred by the narrative of personal salvation was widely thought to transcend social codes. By the mid-nineteenth century, this literary space had narrowed, partly with the proliferation of secular ‘masculinized’ models of self-development (such as the tale of self-improvement, or the reminiscence of public or literary life), and partly with the tightening up of gender roles that was fundamental to the establishment of middle-class culture, enterprise and identity. Claiming authority now meant either sacrificing one's female identity by writing anonymously or pseudonymously, or risking both caste and femininity in the literary market place. The result was that what could be risked by women in the name of religious or moral authority was more strictly codified. Some space did remain within a genre still shaped by residual structures of moral authority—authority now claimed in the name of struggle with, and triumph over some version of traditional or paternal power—and a few (privileged) women were able to occupy, and to some extent transform it. Needless to say, their tenure of this newly Oedipalized space was often uneasy, deferential or circumspect.⁹

Little of this unease can truthfully be attributed to the Autobiography of Harriet Martineau. Born in 1802 and brought up in the solidly upper-middle-class Unitarian community of Norwich, Martineau, after a childhood of alternating misery and nauseating piety, is forced to support herself through writing when, in the economically turbulent 1820s, her father dies and the family manufacturing fortune fails. Through her non-fictional writings on political economy, social policy, religion and philosophy, Martineau achieves fame, influence and a degree of economic security. Her gradual struggle to set herself free from what she calls superstition—revealed religion—leads her through necessarianism to Comtean Positivism, from which platform she sees herself qualified to pronounce liberally on her Life and Times with a confidence, and at a length (just under nine hundred pages in the two volume Virago) the manliest Victorian sage might envy. Formally, then, Harriet Martineau's Autobiography conforms to the model normally gendered ‘male’, and not at all to the hesitant, meandering, apologetic form generally associated with Victorian lady autobiographers.

None of the conventional solicitude about obtruding herself on the public forestalls Martineau's opening statement: ‘From my youth upwards I have felt it was one of the duties of my life to write my autobiography’ [I 1]. This sense of ‘duty’ or ‘obligation’, stressed four times on the first page, is based in the first instance on her claim to ‘a strong consciousness and a clear memory in regard to early feelings’. To this imperative faculty is then added the fact of her ‘remarkable’ life. These two components of her vocation as autobiographer—the possession of a particular cast of mind and a sense of being historically significant—are not easy to reconcile with existing understandings of Victorian women's sense of duty. More is at issue here than the sincerity, or egotism, of her opening gambit, since these two surprising modes of duty—fidelity to a style of remembering associated with childhood, and respect for a story of accomplishment associated with adulthood—roughly anticipate the form and the content of her Autobiography respectively. I would argue that gender ‘happens’ in autobiography here, at the interface of form and content: the place where the connection between what is written and the way it is written succeeds, or fails, to cohere and make sense: the place where authority and respectability are reciprocally at stake. If Martineau's Autobiography can be said to be gendered, then, it is not in her resort to the idea of an autobiographical duty, but in her rewriting (or dis-solving) of ‘duty’ itself.

In a much later passage about her autobiographical duty, she elaborates on her special responsibilities as a famous intellectual: ‘For a quarter of a century past I have been answerable to an unknown number of persons for a declaration of my opinions as my experience advanced’ [II 344]. This is a role with its own momentum, its own inbuilt incitement to discourse. As an example of what happens if she holds back from telling all about herself, she recounts the grateful last words of a Christian missionary to whom Martineau—by now virtually an unbeliever—had written an ambiguous letter of comfort and hope at the request of his wife. An ardent fan, he died happy but under false pretences. Only by publicizing every phase of her thought on every subject can Martineau be released from ‘all danger of misleading missionaries, or any body else, by letters of sympathy under solemn circumstances’ [II 348]. This is what George Landow has called the ‘ethos’ of Victorian eminence: the self-perpetuating duty of disseminating opinion underwritten by the revelation of experience.¹⁰ Hence, in her Autobiography, no explanation is too long-winded or too pernickety if there is superior experience to be established and hence moral credit to be accumulated. Whether narrating how she got the Corn Laws repealed or refuting a rumour about her medical history, all facts large and small contribute to her reputation as a trustworthy broker of knowledge.

Another aspect of Martineau's reading of her mission as a thinker is the duty to ‘get out of the prison of the self’ [II 333]. Her sense of her own ‘remarkableness’ is closely tied up with the way she has mastered knowledge and deployed it to the great benefit of the public. In a wonderfully characteristic passage she enumerates the various ‘clearings’ she has made in the ‘wilderness of the unknown’ with no apparent sense of their incongruity or incommensurability: French and Latin, the metaphysics of the mind, political economy, the doctrine of necessity, America, sickness and death, the Lake District, and so on. All these subjects gradually disclose themselves to her as she stomps up towards a symbolic vantage point, usually a summit somehow exempt from the laws of the terrain.

