SOURCE: “‘The Laws of Justice, of Nature, and of Right’: Victorian Feminist Utopias,” in Feminism, Utopia, and Narrative, edited by Libby Falk Jones and Sarah Webster Goodwin, The University of Tennessee Press, 1990, pp. 50-68.

[In the following essay, Albinski surveys the major themes and fictional modes of nineteenth-century British women's utopian fiction.]

For the utopian idealist, fiction offers advantages that the essay form lacks: it reaches a potentially wider audience while peopling one's vision and bringing it to life.¹ Description and dramatization can, however, be uneasy partners, and sometimes the fictional elements are overwhelmed by the very eagerness to depict utopia in all its perfection, or the utopia by the exigencies of a fantastic plot. To achieve a balance between the two requires careful integration of narrative form with social analysis and proposals for reform. All too often nineteenth-century writers tack on an irrelevant sentimental romance.

How innovative have women utopists been in simultaneously creating utopian societies and fiction? The purpose of this essay is to identify some of the narrative modes used in British women's utopias of the late nineteenth century. A general introduction to the major utopian themes of the period and to commonly used fictional approaches (the author's preface, the role of the narrator, the fictional subgenre) will be followed by detailed textual analysis of two works: an allegory, “Three Dreams in a Desert” (1890); and a melodrama, Gloriana (1890). “Three Dreams” is a fable of women's emancipation by feminist Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) (Dreams). Modern readers associate her with The Story of an African Farm (1883) and Woman and Labour (1911), but her short utopian allegory, which was constantly reprinted in Britain and in America for over thirty years,² encouraged an earlier generation of feminists. Constance Lytton describes its impact on hunger-striking suffragettes in prison in 1909: “The words hit out a bare literal description of the pilgrimage of women. It fell on our ears more like an ABC railway guide to our journey than a figurative parable, though its poetic strength was all the greater for that” (157).³Gloriana, or, The Revolution of 1900 is by a more obscure feminist, Lady Florence Dixie; it is a standard Victorian “three-decker” in one volume, published in Britain (1890) and America (1892).

The utopian novel reached its peak in Britain, as it did in America, during the 1880s and 1890s. Cultural differences were, however, quite marked, and British women's utopias differ in several important aspects from those of their American contemporaries. Broadly speaking, the British writers show more interest in political and legal changes, even to reform domestic relationships (the ideal of motherhood, for instance, is presented either as peripheral or in terms of the state as “Mother of the People,” never as the foundation stone of a society as in Gilman's Herland). British utopias are more often urban in setting and are located in a far future Britain rather than in a sequestered valley or another planet. Meliorists all, these writers envision gradual change achieved through established institutions. British women utopians are reformist rather than revolutionary and, despite their outspoken socialism, are less likely than men to suggest the overthrow of the existing order.⁴ Naturally the vote is a major catalyst in this prospectus, but the election of women to Parliament is an even greater one. In their future worlds, the monarchy and a Westminster system of government survive structurally intact, although they are transfigured by the presence of women. The revolution of Gloriana's subtitle, for instance, is short-lived; the achieved utopia glimpsed at the end of the novel is the result of a slower process: ninety-nine years of reform. By comparison, the revolution in William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890) is protracted, bitter, and a necessary precursor to the foundation of his new society, where the Houses of Parliament are used as a repository for dung.⁵ Both writers have strong feelings about the role of class in British society, but Lady Florence's vision of the future is typical of other women's; barred from institutions of power, they wished to be admitted and to effect change through them. One hundred years in the future, Lady Florence's Britain still has titles and title-holders, and a triumphant Imperial Federation. So, too, do many of her contemporaries' utopias; in fact, the Empire often emerges even stronger in utopia than in real life. In Elizabeth Corbett's The New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future (1889) (six hundred years hence)⁶ and Amelia Mears's Mercia, the Astronomer Royal: A Romance (1895) (set in the twenty-first century), it expands to include territory in Europe.⁷ Cora Minnett, in The Day after Tomorrow (1911), not only retains the British monarchy but also predicts that by 1975 America too will have a king.

