[In the following excerpt, Zlotnick examines how Charlotte Brontë's novel Shirley represents history, noting the author's ambivalent treatment of the Luddites. The critic asserts that the reaction to industrial capitalism by female writers was complex and very different from that of nineteenth-century male writers.]

Charlotte Brontë's second published novel, the much-anticipated successor to Jane Eyre, must have indeed seemed like a dish of “cold lentils and vinegar without oil” to readers expecting the Sturm und Drang of the first. Despite Brontë's significant achievement, Shirley is not a novel calculated to keep readers on the edge of their chairs, turning pages until the small hours of the morning. As Brontë acknowledges in a letter to William Smith Williams, “Those who were most charmed with ‘Jane Eyre’ are the least pleased with ‘Shirley’; they are disappointed at not finding the same excitement, interest, stimulus, while those who spoke disparagingly of ‘Jane Eyre’—like ‘Shirley’ a little better than her predecessor. I suppose its dryer matter suits their dryer minds. … Mere novel-readers, it is evident, think ‘Shirley’ something of a failure” (Wise and Symington 3: 35). While admitting that Shirley failed to please the large Victorian population of novel readers, Brontë draws a distinction between those who read novels for pleasure and those who demand a more substantial meal from their fictions. Yet the “dryer matter” which disqualifies the average reader from appreciating Shirley is not, as one might expect, the industrial material that Brontë takes as her subject matter. After all, condition-of-England novels were in demand at midcentury. Gaskell's investigation of the industrial crisis a year earlier in Mary Barton did not prevent it from being a critical and popular success, and when Brontë sent her publisher the manuscript of her next novel, Villette, she apologized for its lack of topicality. Rather, the “dryer matter” for “dryer minds” that Brontë refers to in her letter is that dry-as-dust subject: history.

Brontë brings the subject of history, as the past remembered and dismembered, to the center of Shirley. Taking nostalgia as a starting point from which to launch an exploration of women in history and women's exclusion from history, Brontë writes in Shirley a woman's history of England. In doing so, she overturns the history of the nineteenth century popularized by the medievalists and scripts the fall into modernity as a fortunate one. But patriarchal structures and expectations subvert the novelist's attempts to envision the liberation of middle-class women through industrial capitalism. At the novel's conclusion, Brontë repudiates the past only to embrace a present that, for her heroines, proves to be a repetition of the past. Like Mary Barton, Shirley discovers a new world that all too closely resembles the old one.

Brontë understands that the volatile mixture of memory and desire creates a past that never was. In the opening lines of Shirley, the novelist forces the reader to acknowledge—so that she can quickly dismiss—the seductive power of nostalgia:

But not of late years are we about to speak; we are going back to the beginning of this century: late years—present years are dusty, sun-burnt, hot, arid; we will evade the noon, forget it in siesta, pass the mid-day in slumber, and dream of dawn.

If you think, from this prelude, that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken. … Something real, cool, and solid, lies before you; something unromantic as a Monday morning.

(39)

Brontë sets up an opposition between the “hot” and “arid” present and the romantic appeal of the past in order to arouse the reader's expectations for a Regency novel overflowing with belles in sprigged muslin and gallant officers. But she raises those hopes only to dash them, offering up instead a past replete with industrial riots, starving workers, and civil unrest on the home front. By writing about the Luddite riots of the 1810s rather than more recent outbreaks of industrial unrest, such as the Chartist agitations of the 1840s, Brontë serves her text's larger purpose: the past revealed in Shirley is indeed as “unromantic as a Monday morning.”