Critics of Martineau have noted her preference for this mountain-top perspective as a metaphor for mastery of knowledge.¹¹ What is interesting here is that even real landscapes reveal themselves to Martineau ‘map-like, as if seen from a mountain top’. Her knack of staring down and petrifying her own metaphors (she had Come, Light! inscribed on her sundial [II 266]), is related to a need many critics have observed in her work to fix facts, laws and meanings, and to keep them from the contagion of mere circumstance, irrational desire or slippery language. Not entirely unfairly, Valerie Sanders has called her ‘literal-minded’ and Linda Peterson thinks her ‘logocentric’, while Deirdre David has pointed to her ‘naïve’ belief ‘in a virtual correspondence between language and reality’.¹²

This belief in ‘logos’, in the existence of fixable, disembodied and unsituated truth can be seen as both a strength and weakness of her feminism. She condemns both the dreamy ‘floating religiosity’ of feminists like Fredrika Bremer who argue from the power of feminine passion and influence [I 428], and the special pleading of those campaigners who speak out from a sense of personal injury or mortification; and, in a famous passage, she dismisses Mary Wollstonecraft as a ‘poor victim of passion’. Advocates of the cause of women, Martineau emphasizes, should keep quiet unless, like her, they can ‘get their troubles under their feet, and leave them wholly out of the account’ [I 400]. This ‘view from nowhere’ with its seeming denial of the epistemological force of context and difference has made some critics uncomfortable with Martineau's feminist pretensions. Deirdre David, for instance, sees Martineau as a purely ‘auxiliary’ intellectual whose business was to purvey bourgeois ideology, with all its contradictions, to the public: ‘Her call is for women to be educated so they might clear-headedly, rationally assent to their subjugated position.’¹³

Peterson, in a more subtle analysis, has pointed to the ‘strains that develop when a female sage appropriates a masculine mode’: the strain on her credibility (as an autobiographer denying the significance of so personal a fact as her sex); the strain on her theory (by rendering her complicit with male theory and compromising her as an original thinker), and the strain on her control of the narrative (evident in the ‘irruptions’ of catty ‘feminine’ gossip in an otherwise linear text).¹⁴

But do we need to resort to negative and unconscious traits to restore a feminist, deconstructive edge to our reading of Martineau? It is certainly true that her own scientific theory and her autobiographical practice are deeply conflictual. But there are also signs that Martineau was aware of this. It is my contention that Martineau's autobiographical strategy is to prostrate her ‘self’, thereby ‘epitomiz[ing] the patriarchal rendering of the Victorian woman’¹⁵, so as to expose its contradictions. The Autobiography is framed, I would argue, not by a mystifying ‘view from nowhere’ but by a liminal view from the Sick Room. From a moribund position she is able to reverse the cultural gaze that defines the female body, and preferably the dead female body, as the object par excellence of scientific enquiry and aesthetic desire,¹⁶ and can explore from within the ambiguities inherent in the lexicon of ideal femininity: in duty, self-sacrifice and martyrdom, as we have seen, but also in the language of religiosity, innocence, deference, dependence and—most riskily for Martineau's positivism—of nature itself.

A rare footnote to Schiller points to the dialectical relationship between the autobiographical and the post-metaphysical selves:

When [Man] begins to assert his independence against Nature as an appearance, he also asserts his dignity against Nature as a power, and in all freedom stands up boldly before his gods. He tears away the masks from the spectres which terrified his childhood; and they surprise him with his own image; for they are merely his own imaginations.

[II 333 n.]

The uncanny presence of the spectres of childhood in the very assertion of epistemic independence is central to Martineau's autobiographical practice. Whatever the demands of reason, the prior, pre-rational claims of terrified childhood must be heard: we remember that in Martineau's opening apologia her faculty for remembering early ‘feelings’—her duty, if you like, to ‘write her body’—predated and prefigured other responsibilities. By insisting on childhood spectres, hysteria and sickness as the framework for her story, Martineau literalizes—inhabits—the metaphors of feminine faultiness: her body is, rather than simply represents, a site of disorder.

Martineau's compulsion to speak of, and from, a moment of physical dis/integration is a guiding principle of the Autobiography, and provides a trope supplementary to the remorseless narrative of struggle and mastery. Its importance in the economy of her self-representation was recognized in a letter by an estranged friend, Elizabeth Sedgwick, who tartly observed that Harriet ‘could not get ill—or get well—without some special fussification’.¹⁷ Certainly the fact that she wanted her body read is so clearly signposted in her text that it takes a certain doggedness to comply. She has, she tells us, made elaborate provision for her body after her death. In her early thirties she willed her body to the eminent physician Southwood Smith for dissection, and since the law has changed facilitating a good supply of corpses for study, she has rewritten her will and (after agonizing over a separate request for her ears) has left her head to her phrenologist friend Henry Atkinson, on the grounds that it is ‘not easy to obtain [the brains and skulls] of persons whose minds are well known’ [I 391]. In the unlucky case of death by drowning or railway smash, she reassures us, she has had two phrenological casts taken while alive.¹⁸ Her mortal remains are therefore presented as a crucial site of confirmation of what is known about her through her writings: a place where signs can be finally fixed to signifieds, where language can be stabilized and difference disposed of. As she says elsewhere, ‘[t]he very conception of self and other is, in truth, merely human, and when the self ceases to be, the distinction expires’ [II 207]. However, as we shall see, her death and dying body are also objects of fantasy in the text, sites of shifting meaning—of pathetic appeal and ironic response.¹⁹