Feminist visions of socialist reforms within the existing framework of government produce a figure ubiquitous in Victorian feminist utopias: the woman parliamentarian. She was to become a reality in the House of Commons after 1920 when women were enfranchised; the House of Lords, however, remained an all-male preserve until after World War II.⁸ But while the woman member of Parliament was a vision for the future, there was precedent in the past, and British history is mined by these writers for its powerful women.⁹ Contemporary interest in social evolution supported this continuity from past to present to future; Darwinian theory had opened up a new prospect, one of particular significance for feminists, who defined their utopian futures on the basis of social cooperation based on women's sense of moral responsibility rather than on male-derived competition. Late-nineteenth-century Darwinism provided a secular, scientific theory that progress was inevitable, and that social evolution could be consciously guided: as one woman wrote, “Unconscious evolution has carried us forward from savagery through many transitions to a state of civilisation which, though grossly imperfect, contains within it an element of advance” (Clapperton, Vision of the Future, 328). Furthermore, the Industrial Revolution played a significant emancipating role. Olive Schreiner in “Three Dreams” explains that “the Age-of-Muscular-Force” binding women has been slain with the “knife-of-mechanical invention” by the succeeding “Age-of-Nervous-Force” (71). These journeys into the future are impelled by socialism and Reform Social Darwinism.

Courtship and domesticity do not interest these writers. Adventure and melodrama, more consistent with these authors' public worlds of parliamentary change, add narrative tension. Sometimes the plots include a single unscrupulous and un-utopian character; at other times there is conflict beyond the boundaries of utopia. The potential stasis of the descriptive utopian novel is often evaded by means of an introductory preface, where the author speaks directly to the reader, explaining her ideology or describing the structure of her new society. The prefatory address is usually directly related to choice of first person or omniscient narration. A brief examination of several novels reveals how the formal configurations of utopian fictions vary.

With the prologue to The New Amazonia (1889), Elizabeth Corbett steps into a suffrage debate which was conducted in the pages of two popular journals; a debate on women's rights continues in her narrative. Two time-travelers enter her future utopia. The narrator, a woman, shares her author's declared views; her “companion,” the Honorable Augustus Fitz-Musicus, an effete little fellow, cannot abide the forthright women of utopia. His role (like Terry's in Herland) is that of the decadent male, bemoaning his lost vices and wanting respectful, “feminine” women.¹⁰ The narrator, however, is immediately in sympathy with the values of a socialist society based on the principles of moral feminism (among the imposing women of the future, her 26-inch waist is perfectly normal). New Amazonia, with its two visitors to utopia, is the only one of the feminist British novels of the period to use several visitors to utopia as Gilman does, and Corbett relies on the forceful arguments between these two to add conflict to her novel. Fitz-Musicus, in a technologically advanced feminist utopia which has a minority of men, persists with his arguments for the subordination of women. He is offended by Amazonia's socialism (the centralized State is the “Mother of the people”) and its unchristian matriarchal religion, which deifies woman as “the Life Giver.” He is outraged by the absence of the patriarchal Victorian family (children are raised separately from their parents) and by utopia's new moral code (vegetarianism, no alcohol or tobacco, easier divorce). For the woman narrator, these are a source of delight. Corbett treats the misogynist with derision, and “wins” her side of the debate through the spirited rebuttals of her utopian women and the narrator.

Mears, in Mercia (1895), proceeds differently. She also addresses the reader directly in a prologue, but she does so in order to present many of the details of her future society: women's political and professional emancipation, widespread use of birth control and choice of the child's sex, robot-like machines to do housework. War has been outlawed, armies abolished, and peace is maintained by an international tribunal. And yet her narrative ignores the transformed domestic world of the prologue, although it concentrates on Mercia's personal dilemmas. She is courted by the Emperor, whom she does not love, and “framed” by a male rival envious of her position. Conflict is introduced in the political realm through an Indian claim for national independence, which is ultimately successful. Although the third person narrator and Mercia refer to potentially intriguing events, such as to the action of “lady M. P.s” who aid the liberation of Turkish women, the promise of the prologue is not fulfilled, being forgotten in the exigencies of the popular romance/adventure story. Here is an instance where the material for a potentially strong feminist utopia has been overwhelmed by trivial sensationalism.