Shirley investigates the “making of history,” with all the ambiguities inherent in that expression. For as Brontë conceives it, history is twice made, first by the men and women who live through it and then by the historians who record, redefine, and reshape it. Like Disraeli's Young England novels, Brontë's Shirley explores the practice of recording history; however, writing as one of history's losers—as Milton's cook rather than Shirley's titanic Eve—Brontë grasps the essentially fictional and hence mythic nature of history. Disavowing what Hayden White identifies as the nineteenth-century faith in history as a factual discourse that can be distinguished from the fictional discourse of novels, Brontë conflates history and fiction, for neither is disinterested and both bear the political stamp of their authors. Consequently, she holds that there exists no one correct way to read past events because they are continuously being reevaluated in the light of present and personal contingencies. When Joe Scott, the mill's overseer, quotes St. Paul's maxims on female subjection, Shirley Keeldar, in good Protestant fashion, calls for the right to “private judgment,” and Caroline Helstone offers a host of alternative readings: “It would be quite possible, I doubt not, with a little ingenuity, to give the passage quite a contrary turn; to make it say, ‘Let the woman speak out whenever she sees fit to make an objection;’—‘it is permitted to a woman to teach and to exercise authority as much as may be’” (323). By volunteering to reinterpret the historical context and the original text of St. Paul's epistle, Shirley and Caroline act as revisionist historians and rewrite history from a female perspective. Like her two heroines, Brontë denies the existence of absolute historical truths because all history—whether it be Shirley and Caroline's or Joe Scott's—is subject to “private judgment.” It is this truth—and its ramifications for women's history—that engages Brontë in Shirley.

Brontë recognizes that history is a powerful political tool, particularly when the authority of the past is marshaled to justify present actions: witness Joe Scott's use of sacred history to defend the historical oppression of women. But by invoking “private judgment” and arguing for every individual's right to the past, Brontë opens history up and liberates it from exclusive claims of ownership. So, for example, when the Reverend Helstone, the Tory supporter of Wellington, and Robert Moore, the radical admirer of Napoleon, engage in a political dispute, both men invoke the past to legitimize the present. Each claims biblical history for his side and envisions his commander-in-chief as a second Moses. In Moore's account, Napoleon becomes the great liberator, leading the slavish peoples of Europe out of the darkness and decay of feudal traditions, while in Helstone's rendering, Wellington is metamorphosed into the leader of a “poor over-wrought band of bondsmen” (69), who will soon triumph over the superior military might of those latter-day Egyptians, the French. However apt the comparisons, neither man holds the patent on biblical history, and to complicate matters further, Brontë introduces into the text a “genuine” Moses, Moses Barraclough, the sometime tailor, sometime Methodist preacher and full-time Luddite. This Moses also asserts a right to the historical comparison, “I'm a very feeling man, and when I see my brethren oppressed like my great namesake of old, I stand up for 'em” (155). Speaking as he does for impoverished weavers who feel enslaved by their masters, Barraclough's historical analogy suits. Yet Brontë goes to such pains to discredit Barraclough (he is both a drunk and a liar) that it becomes impossible to claim that one group—the French, the English, or the weavers—rightfully owns the analogy, or by extension, history itself. By abolishing private ownership of the past, Brontë frees herself from the constraints of monolithic history and absolute historical truths, and in this way she gives women an access to history denied to them in a historical discourse that insists on its factual nature.

Having placed history in the public domain, Brontë then draws on its new availability to argue that what has been traditionally constituted as written history consigns women to the margins of the text. In the raid on the Hollow's End mill, Brontë offers a paradigm for the place of women in (male) history. The attack on Robert Moore's mill is itself a historical event writ large, the kind of grand dramatic incident guaranteed inclusion in any history book. Quite appropriately, it is also a re-creation of an actual historical occurrence, the Luddite raid on William Cartwright's mill at Rawfolds, that has, in fact, made its way into the history books. Of Brontë's reconstruction of the attack, Terry Eagleton contends that “the event is at once structurally central and curiously empty—empty because the major protagonist, the working class, is distinguished primarily by its absence” (Myths of Power 47). But while it is true that the workers are heard and not seen, it is equally true of the mill's defenders. Emblematic of women's participation in history, Caroline and Shirley are literally marginalized as they watch the events from a nearby ridge, and if they hear the weavers' shouts and the soldiers' shots, this is not Eagleton's “abstraction of action to sound” (48), but history from a female vantage point. For women like Caroline and Shirley, history is heard, or to be precise, heard about. Even their limited participation as ear-witnesses is a stolen pleasure: the mill's defenders go to great lengths to remove all the women from the site of the battle, keeping the approaching confrontation a well-guarded secret. In (male) history, women hear about events secondhand through mediating narratives that distort and falsify the experience, so that, true to form, the parsonage servants tell Shirley and Caroline that “twenty men were killed” (344), while Moore relates that “not a single man [was] hurt on our side” (350). Both accounts are exaggerations—one man was killed and Robert himself suffered a slight wound—but they underscore the unreliability of historical narratives and the traditional dependence of women on those unreliable narratives.