As I have intimated, Harriet Martineau wrote her Autobiography at the age of fifty-three in 1855, believing she was about to die, and intending the two volumes for publication after her death. (The Autobiography conforms in many respects to the genre of ‘mémoires d'outre-tombe’.) In the second volume of this mammoth work, Harriet Martineau recounts her long illness between the ages of 37 and 43. While describing this interlude of disease, which was finally cured by mesmerism, a precursor of hypnotism, Martineau digresses to reflect on two other important times in her life when death seemed imminent. She looks back to the early chapters about her childhood, and then forward to the time of writing, when she is once again in retirement expecting to drop dead of heart disease at any moment. This triptych of death-bed scenarios—Harriet dreaming of death as a child, Harriet resigning herself to death in early middle-age, and Harriet calmly contemplating death in late-middle age—correspond neatly to Martineau's favoured Comtean reading of her own advance from theological through metaphysical to positive thinking. But they also, through certain verbal echoes, modulations of tone and snatches of imagery, constitute a kind of ironic anti-narrative: a refrain, punctuating the relentless progressivism of the text. In counterpoint to the autobiographical construction of Martineau as pioneer or mountaineer, we are offered the picture of Harriet in bed. Here we meet a Martineau quite unlike her usual brisk persona: a tentative, wistful self invaded by physical sensations; prey to unruly fantasies and desires and subject to vague, spiralling thoughts.

TURNING TO THE DEATH PARTS

Musing on the pattern of her physical sufferings and the time she has wasted indulging them, she recalls that

My youthful vanity took the direction which might be expected in the case of a pious child. I was patient in illness and pain because I was proud of the distinction, and of being taken into such special pupilage by God; and I hoped for, and expected early death till it was too late to die early.

(II 148-9)

Like her play on the idea of mission or duty, Martineau's meditations on the related notion of feminine suffering and death are seldom straightforward, but operate at more than one pitch: appealing to a historiographical register of referentiality, explanation and chronology at the same time as opening up a dreamworld of unresolved contradiction, romance and fantasy; drily describing the pre-rational world of a prissy little Unitarian misery while simultaneously invoking an epic struggle between Eros and Thanatos, pleasure and pain, life and death. Significantly, Martineau is invariably most poetic when it is most in the interests of her argument to be prosaic, and most whimsical when we most expect her to be serious. Death, oddly enough, is one of the few subjects—perhaps the only subject—about which Martineau is consistently funny, with a wit borne of familiar contempt and a fine understanding of death's cultural obscenity. ‘Did we not all, in our young days, turn to the death part in all biographies’, she enquires in the Sick Room Essay unselfconsciously entitled ‘Death to the Invalid’:

to the death articles in all cyclopaedias; to the discourses on sickness and death in all sermon books; to the prayers in the prospect of death in all books of devotion? Do not the most common-place writers of fiction crowd their novels with death scenes, and indifferent tragedy writers kill off almost all their characters? Do not people crowd to executions; and do not those who stay at home learn all they can of the last words and demeanour of the sufferer? Are not the visions of heroic children (and many grown children), chiefly about pain and noble departure?²⁰

For Martineau, death is remarkably analogous to Foucault's vision of Victorian sexuality. She is fascinated by the administration of the human body and in particular by the place of what Foucault calls the ‘polymorphous techniques of power’ in the construction of the mortal subject.²¹ Within a general proliferation of discourses about death, she is especially interested in representations of the death of children—and by extension of the ‘grown child’ with whom she identifies herself. From the earliest chapters of the Autobiography martyrdom is seen by the young Harriet as a more satisfying alternative to the petty tyrannies of daily life—the injustices and compromises suffered by the powerless little girl. Indeed the idea of being singled out for special persecution allows her to remain recalcitrant while affecting a superior piety. Here she is at about the age of three:

I pampered my vainglorious propensities by dreams of divine favour, to make up for my utter deficiency of self-respect: and I got rid of otherwise incessant remorse by a most convenient confession and repentance, which relieved my nerves without at all, I suspect, improving my conduct.

[I 12]

That word ‘vainglorious’ is one of many highly gendered, highly ambivalent key terms in the development of Martineau's invalid persona. In important ways the tension between the desire for glory and the danger of vanity (in both senses) is a structuring principle in her life-writing, and one which regularly modifies the already fractured meaning of autobiographical ‘duty’. We might compare Martineau with Annie Besant writing in 1892 about her own childhood:

I read tales of the early Christian martyrs, and passionately regretted I was born so late when no suffering for religion was practicable; I would spend many an hour in day-dreams, in which I stood before Roman judges, before Dominican Inquisitors, was flung to lions, tortured at the stake; […] and always, with a shock, I was brought back to earth, where there were no heroic deeds to do, no lions to face, no judges to defy, but only some dull duty to be performed. And I used to fret that I was born so late, when all the grand things had been done, and when there was no chance of preaching and suffering for a new religion.²²

By the age of five, Martineau has found a permanent home for her ‘vainglorious propensities’ in a daydream of immediate and spectacular death: ‘Being usually very unhappy’ she says, ‘I was constantly longing for heaven, and seriously, and very frequently, planning suicide in order to get there.’ [I 18] The fact that youthful death has a certain audience appeal adds to its attraction:

The Octagon Chapel at Norwich had some curious windows in the roof;—not skylights, but letting in light indirectly. I used to sit staring up at those windows, and looking for angels to come for me, and take me to heaven, in sight of all the congregation,—the end of the world being sure to happen while we were at chapel.