Cora Minnett, on the other hand, with a similar approach salvages more of her utopian vision (The Day after Tomorrow, 1911). She uses an introductory chapter to explain her society: women's suffrage, full equality, divorce reform, improvements in economic life due to the work of “women legislators” (equitable taxation, emigration, and national insurance bills). The subsequent narrative includes a sentimental romance and some melodramatic skullduggery concerning a will, to supply tension; nevertheless, the social dimension of her welfare state is not displaced.

We do not find in any of these novels a feminist counterpart to that staple of male utopians: courtship of a utopian woman by the male traveler to utopia. Women's evolutionary bias and their feminism makes this a most unlikely scenario; even a sensitive Victorian male would be too atavistic for a highly evolved woman of the future. Only one writer develops a platonic romance between two women: Irene Clyde, in Beatrice the Sixteenth (1909). Clyde's utopian traveler, Mary Hatherley, M. B., explorer and geographer, moves back in time, from someplace in Asia Minor to the world of the legendary Amazons. In a first-person narrative, Mary tells of Amazonian life, and at the conclusion she contracts a marriage (“conjux”) with an Amazonian woman.¹¹ But this romance is not the central narrative device. Clyde introduces one male into the society, a conniving Chief Steward who foments trouble within the world of women, while an onslaught of neighboring barbarian tribes poses an external threat and allows the writer to show her Amazons in their martial as well as in their cultivated, social aspect.

In Schreiner's “Three Dreams in a Desert,” personification replaces characterization, allegory replaces melodrama. This writer's method is unlike that of other women authors in the period, but they share one vision. Schreiner's utopia is also a world where “brave women and brave men [walk] hand in hand,” it is the heaven that will be, on earth, “in the future” (84). “Three Dreams” is one of Schreiner's many allegories, for it was a form that she found herself using to express her deepest feelings: “While it is easy clearly to express abstract thoughts in argumentative prose, whatever emotion those thoughts awaken I have not felt myself able adequately to express except in the other form [allegory]” (Women and Labor, 9). To this she adds a footnote stating that “Three Dreams” was originally written for an earlier book on the history of women, the manuscript of which was destroyed during the Boer War. Schreiner often included allegories in her fiction and other prose works, for she could “condense five or six pages into one, with no loss but a great gain to clearness” (First and Scott, 182).

Schreiner's narrator dreams her three dreams in the course of one day; she is an observer and questioner in each. In the first dream, she sees the bound figure of woman struggling to rise; in the second, woman guided by Reason, relinquishing Love, laboring toward the land of Freedom; in the third, woman arriving at her destination, victorious and free and loved. Like other writers, she looks backward not for an image of female power, but for an earlier age of equality. Her figure of woman has not always been unnaturally subordinated to men, for “on the Rocks of Language, on the hard-baked clay of Ancient Customs, now crumbling to decay, are found the marks of her footsteps! Side by side with his who stands beside her” (69). It is the reclamation of this ancient equality that is woman's task, and woman's alone. Schreiner insists that either sex is degraded by the oppression of the other, for in the first dream her man and woman are joined by a cord, which holds him back until she is able to raise herself.

In the second dream, the cord has been cut, for woman alone faces a dark river, wide and deep. The guide who appears tells her that the only way to Freedom is “down the banks of Labour, through the water of Suffering” (76-77). He counsels the removal of her clothes, “the mantle of Ancient-received-opinions” and the “shoes of dependence”; she goes forward clad only in the white mantle of Truth. But she must leave behind the tiny figure of Love which she nurtures: “and she took her bosom from his mouth, and he bit her, so that the blood ran down on to the ground” (81). So, forsaking the exploitative infantile figure of Love which is bound to woman's self-sacrifice, woman grasps her staff of Reason and faces her lonely journey. To help overcome her fears, the guide reminds her of the locusts, and how they cross a stream: “First one comes down to the water-edge, and it is swept away, and then another comes and then another, and then another, and at last with their bodies piled up a bridge is built and the rest pass over” (82). Waiting to cross behind her is “the entire human race” (83). In the third, brief dream, she has reached Freedom.