Although excluded from the history of public events both as participant and witness, women have nevertheless always possessed their own history, hidden from view, and it is the buried corpse—the unwritten corpus—of women's history that Brontë exhumes in Shirley. She does so by overturning the medievalist history that devalues the present and longs for the vanished, feudal past. When Caroline Helstone and her uncle pay a call at Fieldhead, a “gothic old barrack,” Brontë offers this description:

Mr and Miss Helstone were ushered into a parlour: of course, as was to be expected in such a gothic old barrack, this parlour was lined with oak: fine dark, glossy panels compassed the walls gloomily and grandly. Very handsome, reader, these shining, brown panels are: very mellow in colouring and tasteful in effect, but—if you know what a ‘Spring-clean’ is—very execrable and inhuman. Whoever, having the bowels of humanity, has seen servants scrubbing at these polished wooden walls with bees-waxed cloths on a warm May day, must allow that they are ‘tolerable [sic] and not to be endured;’ and I cannot but secretly applaud the benevolent barbarian who had painted another and larger apartment of Fieldhead—the drawing-room to-wit, formerly also an oak-room—of a delicate pinky white; thereby earning for himself the character of a Hun, but mightily enhancing the cheerfulness of that portion of his abode, and saving future housemaids a world of toil.

(208)

In this passage Brontë anticipates Ruskin's “The Nature of Gothic,” which appeared a few years after Shirley. Like the great Victorian champion of the Gothic, she also judges a style of architecture (and the culture it represents) by examining the contribution of the worker, except that she focuses on the contribution of the working woman rather than the working man. So while Ruskin reads the facades of Gothic buildings, Brontë ventures inside looking for women's history; and if he discovers the principle of creative freedom for the individual workman embodied in the stones of Europe's Gothic cathedrals, Brontë finds, to her evident displeasure, long days of drudgery for the anonymous housemaids responsible for keeping the dust off the gargoyles.

By turning medievalist history inside out, she turns it upside down, so that Gothic architecture suddenly appears “execrable and inhuman” rather than as the noblest expression of the worker's individuality in art. Focusing on women in history, rather than on men, Brontë reverses the medievalists' judgment about the superiority of Gothic architecture and, by extension, the feudal past it embodies. For while history of the sort the Victorian medievalists were writing would label the interior redecorator of Fieldhead a “Hun” and a “barbarian,” in Brontë's revision, the renovation of the old constitutes progress, at least for the housemaids of the world.

Brontë firmly rejects the concept of the medieval past as a paradise lost, or even as an era of greater human felicity, because she believes that for women the Middle Ages were the Dark Ages. At one point, Shirley's two heroines propose to travel “back into the dim days of eld” when they project a visit to Nunnwood, “the sole remnant of antique British forest in a region whose lowlands were once all sylvan chase” (220). Whether the visit occurs or not we never find out, but it becomes increasingly clear that the journey, had it ever come off, would not have been a pleasure trip. To go back in time is to come face to face with a specifically female horror, for at the center of the forest stands the ruins of a nunnery. And in Shirley, as in Villette, the nun symbolizes the emotionally barren, sexually repressed, and socially useless lives led by so many women.¹ Certainly wherever Caroline Helstone turns, she is confronted with the nunlike existence of her female predecessors, from her aunt, a figure of silence and death, “living marble … a monumental angel” (81), to her mother, who suffered through the “sedentary, solitary, constrained, joyless, toilsome” life of a governess (363). For Caroline to wish a return to the past—whether to the nunneries of the medieval past or the modern nuns in her more immediate and personal past—would be to invite her own death, or more accurately, her own death-in-life. Brontë does not want women to turn back to the medieval past; she wants them to turn their backs on the medieval past.