[I 22 (Aged 5)]

An important aspect of this kind of scene—and there are many in the Autiobiography—is its overblown quality, its splendid surrealism. I would suggest that one of the resources available to Victorian women to disrupt the ‘naturalness’ of their ‘feminine’ self-sacrifice is a parodic discourse of religious excess. The term ‘religiose’ is very mid-Victorian, and means unduly occupied with religion, morbidly or sentimentally religious. It connotes excess, redundancy of feeling, fascination with immortality and death.²³ Although it is not always easy or even possible to distinguish between religion and religiosity in women's self-representation, it seems to me that women's resistance in autobiography is frequently to be located in the counterpoint between these two related but tactically and tonally different idioms. When the autobiographical ‘I’ laughs at itself for ‘religiosity’ while still constructing itself as temperamentally ‘religious’, it is constructing, enjoying and dismissing a deviant self: a self in excess of autobiographical convention, possibly a feminine autobiographical self. A tell-tale sign of religiosity in autobiography is the presence of another eminently mid-Victorian self: the prig is the religiose self let loose upon an audience. The Victorian women I have studied often identify themselves closely with the prig, who, according to George Eliot ‘is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions’.²⁴

The language of religiosity, as opposed to that of religion, is self-conscious, pseudo-genteel, prudish, sanctimonious, and closely tied up with anxieties about class and gender. It is mannered, deferential and hyperfeminine: in Victorian literature it is characteristically the language of young ladies who fall in love with clergymen, who turn out to be in love with themselves. Structurally, pastor-worship plays a similar role in the narrative of the martyr manqué as penis envy plays in the feminine Oedipus complex, and Martineau speaks of her ‘fanaticism’ and its consequent ‘pastor-worship’ as ‘a stage which I should probably have had to pass through at any rate, … whoever the pastor might have been.’ [I 96] She recounts that at the age of seven:

I had a prodigious awe of clergymen and ministers, and a strong yearning towards them for notice. No doubt there was much vanity in this; but it was also one investment of the religious sentiment, as I know by my being at times conscious of a remnant of the feeling now, while radically convinced that the intellectual and moral judgment of priests of all persuasions is inferior to that of any other order of men.

[I 32]

This avowedly bizarre and deeprooted obsession with clergymen which would later cause Annie Besant to marry the first one that came along, and which in George Eliot's Middlemarch got Dorothea Brooks into hot—or rather cold—water points to another important aspect of this imagery of submission unto death: its affective, or erotic component.

Of course martyrs have for centuries been the focus of erotic fantasy. What intrigues me about the fantasy element in these middle-class Victorian women's autobiographies is the extent to which the writers entertain these erotic ideas while appearing to acknowledge that they are perverse and disreputable. When eight-year-old Harriet's crippled playmate finally has her diseased leg amputated, Martineau reports how impressed she was by the spectacle of her friend's patient endurance:

It turned my imagination far too much on bodily suffering, and on the peculiar glory attending fortitude in that direction. I am sure that my nervous system was seriously injured, and especially that my subsequent deafness was partly occasioned by the exciting and vainglorious dreams that I indulged in for many years after my friend E. lost her leg. All manner of deaths at the stake and on the scaffold, I went through in imagination, in the low sense in which St. Theresa craved martyrdom; and night after night I lay bathed in cold perspiration till I sank into the sleep of exhaustion. All this is detestable to think of now; but it is a duty to relate the truth, because parents are apt to know far too little of what is passing in their children's imaginations, unless they win the confidences of the little creatures about that on which they are shyest of all,—their aspirations.

[I 45]

Clearly on one level Martineau is invoking the pre-Freudian notion of a nervous economy: due to the demands of their reproductive system, women were exhorted to refrain from too much nervous excitement, on the grounds that indulgence in extravagant emotions would leave the fragile female body exhausted and perhaps even permanently impaired. At a time of obsessive surveillance over children's secret lives, she is alerting parents to the moral and physical dangers of unregulated fantasy. In a curious twist to the usual prohibition, she seems to be warning parents that too much masochism makes you go deaf. But she is also exploiting some of the contradictions in this ideology in order to show that femininity itself doesn't make sense. By teasing out the complexities of feminine self-sacrifice as pleasurable pain, as self-promotion through self-denial, she comes close to expressing and exposing the riddle of femininity in psychoanalytic terms.

In fact it is difficult not to read this as a case study in hysteria, similar to Freud's Anna O. or Elizabeth von R., though a case study in which Martineau plays both analyst and analysand.²⁵ For Martineau makes many of the connections between unconscious and conscious motives, between psychic repression and neurosis, herself. Not only does she equate dispersed bodily symptoms (in this case poor digestion and deafness) with a traumatic incident in childhood, but she goes on to associate that trauma with a ‘low’ pleasure: autoerotic indulgence in masochistic fantasies which combine pain, fear and narcissistic pleasure at the expense of moral rectitude, true fortitude and wisdom. Looking back on this episode while discussing her second illness, she uses a language of extreme moral disapproval to describe what she calls her ‘morbid appetite for pathological contemplation’, calling it perverse, egotistical, foolish, corrupt and disgraceful.

The Freudian trajectory is so familiar as to be virtually inescapable: first to Harriet's repressed lesbian desire for her friend, and then to an obsession with amputation (like St Theresa's dreams of decapitation) as disavowal of castration, and hence to a splitting of consciousness into ultra-feminine hysterical deafness on the one hand, and masculine assertiveness in speaking out on the other: entry into the Symbolic symbolically stymied.²⁶

It seems to me that Martineau's comedy of attempted martyrdom enables her consciously to critique ideal femininities while at the same time acknowledging and evaluating the desires and pleasures they embody. In the end it is not the appearance of her friend that troubles the young Harriet most profoundly, nor her dependence (her ‘extreme need of support … always on the same side’), nor the bitter loss it represents for herself (the ‘privation of play’), but the public attention she attracts. E. was ‘the talk of the whole city’. [I 45-8] E's deformity and suffering, Martineau argues in a favourite formula, should not be (as it is to her family) a source of shame, but neither should it be a matter of glory or pride. Difference need not be denied, but neither should it be turned into a spectacle. Hence the obsession with amputation that scholars have identified in Martineau's oeuvre²⁷ might be read not simply as evidence of a castration complex, but as a symbol of the bankruptcy for women, the ‘wretched extravagance’, of an erotic economy guaranteed by the Phallus and premissed on the gaze.