For the dreamer, these dreams occupy an African afternoon. The first dream comes to her in the noonday heat, in a landscape “parched” and “brown.” After the first dream, she wakes to a less stressful environment; the earth is still barren, but the sky is blue, not throbbing with heat. After the second dream, the landscape is transfigured by “yellow afternoon light.” The ants which she had earlier noticed running “to and fro” now “run by thousands in the red sand” (83), reminders of those swarming locusts. After the third dream, there is hope to match the completed vision, an echo of the glimpse of utopia that has drawn woman on: “Then the sun passed down behind the hills; but I knew that the next day he would arise again” (85).

“Dreams” ends with a promise of struggle and duty, a message of hope, and the voice of a visionary dreamer who has glimpsed a new world. So too does Dixie's Gloriana, although it reaches that conclusion in a very different narrative form, the melodrama. In her novel of a utopia-in-process, Dixie amply embodies conflict between the utopian impulse and its opponents. The female hero of this utopian novel, the founder of its utopian society, is a militant feminist. At age twelve, Gloria adopts the disguise of a boy (Hector L’Estrange). She subsequently follows the traditional British masculine path to power: Eton, Oxford, the House of Commons, and eventually the office of prime minister. She starts a national movement of women's paramilitary organizations which becomes the nucleus of a volunteer army of women, founds a women's university, and successfully legislates votes for women. It is when Gloria campaigns for equality in other areas, supporting equal education, equal application of the right of primogeniture, and the right of women to enter Parliament, that her line of early successes temporarily falters.¹² After her true sex is revealed and she becomes the first woman prime minister, this legislation is passed, leading to the utopia presented in the final chapter of the novel; Britain in 1999 is a nation transformed.

Dixie states her feminist principles in several ways before commencing the narrative. The novel has a lengthy dedication to all women and such courageous men as “uphold the Laws of Justice, of Nature, and of Right”:

with the hope that a straightforward inspection of the evils afflicting Society, will lead to their demolition in the only way possible—namely, by giving to Women equal rights with Men. Not till then will Society be purified, wrongdoing punished, or Man start forward along that road which shall lead to Perfection.

Next this preface attacks critics who forget to ask, “Why is this book written?” she continues: “There is no romance worth reading, which has not the solid foundation of truth to support it”; her own principles are then stated:

‘Gloriana’ pleads woman's cause, pleads for her freedom, for the just acknowledgement of her rights. It pleads that her equal humanity with man shall be recognised, and therefore that her claim to share what he has arrogated to himself, shall be considered. ‘Gloriana,’ pleads that in woman's degradation man shall no longer be debased, that in her elevation he shall be upraised and ennobled. (p. ix)

Dixie also uses a conventional framing device. Gloriana opens and closes with a poem, “Maremna's Dream,” which introduces the narrative as the vision of a contemporary woman, and concludes with a call to her for action. Maremna's sleeping and her waking are confined within the poem, however, and she does not enter the narrative.

There is little chance that Gloriana could be read for its sensationalism and its feminism ignored (a problem with Mercia). Gloriana, which Dixie terms a “romance,” belongs rather in the genre of melodrama. In addition to the revolution of 1900, the novel contains two kidnappings, a suicide, a foiled assassination attempt, a shipwreck, the sensational trial of the incumbent prime minister for murder, and the revelation that “he” is really a “she.” Moreover, not one but two women masquerade as men (the second is a young woman employed by the villain). These incidents are not included in the novel merely to titillate the reader; melodrama, I argue, is logically consistent with the moral universe of the utopia, and far more so than any grafting of the sentimental romance:

Most definitions of melodrama have laid stress upon the concentration on plot at the expense of characterization, the reliance on physical sensation, the character stereotypes, the rewarding of virtue, and punishment of vice. These are truly characteristic, but what is really more important is the pattern into which they all fit, a pattern giving what appears on the surface to be a wildly chaotic and exceedingly trivial drama a logical moral and philosophical coherence. Essentially, melodrama is a dream world inhabited by dream people and dream justice. (Booth, 13-14)

Within this clear, if simplistic, moral and philosophical framework, the sensational elements of the narrative dramatize the “evils afflicting Society,” and the ensuing battle between good and evil, with its inevitable result, represents more than the triumph of a few individuals; it is the triumph of principles of social reform. While most of the novels briefly discussed have used some melodramatic device for this purpose, in none is it as extensively used as in Gloriana.

Evil is represented in the melodrama by the stock figure of the villain:

A superman of crime, tireless in iniquity, implacable in vengeance, inexhaustible in evil resource. Around this monster's treasonable ambitions, his sinful loves, his base grudges, the plot revolved; his ingenuity, his energy, and his sublime persistence kept matters in that headlong whirl which made these dramas what they were. (Rahill, 207)

Dixie's villain, Lord Westray, is as swarthy, lecherous, vindictive, rich, and powerful as any. His function, of course, is directly related to the novel's purpose. Representative both of a decadent ruling class and of patriarchal attitudes toward women, Westray (as his name suggests) belongs to a day that is passing. The narrator points out the impunity conferred by his class and sex: he is

regarded as a gentleman, is received and welcomed by society, is high in the graces of the Government of the day, and accounted a clever man and useful statesman. Clothed in these mantles of virtue, he is free to do as he pleases. Wickedness will not bar Society's doors against him, or lose him his high preferments. Is he not a man, one of the dominant and self-styled superior race? Therefore, is he not free to do as he pleases? (99)

Totally deficient in moral sense, Westray treats women as objects to be bought or as animals to be cowed, and he corrupts both the law and the lower classes by bribing witnesses. In a meeting of the parliamentary cabinet (chapter 7 of book 2), Dixie shows the political workings of his contemporaries, a “venerable” all-male collection—of fools and knaves. It is only with the death of Westray that Gloria's name can be cleared; it is only with the death of his type that a more just society can be created. He is an upper-class member of that “Age-of-muscular-force” whose passing Schreiner applauds (although he employs others to use that force for him).

But if the villain is stereotyped, the hero is not. Gloria, as the female hero of the novel, invests the good and the true with extraordinary energy. Although the machinations of the villain may help to keep the plot moving, he is outdone by Gloria. Dixie often keeps him offstage, but even when they meet, or when Gloria is combating his plans, his resourcefulness and vitality are far outmatched by hers. Amid the pageantry of the opening of the Hall of Liberty (the women's university), Gloria/Hector addresses a crowd of thousands on the desire of woman “to shake off the chains of slavery … that have held her a prisoner in the gilded gaols of inactivity and helplessness.” Then Dixie (like Corbett and Clyde) invokes the spirit of the Amazons:

One of our heart-stirring writers—I allude to Whyte-Melville—has left it declared in his writings, ‘that if a legion of Amazons could be rendered amenable to discipline they would conquer the world.’ He was right. The physical courage, of which men vaunt so much, is as nothing when compared with that greater and more magnificent virtue, ‘moral courage,’ which women have shown that they possess in so eminent a degree over men. (92)¹³

Such a splendid vision rarely informs the hero of melodrama, who is usually a reactor rather than an instigator of action, and the militant energy of Gloria's speech and actions stands in stark contrast to the sordid backroom deceptions of the Earl of Westray.