Brontë even goes so far as to parody the medievalist fantasy of the fourteenth century through the figure of Shirley's erstwhile suitor, Sir Philip Nunnely, before she excludes him from the symbolic marriages with which the novel concludes. Sir Philip, the son of the late Sir Monckton, and the possessor of a Yorkshire estate known as the Priory, makes an appearance in Shirley so that the heroine can reject his marriage proposal along with the medieval world, to go by the family names alone, in which he is implicated. In fact, Sir Philip, whose two defining features are his “boysih” countenance (448) and his fondness for writing dreadful sonnets, appears to be nothing so much as a satiric sketch of one of the scribbling, aristocratic members of Young England, a skewed portrait of Lord John Manners, perhaps. With Shirley's rejection of Sir Philip, Brontë dismisses Victorian medievalism, and with it all nostalgic attempts to feudalize the nineteenth century.

She similarly disowns the working-class nostalgia of the Luddites. Like the medievalists, the Luddites are a reactionary force, and it is this nostalgia for a gilded past, which the machine-smashing weavers share with the practitioners of Victorian medievalism, that accounts for Brontë's ambivalent treatment of the Luddites.² On the one hand, Brontë celebrates the Luddites' bloody defeat at Hollow's End; but on the other hand, she openly sympathizes with the weavers' sufferings, exploiting the emotional power of an analogy between the hungry, out-of-work workers and the idleness and spiritual starvation of middle-class women. Like Gaskell before her, Brontë links middle-class women to working-class men through their common affliction: unemployment. The analogy that sustains Mary Barton, however, breaks down in Shirley because the interests of the male Luddites and those of the novel's women are not identical. When the frame-breaker Barraclough comes to debate the future of machinery with Moore, he informs the industrialist: “Or iver you set up the pole o' your tent amang us, Mr Moore, we lived i' peace and quietness; yea, I may say, in all loving-kindness. I am not myself an aged person as yet, but I can remember as far back as maybe some twenty year, when hand-labour were encouraged and respected, and no mischief-maker had ventured to introduce these here machines, which is so pernicious” (155). “Or iver”—before ever—Moore arrived, Barraclough argues, the weavers lived in a prelapsarian state of peace, love, and goodwill towards all. In one sense, Barraclough speaks the truth, for what Shirley captures, in all its painful process, is the gradual immiseration of the handloom weavers, the decimation of weaving communities and the disruption of a centuries-old way of life. Faced with their own extinction, the weavers responded by forging a collective memory of an idealized past, the “or iver” the factories came into Yorkshire: “The history of the weavers in the 19th century is haunted by the legend of better days,” E. P. Thompson notes (269). Yet while Brontë can respond movingly to the weavers' distress, she professes nothing but hostility for the reversionary goals of the Luddites because she sees the technological changes so destructive to the weavers as benefiting the weavers' wives and daughters.

For what the modern reader of Shirley may forget is that the introduction of machinery occurred simultaneously with the opening up of employment opportunities for women and children in the mills. “The two techniques that fuelled the classic Luddite attacks, the gig mill and the shearing frame, displaced six out of seven and three out of four men respectively,” Berg notes (“Women's Work” 82). These machines, which Robert Moore imports into Hollow's End, would eventually destroy the old artisan traditions, but in the process they did make available waged labor to large numbers of women and children, who could be paid less than men and were considered more adaptable to the discipline of factory work. To be sure, women belonged to handloom weaving communities, and many took part in protests against the introduction of the machinery.³ But by drawing on the cultural equation of industrialism with female employment and male unemployment so prevalent in the 1840s, Brontë ignores women's participation in the Luddite riots in order to heighten the opposition between the old technology, which she figures as the exclusive province of the male weavers, and the new technology, which opened up the labor market for women. We know the mill in Hollow's End employs women because Robert Moore's sister dismisses the independent “young coquines” (112) in his factory as unsuitable for domestic service. So it is not surprising that in a novel exhorting the “Men of Yorkshire” to seek for their daughters “scope and work” (379), and in which one of the heroines claims to wish for a profession “fifty times a-day” (235), Brontë defends the factory system as fiercely as Robert Moore defends his mill. If nothing else, the mill provides “scope and work” for some of Yorkshire's daughters. Like the historian Joan Kelly, Brontë recognizes that “one of the tasks of women's history is to call into question accepted schemes of periodization. To take the emancipation of women as a vantage point is to discover that events that further the historical development of men, liberating them from natural, social, or ideological constraints, have quite different, even opposite, effects upon women” (19). Conversely, events that further the historical development of women may have the opposite effect upon men. Brontë imagines that the industrial revolution might be one such historical development, one that works to the advantage of women, often at the expense of men.