However, though this spectacular model of femininity as martyrdom can be unmasked, its spectral hold on culture and the imagination proves more resistant to reason. The very fact that her fantasy enabled her to bear what it also indirectly caused—‘a very unusual amount of bodily pain’ [46]—while the real amputee, according to Martineau, ‘probably did not suffer very much under the operation’ [I 45], underlines the power, as well as the danger, of the imagination. Of course such lessons in endurance may be ‘poor recompense’ for psychosomatic habits too stubborn to eradicate [I 46], but they stand as a warning to others of the importance of disentangling religious myth from dream, and moral imperative from physiological law. That these ways of understanding femininity need to be prised apart is the deconstructive message of the Autobiography. That they might be incommensurable and hence differentially susceptible to ‘scientific’ analysis is the blindspot of Martineau's method and the discovery of her narrative.

We have seen that one axis of Martineau's duty consists of the attempt to empty her ‘self’: to evacuate her body and history of ideology and to recognize it as an important but neutral object of study governed by the timeless, abstract laws of nature and society. We have noted, on the other hand, a countervailing duty to record early sensations and to attend minutely to the terrors and pleasures of the pre-rational world of the body. What begins to emerge (and what feminists are only now beginning to rediscover in relation to the contemporary ‘sexual difference versus gender’ debate) is that the disjunction between exclusively biological and exclusively sociocultural theories of femininity might be implicated in and constitutive of the ideological subordination of women.

The clearest case of theoretical fall-out occurs when Martineau attempts to explain the long period of gynaecological illness at Tynemouth. After a breezy account of the travels and adventures that led up to her collapse and retreat in 1839, with only a passing reference to ‘growing domestic anxiety’ and ‘self-exhortations and self-censures’ [II 134], Martineau switches tempo and returns to the self-reflexive mood that characterized her memories of early childhood. First she maps out the basis on which her suffering can rationally be discussed:

To think no more of death than is necessary for the winding up of the business of life, and to dwell no more upon sickness than is necessary for its treatment, or to learn to prevent it, seems to me the simple wisdom of the case,—totally opposite as this is to the sentiment and method of the religious world.

On the other hand, I do not propose to nourish foolish pride by disguising, through shame, the facts of sickness and suffering. Pain and untimely death are, no doubt, the tokens of our ignorance, and of our sins against the laws of nature. I conceive our business to be to accept these consequences of our ignorance and weakness, with as little personal shame on the one hand, as vanity or pride on the other. As far as any sickness of mine can afford warning, I am willing to disclose it; and I have every desire to acknowledge my own fault or folly in regard to it …

[II 149]

Having protested at length her neutrality and objectivity (the word ‘sins’ is perhaps the only sign of ideological drift), she rambles off into a series of dark hints about maternal tyranny and neglect, memories of E.'s amputation and the reveries to which it gave rise, and grim confessions of self-doubt (‘a dream that my mother had fallen from a precipice … and that it was my fault’ [II 151]). After two pages it comes as a shock to discover that all this has been offered as the hard evidence from which the ‘scientific’ conclusion can be drawn. ‘A tumour was forming of a kind which usually originates in mental suffering’ [II 151]: in other words, a uterine or ‘hysterical’ tumour:

It is impossible to deny that the illness under which I lay suffering for five years was induced by flagrant violations of the laws of nature: and I then failed to appropriate the comforts with which Christians deprave their moral sense in such a case, as I also felt unable to blame myself individually for my incapacity. No doubt, if I had felt less respect and less affection for my mother, I might have taken the management of matters more into my own hands, and should have felt her discontent with me less that I did; and again, if I had already found the supports of philosophy on relinquishing the selfish complacencies of religion, I should have borne my troubles with ease. But, as it was, I was neither proud or vain of my discipline on the one hand, nor ashamed on it on the other, while fully aware that it was the result of fault and imperfection, moral and intellectual.

[II 152]

Only by navigating between the Scylla of personal shame and the Charybdis of vanity (and certainly, Martineau's reasoning lurches precariously from the one to the other) can the rational mind hope to attain its goal of inducing natural law from the evidence of pathology. But somewhere in between, the painfully assembled scientific method breaks down. Evidently, there is illness: the ‘token’ of ignorance or sin against the law of nature. There is Martineau's own testimony of mental suffering, backed up by diaries and the opinions of friends: excessive anxiety has caused her tumour. But what caused the anxiety? All the evidence points to the unacceptable: the cause of the ‘extreme tension of nerves’ was the duty of daughterliness and the exigency of domestic responsibility. The ‘natural’ law that (implicitly and shiftily) underpins Martineau's illness is the necessity of reproducing femininity on the female body. Her cure involves the breaking of that law. What has to be repressed, and what consequently blurs and muddies the otherwise clear lines of Martineau's argument, is the possibility of ideological conflict at the level of nature: that the ‘nature’ of ‘woman’ might itself be a site of contradiction. For all her repudiation of the body, and for all her belief in the power of disembodied reason, Martineau reveals, at the heart of her model of healthy subjectivity, a core of resistance from which a playful fantasy of ‘untimely death’ seems the only escape.²⁸