Despite Gloria's political role, her reported speeches are kept to an effective minimum. This first oration at the Hall of Liberty, heralding a new day for women, is short (less than three pages) and stirring. Her only long speech is an impassioned plea for women's full emancipation near the end of book 1 (pp. 127-39). The speech is neither superfluous nor tedious. It brings home to the reader what the events of the novel have to that point dramatized: the current position of women and the process by which it might be reformed. Gloria, as role model, has already proved the value of the educational, legal, and political measures that she advocates, although she has been able to do so only by concealing her identity as a woman.¹⁴ She herself is proof of what other women might accomplish, given equality and access to male-dominated institutions. Her long speech is a manifesto for achieving that equality. Equal education will develop women's intellectual and physical powers; the right of primogeniture will pass inheritance to the firstborn of either sex, not to the oldest son; entry into professions will give women an alternative to marriage; political power benefits society as a whole, through women's influence on the affairs of the nation.¹⁵

Her several subsequent short speeches in court recapitulate crucial elements of the narrative and restate Dixie's ideology of true emancipation. The narrative concludes with another short address by Gloria after the passage of her equal rights bill (also made in the Hall of Liberty), a talk that looks to a golden future:

Human freedom means the right to take part in the creation of laws for the better government and perfection of man; it means that man and woman are born equal, are created to work hand in hand for the greater happiness of mankind. … By the acknowledgement of this principle you have laid the train which, when fired, will put an end to immorality and social wrongs, which will make evil unpleasant to perform, and which will degrade the performer to the position of a leper … a day of darkness has sunk to rise no more, and one of brightness, and promise, and fair hope has arisen to cheer us along the glorious path of reform. (334-35)

It is on this high note that the narrative action ends, with a woman in the highest political office, one that she had formerly been able to hold only in the disguise of a male.

The historical role model for Gloria is Queen Elizabeth the First, the “Gloriana” of Spenser's The Faerie Queene. The novel's title, Gloria's frequent progresses and pageants, her white horse, her militancy, her leadership, and her virginity all associate her with Elizabeth I. Gloria's triumphal progress from Tilbury to London at the conclusion of the novel (she had been missing and presumed dead) is a reminder of Elizabeth's visit to the camp there after the defeat of the Spanish Armada; a contemporary poet described her as “most bravely mounted on a stately steede,” “in nought unlike the Amazonian Queene.”¹⁶ As a Victorian aspect of the Virgin Queen, Gloria, who becomes engaged in the course of the narrative, remains unmarried within the story's boundaries; that a marriage has occurred is revealed only in retrospect, from 1999.

The subordination of Gloria's marriage to her public role is consistent with the treatment of marriage throughout the novel. Dixie does not describe (or illustrate) its reform or replacement, but offers women an alternative: participation with men in the wider sphere. The contemporary role of women in marriage is depicted throughout the novel. As a girl, Gloria's mother, Speranza, married Westray (her guardian's son)—in true melodramatic style—only to ensure her brothers their inheritance. Her suffering inspires Gloria's vow to right the injustices imposed on women. (Westray is not Gloria's father; the latter had eloped with Speranza but was pursued by Westray and shot.) As a girl, Speranza had longed for the freedom to work and to be independent. Her daughter takes on the appearance of a boy and shows what a girl can do given the same opportunities. Her article on marriage (by Hector L’Estrange, “an Eton boy”) is printed in the Free Review, condemning “the cruel laws by which men have shut women out from every hope of winning name and fame, [and which] are responsible for hundreds of wretched marriages, which have seared the world with their griefs” (27). A subplot illustrates this impact on marriage: two young society women use intrigue to relieve the tedium of their marriages, but Gloria's example eventually raises their consciousness, and they join her cause. Theirs is not the high tragedy of Speranza's life, but a tragedy of waste. Gloria's relationship with her own fiance, Lord Evelyn Ravensdale, is a model of dual respect and comradeship; but it is one in which the leadership is undoubtedly the woman's. Dixie engages in a symbolic role-reversal, for while her Gloria is called Hector, the duke is usually referred to as “Evie.”