But in the end, Brontë—like Gaskell in Mary Barton—finds herself betrayed by the progress of industrial capitalism. Although Shirley Keeldar is briefly empowered by a fortune linked to Robert Moore's mill (she is his landlord), the text cannot legitimately claim that there exists a natural connection between Shirley's financial and personal independence and the industrial revolution. Shirley makes her money the old-fashioned way—she inherits it. In an 1839 letter sent to Emily from the home of a wealthy manufacturer where she was enduring life as a governess, Charlotte Brontë mused: “I could like to be at home. I could like to work in a mill. I could like to feel some mental liberty. I could like this weight of restraint to be taken off. But the holidays will come. Corragio” (Wise and Symington 1: 181). Yet what the elder sister knew, even if she knew nothing about factory work, was that industrial labor remained closed to the impoverished daughters of the middle classes. Moreover, Mrs. Gooch's Golden Rule for her upwardly mobile son that Matthew Arnold conjures up in Culture and Anarchy—“Ever remember … that you should look forward to being some day manager of that concern!” (433)—did not apply to the Gooch daughters. But in Shirley, Brontë evades the problem of Shirley's unearned and unearnable income to fantasize briefly about what it would be like if women could engage in the middle-class equivalent of factory work. It is just this scenario that she plays out through Shirley, only to find that if one is both a woman and an owner of the means of production, the iron will of patriarchy finds a way to prevail nonetheless.

Self-styled as Shirley Keeldar, Esquire, and Captain Keeldar, Shirley pretends to be a country squire and a captain of industry, but while she assumes the masculine titles, she can never assume masculine power: the sources of power remain mystified, even in the money-mad nineteenth century. Although Shirley's wealth gives her an extraordinary degree of autonomy over her own life, it does not lend her any political power to intervene in public events. Landlord or not, Shirley is treated like a girl and is expected to behave like one: “A chit like that would scarcely presume to give herself airs with the Rector of her parish, however rich she might be” (207), Helstone assures his niece, Caroline. The local elites even keep the impending confrontation at Hollow's End mill a secret from her, and if anyone has a right to that information, it is Shirley, who owns the mill property. Excluded from the world of public events, Shirley falls back onto women's traditional social role, transforming herself into Lady Bountiful and dispensing the necessities of life to the starving families surrounding her. In the end, she more closely resembles that other bountiful provider, Milton's cook, than the titanic Eve of her fertile imagination. Despite her public standing, Shirley remains marginal in a man's world (her philanthropic activities fail to circumvent the violent conflict at the mill) and unable to escape, in her own life, the patriarchal model of mother Eve she so feverishly rejects. In Shirley's impotence to enact a new history for women, we must read Brontë's own recognition that modernity has not lived up to its promise, a failure which condemns the women of the present to relive the lives of their mothers. The tragedy in Shirley is not change but the inability of things to change.