CONCLUSION

For R. K. Webb, Harriet Martineau's language of martyrdom was unambiguously part of her Unitarian and Priestleyan inheritance, indeed was ‘the natural mode for intellectuals under attack’.²⁹ Certainly it is possible to trace in her work a heroics of persecution evincing all the vigour, and all the arrogance, of a dissenting legacy. But a more nuanced interpretation is needed to explain the peculiar wistfulness of Martineau's treatment of herself as a failed heroine. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, on the other hand, have investigated the moral atmosphere of the Evangelical revival, arguing that the practices of self-denial and self-effacement that this atmosphere promoted were regarded as less problematic for women than men ‘since it went along with their dependent position and the importance attached to the influence which their weakness and need for protection would have on men.’ This premium on feminine suffering finds its cultural apotheosis in the ‘makeshift pulpit’ of the deathbed scene in art and literature.³⁰ But if Harriet Martineau clearly invokes this ideology in her autobiographical writing, she just as clearly revokes it in a double movement of self-indulgence and self-parody.

Systematically, over the course of nearly a thousand pages, Martineau demolishes the case for any but the most pragmatic interest in illness and death. One's curiosity and attention, she argues cumulatively, should, morally as well as scientifically and philosophically (and these are virtually synonyms for Martineau) be restricted to how to avoid illness and death where possible, and how to be practically and financially ready for them when they become inevitable. One's duty in life, she maintains, is to try to understand the laws of nature and society, and, through didactic efforts, to enable others to do so too. At the same time, and equally systematically, she evolves a case history for her own present frame of mind in which pathological obsession with pain and death is totally and structurally implicated. Both chronologically and textually the two are inextricably linked: the scientific view is the direct result of the ‘unhealthy’ impulse, and the residual traces of childish morbidity offer a compelling contrast to brisk and businesslike tones of the dying author.

If Martineau's conflicting strategies of self-representation require each other, this may relate to the paradox built into the structure of feminine duty itself. Linda Nead quotes Sarah Stickney Ellis' view in 1845 that, in the middling ranks of society. ‘To love is woman's nature—to be beloved, is the consequence of her having properly exercised and controlled that nature. To love is woman's duty—to be beloved, is her reward. [Nead's emphasis]’ and goes on to point out that

Here the concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘duty’ become conflated and woman's nature itself takes on a strangely ambiguous character, requiring control and regulation to enable woman to fulfil her domestic mission.³¹

If what one should aim to be and what one is by definition are the same, then one or both of two consequences will obtain: one's identity will be cast into doubt as Nead suggests, or one's motive for action will be emptied of ethical or religious value. Historians have rightly pointed out the potential for wider action latent in the concept of domestic duty. However enabling in practice, though, this notion leaves deep ontological scars in women's autobiography precisely because it represents both the necessity and the impossibility of self-justification.

I have argued that Martineau uses the language of martyrdom, self-sacrifice and duty strategically, pitting the terms against each other in a continuous critique of nineteenth-century ideals of femininity, as a means of deconstructing the ideological prohibition against women's autobiographical authority,³² and as a way of testing the respective claims of science and religion against the testimony of the female body. It should be remembered that Martineau was intent on de-coupling science and religion at a time when, as Davidoff and Hall tell us, ‘the commercial, religious and scientific interests of the middle-classes were still regarded as mutually supporting’³³ and at a time when much of the theological world was still embroiled in the aftermath of the Oxford Movement. Through espousing mesmerism, through writing about her illnesses and death, and generally through drawing attention to, or fussifying, her desires and satisfactions, Martineau attempted to wedge a female-shaped body—and a woman's voice—into the earliest phase of the Victorian debate between theology and science, miracle and nature, morality and reason.³⁴ She could not anticipate that by the time of her death in 1877 the battle-lines over women's nature and women's role would have been redrawn, and drawn more firmly, elsewhere. That on her death the newly respectable profession of gynaecology, and the positivist approach to anatomy she herself had encouraged, would, as Cooter has ably demonstrated, have the power to revise Martineau's self-diagnosis; or that so respected a reviewer as Margaret Oliphant would, by 1877, locate the Autobiography's transgression mainly in its ‘unfavourable estimate of her mother’³⁵, need not diminish the importance of the work as an early experiment in feminist theorizing.

Later generations of women, among them George Eliot and Olive Schreiner, would put the politics of priggishness to the service of a more recognizably feminist art. For these writers the aesthetics of martyrdom—the business of making a virtue of necessity—held out the tantalizing possibility of a mission that was imperative, decisive, and prior to the ‘weak’ duties associated with hearth and home. So rather than dispersing under the glare of secularism, the language of martyrdom gained currency among feminists attempting to theorize a space for ‘independent women’ in a world where the two terms threatened to cancel each other out.

But it is not, or not only, a concern with the social construction of femininity that the Autobiography evinces and authorizes, but a bold effort both to write the ageing, changing female body and to theorize its impact upon scientific epistemology. If Martineau's feminism comes unstuck it is at the point where her brand of rational discourse fails to accommodate and account for what she recognized as literally unreasonable in the relationship between mind and body, science and femininity. She nonetheless probes and exposes this resistance and explores it in a language of fantasy, play and pleasure anticipating the celebratory linguistic escapades of Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray.