Dixie is most concerned with opening up the public sphere to women, and although in this novel motherhood receives its Victorian due, this is conveyed mainly through the relationship between Gloria and Speranza. One of the few references to motherhood in the abstract is made during Gloria's long speech, when she refers to the population problem:

I believe that with the emancipation of women we shall solve this problem now. Fewer children will be born, and those that are born will be of a higher and better physique than the present order of men. … Thousands are born in our midst who should never see the light of day. Born in disease, these miserable victims of vice and immorality grow up to beget other like horrors, and in the teeming millions of this vast city alone exist misery and sin too terrible to contemplate. (137-38)

Compared to the mystic associations with motherhood in Herland, this is a cold, eugenic statement, directed less to feeling than to reason, but the absence of any emotional tie to family is typical of British feminists' utopias of the period. They neither question nor seek to replace the family as an institution, they simply ignore it. While Gloria's relationship with her mother is of utmost importance within the novel, it is a relationship between two strong-minded adult women, and while the final chapter reveals the fact of Gloria's marriage, it implies that the marriage was childless.

The utopian future revealed in this final chapter of Gloriana is not a pastoral vision. It includes a transfigured, “countrified” London, the foul air cleansed, the moral degradation of unnatural laws replaced by honesty and equality. Home Rule has been granted to Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and colonial relations are centralized in a new Imperial Parliament. The benefits of women's full emancipation are seen in national and international politics.

The two narrative methods of Dixie and Schreiner are equally effective though quite different. The symbolic form that Schreiner so often adopted speaks volumes in the compass of a short parable; it offers a golden age of the past and of the future, alludes to the emancipation possible through the Industrial Revolution and a sense of evolutionary purpose, condemns sentimental but exploitative romance, and charts the way forward through labor and suffering. Its utopia, although an abstraction, breathes harmony between women and men, “who looked into each other's eyes, and they were not afraid” (84). There, too, “the women also hold each other's hands” (84). Schreiner's personification of woman in an extended metaphor is written from an emotional substratum that communicates most intensely with the reader on the same level. Constance Lytton responded this way to Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence's recital of “Three Dreams” in prison. It was an emotional revelation of a work that she had previously been introduced to by her “father and the painter Watts [who] had been enthusiastic of the poetical beauty of these ‘Dreams’” (Lytton and Warton, 156). “Three Dreams in a Desert,” like a feminist “Pilgrim's Progress,” absorbs the individual into the universal; its language is stark, its tone biblical, its vision broad, and the desert setting aids the note of prophecy. The modern reader responds to its uncompromising harshness, rather than its “poetical beauties.” Welling from Schreiner's subconscious, although it counsels Reason as a guide, it communicates what Schreiner calls “the passion of abstract ideas” (First and Scott, 182).

Dixie's Gloriana speaks the same words in a different tongue. She adopts a narrative mode that even in her time was becoming passé and revives it through her use of an active, resourceful female hero and a constantly moving narrative that rarely becomes detached from the moral vision. The potential major defects of the melodrama, stock characters and sensationalism for its own sake, are largely overcome. Dixie's tendencies to sentimentalize and to harangue the reader are less often suppressed; yet they do not overwhelm the raciness of her narrative. Nor do they mar the freshness of her female hero: the courageous and independent new “Gloriana,” champion of women's rights.

Notes

1. Dixie, dedication.

2. The definitive biography of Schreiner lists twenty-five editions of Dreams by 1930; First and Scott, 185.

3. Lytton and Warton, 157. (Jane Warton was the name Lady Constance Lytton gave to the police when arrested, in order to avoid favorable treatment or early release.)

4. This stance differs markedly from the more religious, inspirational basis of many American women's utopian visions. Barbara Taylor, in her brilliant study of the mid-nineteenth century, discusses how socialists appropriated the language of millenarianism. Taylor says, “It was not merely another brand of religious sectarianism, but an anti-religion” (160), and refers to “the idea of women as moral missionaries” (161). (See Taylor, 157-61.) There is an interesting conjunction of thinking at that time in the only British feminist communitarian utopia, Jane Hume Clapperton's Margaret Dunmore, or, A Socialist Home. Envisioning a utopia similar to those sketched in many American communitarian romances of the period in all aspects except the source of its inspiration, Clapperton's narrator refers with approval to the practices of the Oneida community but bristles at their “childish theology” (41). The American edition of Dixie's Gloriana includes an introduction by the Oneidan George Noyes Miller, although its religious content is minimal.