Like Mary Barton, Shirley finds herself constrained by a variety of entrenched social configurations that refuse to yield automatically to advancing capitalist structures. The freedom with which Shirley's wealth endows her is a chimera, for it turns out to be nothing more than the freedom to choose her own captivity, which she promptly does by marrying Louis Moore. Modern readers find the master-slave imagery of their courtship embarrassing, and it is hard not to cringe when Shirley tells Louis Moore, in lieu of a declaration of love: “I am glad I know my keeper, and am used to him. Only his voice will I follow; only his hand shall manage me; only at his feet will I repose” (579). But perhaps we should instead applaud Shirley's honesty for refusing to cover over the legal bondage marriage will entail by resorting to the language of romantic love. If Shirley's personal independence depends upon her financial independence, she will lose her freedom on her wedding day, for according to Victorian property law, Louis will then become her keeper.⁴

Divided between what she hopes the consequences of industrial capitalism will be and her uneasy sense that the persistence of patriarchy may starve those hopes, Brontë concludes Shirley with an oddly incongruous vision that simultaneously embraces hope and anticipates disappointment. The ending ultimately subverts both the conventions of medievalist history and the novelistic conventions of the day. To much confusion, Brontë places her “private judgment,” her sense of what a happy ending is (the progress of industrial capitalism), in a nostalgic narrative that laments change while at the same time she embeds the text's real tragedy (the lack of progress for middle-class women) in a traditional happy ending of love and marriage.

Brontë undermines the conventions of novelistic closure by being unable to assure the reader that her heroines will live happily ever after, for the marriages confirm a continuity with the past that Brontë repudiates: Shirley openly acknowledges her marriage to be a form of imprisonment, and Caroline stands on the verge of a future that threatens to replay her mother's and her aunt's cloistering. As Gilbert and Gubar observe, “Robert Moore starts perceiving Caroline's resemblance to the Virgin Mary … for readers who remember Mary Cave the echo is ominous” (397). While Caroline confides to Shirley that “if we listened to the wisdom of experience” we would “make up our minds to remain single” (224), the two heroines ignore that wisdom nonetheless. Shirley and Caroline may know the past, but they are still doomed to repeat it.

Simultaneously, Brontë undermines the conventions of (male) history, Luddite or medievalist, that read change in tragic terms, by undercutting the lamentation for the past with which the novel closes. When Caroline complains that Robert's mill will “change our blue hill-country air into the Stilbro' smoke atmosphere” (598), Robert rebukes her and reminds her that “the houseless, the starving, the unemployed, shall come to Hollow's mill from far and near” (598). Given that Shirley records the terrible starvation and unemployment in Caroline's hill-country, one must consider that perhaps, within the moral economy of the novel, Robert offers a fair trade. The narrative then shifts suddenly to the future Moore and Caroline had just been envisioning and relates a conversation between the narrator and the narrator's housekeeper over the loss of Caroline's beautiful landscape, which has apparently now taken place. Indulging in nostalgia—the housekeeper tells her employer that “there is no such ladies” like Caroline and Shirley “now-a-days”—she proceeds to give a description of Hollow's End before the factories arrived in Yorkshire: “I can tell of it clean different again: when there was neither mill, nor cot, nor hall, except Fieldhead, within two miles of it. I can tell, one summer-evening, fifty years syne, my mother coming running in just at the edge of dark, almost fleyed out of her wits, saying, she had seen a fairish (fairy) in Fieldhead Hollow; and that was the last fairish that ever was seen on this country side. … A lonesome spot it was—and a bonnie spot—full of oak trees and nut trees. It is altered now” (599). Traditional readings of Shirley have seen the housekeeper's memorial for the “bonnie spot” as evidence of Brontë's own regret for a rural world vanishing in the wake of industrial progress. But if we pause to consider precisely what the housekeeper laments—the fact that fifty years ago her mother was driven to the point of madness because of superstitious fears—Brontë's irony at the housekeeper's expense becomes manifest. The passing of this country superstition is best left unmourned. The housekeeper's regret for the “bonnie spot,” like Caroline's regret for her hill-country, is a nostalgic longing for the picturesqueness of a landscape emptied of people, and when one repeoples the landscape with the houseless, the unemployed, the starving, and the ignorant, the image loses some of its picturesque qualities.