During her lifetime and ever since, Harriet Martineau has been a cause célèbre of medical science. Whether or not she really was ill, or if ill cured, and why, and how, has been debated from every point of view.³⁶ It seems to me that to insist, finally, on the historical value of women's efforts at self-representation is to insist on the physical cost for all women of pleasure forbidden and reason insulted—the consequences of a phallogocentrism that defines women as lacking desire and lacking reason. For, as Rosi Braidotti puts it

‘I, woman’ am affected directly and in my everyday life by what has been made of the subject of woman; I have paid in my very body for all the metaphors and images that our culture has deemed fit to produce of woman. The metaphorization feeds upon my bodily self, in a process of ‘metaphysical cannibalism’ that feminist theory helps to explain.³⁷

Yet we need not end on a morbid note. Despite her most painful attempts to subjugate her liminal sense of embodied difference to her rationale of abstract humanism, she invariably lets her body have the last laugh. Summing up her life in the closing pages of the Autobiography, she teases us yet again with her fantasy—still dying, still dreaming of dying, still putting it off, still writing—and I cannot resist ending where I began, with an autobiographical moment that is pure jouissance:

I have now had three months' experience of the fact of constant expectation of death; and the result is, as much regret as a rational person can admit at the absurd waste of time, thought and energy that I have been guilty of in the course of my life in dwelling on the subject of death. It is really melancholy that young people (and, for that matter, middle-aged and old people) are exhorted and encouraged as they are to such a waste of all manner of power. I romanced internally about early death till it was too late to die early; and, even in the midst of work and the busiest engagements of my life, I used to be always thinking about death,—partly from taste, and partly as a duty. And now that I am awaiting it at any hour, the whole thing seems so easy, simple and natural that I cannot but wonder how I could keep my thoughts fixed upon it when it was far off. I cannot do it now. Night after night since I have known that I am mortally ill, I have tried to conceive, with the help of the sensation of my sinking-fits, the act of dying, and its attendant feelings; and thus far I have always gone to sleep in the middle of it …

(Martineau II 435)

Notes

1. H. Martineau, Autobiography, ed. G. Weiner (London, 1983), Vol. 2, pp. 148-49 and 435. Subsequent quotations are taken from this edition; volume and pages numbers follow in the text.

2. T. L. Broughton, ‘Women's Autobiography; The Self at Stake?’ In S. Neuman (ed.) Autobiography and Questions of Gender (London, 1991), pp. 76-94.

3. L. Peterson, Victorian Autobiography: The Tradition of Self-Interpretation (New Haven, 1986), pp. 135-43 and passim.; A. Fleishman, Figures of Autobiography: The Language of Self-writing in Victorian and Modern England (Berkeley, 1983), passim.

4. ‘To justify an unorthodox life by writing about it, is to reinscribe the original violation, to reviolate masculine turf’. N. K. Miller, ‘Women's Autobiography in France’, in R. Borker et al. (eds.) Women and Language in Literature and Society (New York, 1980), p. 263.

5. Cf. J. Oppenheim, ‘The Odyssey of Annie Besant,’ History Today, 39, (September 1989), p. 17; J. Manton, Sister Dora: The Life of Dorothy Pattison (London, 1977), pp. 203-5; R. K. Webb, Harriet Martineau: A Radical Victorian (London, 1960), pp. 200-02 (the standard biography).

6. The most recent discussion can be found in L. Stanley, The Auto/biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/biography (Manchester and New York, 1992), pp. 154-239.

7. S. Gilbert and S. Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven and London, 1979), pp. 539-80.

8. V. Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (London, 1977), p. 186.

9. See for example P. Spacks, ‘Selves in Hiding’, in E. Jelinek (ed.) Women's Autobiography (Bloomington, Indiana, 1980), pp. 112-32.

10. Quoted in L. Peterson, ‘Harriet Martineau: Masculine Discourse, Female Sage’, in T. E. Morgan (ed.) Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse: Renegotiating Gender and Power (New Brunswick and London, 1990), p. 179.

11. D. David, Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot (Basingstoke and London, 1986), p. 30; V. Sanders, Reason Over Passion: Harriet Martineau and the Victorian Novel (Brighton, 1986), pp. 127-29.

12. ibid., p. 26; Peterson, art. cit., p. 177; David, op. cit., p. 76.

13. David, op. cit., p. 36.

14. Peterson, art. cit., pp. 179-86. Margaret Walters in an early reading of Martineau alongside Wollstonecraft and de Beauvoir agreed that

    All three writers seem … most illuminating, most thought-provoking, just where they are most confused; where they try to envisage those parts of themselves that elude their rational constructs and polemical demands. … We are inevitably torn between masculine and feminine identities. But feminism cannot afford to throw out the whole notion of femininity, however mystifying and limiting it is, and not deny all meaning to the term in the name of an abstract humanity.

    ‘The Rights and Wrongs of Women’, in J. Mitchell and A. Oakley (eds.) The Rights and Wrongs of Women (Harmondsworth, 1976), pp. 377-78.

15. The phrase is Roger Cooter's from his excellent study ‘Dichotomy and Denial: Mesmerism, Medicine and Harriet Martineau’, in M. Benjamin (ed.) Science and Sensibility: Gender and Scientific Enquiry 1789-1945 (Oxford, 1991), p. 147.