Shirley's double endings both literalize and amplify the duality that lies at the center of Brontë's response to the industrial world: her text heralds the world-transforming changes and laments the slow speed with which those changes are occurring. Industrial capitalism has not yet kept its revolutionary promise of a shining new world. Instead, the old patriarchal order remains intact, manifesting itself in the various patriarchal configurations, from the legal system to novelistic conventions, over which even the transfiguring imagination of Brontë cannot leap. Having promised its readers “something real, cool, and solid,” Shirley gives us reality, with all its inherent disappointments and disillusionments.

Notes

1. I do not wish to argue that medieval nuns lived barren, sexually repressed, and socially useless lives. Rather, in Shirley, Brontë's native anti-Catholicism merges with her critique of the Victorian medievalists, so that the nun, representative of both a Catholic and a medieval world, becomes the ideal embodiment of the miserable lives women have led throughout history. For a rich discussion of the significance of Shirley's nuns, see chapter 11 of Gilbert and Gubar's Madwoman in the Attic.

2. Brontë's treatment of the Luddites has been one of the more controversial aspects of Shirley. Terry Eagleton's Myths of Power condemns Brontë for penning “a lurid travesty of the Luddites” (49); and his argument that Brontë merely echoes the middle-class myth of the Luddites is also found in Thompson's Making of the English Working Class. Patrick Brantlinger accuses Brontë of envisioning the Luddites as a mob in “The Case against Trade Unions in Early Victorian Fiction,” while Igor Webb writes that Brontë simply misunderstood the Luddites' demands for their traditional rights. As they had in Mary Barton, feminist critics insist on the thematic connections between the industrial material and the women's plots. Gilbert and Gubar see Brontë working out the genesis of hunger, wherein workers and women are cultural outsiders condemned to starvation; and Helene Moglen argues that Shirley details the victimization of both women and workers by patriarchal power.

3. Anna Clark notes that “men and women participated together in riots against power looms because they threatened the familial, home-based textile workers' economy” (131).

4. According to Herbert N. Mozley's “The Property Disabilities of a Married Woman, and Other Legal Effects of Marriage,” which appeared in Butler's Woman's Work and Woman's Culture, “the immediate effect of marriage is to place [a woman's] personal property at once absolutely in the power of her husband, and to give him a certain qualified interest in her real property. … In the ordinary case of a woman entitled to ‘real’ property, marriage would confer upon her husband a right to receive the rents and profits for the joint lives of husband and wife” (187). Of course, as Mary Shanley points out, “Under equity, any woman rich enough to have the legal documents drawn up could have her ‘separate property’ or ‘separate estate’ protected by a trust” (59), but even this arrangement limited a woman's financial freedom, since a trustee now had control over her wealth. In Shirley's case, the most logical trustee would be her narrow-minded uncle, with whom she clashes throughout the novel.

References

Brantlinger, Patrick. “The Case against Trade Unions in Early Victorian Fiction.” Victorian Studies 13 (1969): 37-52.

———. The Spirit of Reform: British Literature and Politics, 1832-1867. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1977.

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847. Ed. Q. D. Leavis. New York: Penguin, 1966.

———. Shirley. 1849. Ed. Andrew Hook and Judith Hook. New York: Penguin, 1974.

Clark, Anna. The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Classes. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.

Eagleton, Terry. Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës. London: Macmillan, 1975.

Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell. Ed. J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1966.

———. Mary Barton. 1848. Ed. Edgar Wright. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

———. North and South. 1855. Ed. Dorothy Collin. New York: Penguin, 1970.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.

Mozley, Herbert N. “The Property Disabilities of a Married Woman, and Other Legal Effects of Marriage.” Woman's Work and Woman's Culture. Ed. Josephine Butler. London, 1869. 186-237.

Ruskin, John. “The Nature of Gothic.” 1853. Unto This Last and Other Writings. Ed. Clive Wilmer. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. 75-109.

Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Viking, 1966.

Webb, Igor. From Custom to Capital: The English Novel and the Industrial Revolution. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.

Wise, T. J., and J. A. Symington. The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships and Correspondences. 1933. 4 vols. Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1980.