16. E. Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester, 1992), passim.

17. Quoted in Webb, op. cit., p. 232.

18. ibid., p. 20. According to Webb, Atkinson never claimed his legacy.

19. I am indebted here to Elisabeth Bronfen's brilliant decomposition of Gabriel von Max's Der Anatom, op. cit., pp. 3-14.

20. Life in the Sick-Room: Essays (London, 1844), pp. 104-5.

21. P. Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader (London, 1984), p. 299.

22. A. Besant, An Autobiography (Adyar, Madras, 1939), p. 30.

23. The OED cites a letter of Clough in 1853: ‘Some of my companions are too much in the religiose vein to be always quite wholesome company’.

24. Fred Vincy of Tertius Lydgate in Middlemarch (Harmondsworth, 1965), p. 128. Cf. Annie Besant, op. cit., p. 37: ‘I was quite determined never to go to a ball, and was prepared to “suffer for conscience' sake”—little prig that I was …’

25. Both case studies are to be found in S. Freud and J. Breuer, Studies in Hysteria, A. Richards (ed.), J. and A. Strachey (tr.), (Harmondsworth, 1974), Pelican Freud Library Vol. 3.

26. D. Postlethwaite, ‘Mothering and Mesmerism in the life of Harriet Martineau’, Signs 14.3 (Spring 1989), pp. 599-600, comes to similar though not identical conclusions. She likewise sees the fantasy of amputation and the deafness as ‘metaphors for the even greater handicap Martineau suffered in Victorian society, her gender’: in other words, as castration. She concludes that the Tynemouth retreat, and the writing and mesmeric reveries that accompanied it, served to ‘heal’ the psychic split caused by Martineau's Chodorowian over-identification with her highly conventional, non-nurturing mother, and to release her for years of self-acceptance, reaffirmed femaleness and newly feminised productivity, including implicitly the production of her Autobiography.

    The argument is suggestive but problematic: evidence of conflict emanates from the same sources as proof of resolution. Furthermore the idea of Martineau's body reconfigured and recomposed by a proto-psychoanalytic gaze may be misleading. It ignores both the return of Martineau's ill-health in later life and her reluctance to abandon the state of dis-ease as the framework for her self-representation. That, as Roger Cooter points out (op. cit., p. 156), Martineau suppressed evidence of the failure of the mesmeric cure, firmly substituting heart disease for her more ideologically saturated ‘hysterical’ tumour of the uterus as the cause of her invalidism from 1855 onwards, only confirms the persistence of a radically, even wilfully, split subjectivity during the writing of the Autobiography.

27. Webb, op. cit., p. 252; Sanders, op. cit., p. 85; Postlethwaite, op. cit., p. 599.

28. It is interesting to note that she attributes her recovery not to ‘acceptance’ of the law that has been broken, but to ‘obedience to a newly-discovered law of nature,’ Vol. 2, p. 153.

29. Webb, op. cit., p. 68.

30. Mary Ryan, quoted in L. Davidoff and C. Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850 (London, 1987), p. 117.

31. L. Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 1990), p. 28.

32. The tenure of literary authority is class-specific in the nineteenth century, and although any access to public voice meant losing caste, it was virtually essential that you had caste to lose. Is it possible to retain a sense of the sexual-political usefulness of thinking about the way women like Martineau came to writing, while contextualizing these strategies within other dominant ideologies, such as those based on race and class? I have argued both that nineteenth-century autobiographers used the kinds of linguistic manoeuvres we associate with poststructuralism and psychoanalysis, and that sensitivity to these methodologies may help us to get inside the autobiographical text. To return to questions of history, agency and power, we must remember that this manoeuvre—toying with martyrdom—only works by playing on a particular set of associations between femininity and youth: eroticised metaphorical substitutions of femininity for innocence for childhood which hold only so far as the metaphorised child is English, middle-class, and socially expendable. The notion of martyrdom itself, of course, is deeply embedded in racist and imperialist rhetoric. Martineau was travelling in the United States at a time (1835-36) when white abolitionists were being lynched for their opinions; she call this the Martyr age of the anti-slavery movement. In a now familiar figure, she muses that ‘There were times when I was sorry that I was not the victim of the struggle, instead of Lovejoy, or some other murdered citizen. … The murder of an English traveller would have settled the business of American slavery … more speedily than perhaps any other incident’ [Vol. 2, p. 56]. When played out in the political field rather than in the arena of sexuality, the more conservative aspects of the manoeuvre come to light. However subversive it might be of the masculine monopoly on literary authority and subjectivity, this tone of knowingness brings in its wake a consciousness of superiority over ignorance—here the ignorance of childlike white Americans squabbling in the nursery of republicanism, while the childish black Americans, the primary victims of slavery, do not even count as martyrs.

33. op. cit., p. 26. This was certainly the ideological framework of Martineau's 1839 novel Deerbrook (London, 1983).

34. Martineau appears anonymously but transparently in an erudite debate on these subjects between the hero and his clerical mentor Dean Winnstay in Charles Kingsley's novel of 1850 Alton Locke: Tailor and Poet (Oxford, 1983), pp. 369, 371.

35. ‘Harriet Martineau’, Blackwoods Magazine, Vol. 121, 738, p. 476.

36. See Cooter, op. cit., passim, for an overview of Martineau's role in medical history.

37. ‘The Politics of Ontological Difference’ in T. Brennan (ed.) Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis (London and New York, 1989), p. 101.