5. In Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516), contempt for gold is registered in much the same way—by using golden chamberpots. Perhaps the only woman utopian who might have shared Morris's attitude toward revolution is Clapperton (see n. 4 above), whose Socialist Home in Manchester is built on the site of the Peterloo Massacre (1819); however, while she makes the connection with working-class protest and its suppression, she advocates education as the means of change.

6. Corbett describes the dissolution of the current Empire, but Britain, in alliance with Scotland and Germany, conquers France and Ireland. Ireland, settled by women, becomes “The New Amazonia.”

7. Here the British king has succeeded to the German throne, forming the new Teutonic Empire. “Mercia” was one of the ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

8. An indication of the threat posed by the idea of women in political power is Jesse Wilson's When the Women Reign, one of several misogynist dystopias of the period, which ridicules the feminist ideals of women in Parliament, and of a woman prime minister. A successful revolt by the men leads them to declare (of women), “let them vote but not sit” (i.e., take their seats in Parliament).

9. The suffragettes also appealed to this sense of tradition, favoring pageants and parades. The Daily Express called their great Hyde Park meeting of 30 June 1908 (which drew an estimated quarter of a million people) “one of the most wonderful and astonishing sights that have ever been seen since the days of Boadicea” (Pankhurst, 248). Cicely Hamilton, leader of the women writers' guild of the Women's Social and Political Union, wrote A Pageant of Great Women, which featured artists, saints, heroines, queens, and great warriors. Hamilton was a founder of the Women Writers Suffrage League (see Showalter, 218-20) and coauthor of a successful, witty play with a utopian theme, How the Vote Was Won, in which women leave their jobs and rely on male relatives or the state for financial support, a tactic which rapidly brings male support for female suffrage.

10. Their different methods of entering the future are indicative of their characters. For the woman it is a dream vision; she falls asleep, to waken in a garden in the future. The man, however, is transported as the result of taking hashish in a Turkish bath.

11. There are no sexual connotations to the marriage. In a much later work, Clyde advocates artificial reproduction and close platonic relationships between women: Eve's Sour Apples. Sexuality is the “sour apple.” In Beatrice the Sixteenth, the society of women is continued by buying baby daughters from nearby “barbarians” and raising them as their own.

12. Gloria's public career is one that Dixie dearly longed for. Not only an outspoken feminist, she played a role in colonial diplomacy as public advocate for the Zulu king, and influenced extensive debates in Parliament on the Irish question. She was an intrepid traveler and travel writer (Patagonia, South Africa), pamphleteer on many causes, a crack rider and sportswoman. For perceptive feminist analysis, see Catherine Barnes Stevenson, Victorian Women Travel Writers in Africa. Further information on Dixie's life and work may be found in two works by Brian Roberts: Ladies of the Veld and The Mad Bad Line. The former quotes a newspaper report of her in South Africa: “It is said that she can play a decent game of cricket, write a capital newspaper letter, beat most men at billiards, and bivouac as well as any man” (90). The description fits Hector L’Estrange at Eton perfectly.

13. Her reference is to Whyte-Melville, Sarchedon: A Legend of the Great Queen, a popular Babylonian romance in the style of Rider Haggard's She.

14. Dixie introduces a woman character dressed as a man in several of her novels; most are female heroes, a few are female villains. Dixie herself defied some of the restrictive codes of dress for late Victorian women, particularly in adopting a divided skirt for riding astride, rather than riding sidesaddle in long skirts. The frontispiece of Gloriana shows her as a young teenager in a sailor blouse.

15. Primogeniture would also increase women's participation in politics, as hereditary peers in the House of Lords. Women were not admitted to the Lords until after World War II; at the time of this writing, there are 67 women members in a total membership of 1,200. As a footnote to history, Dixie's great-granddaughter, Eleanor Dixie, “petitioned the Queen under the powers of the Sex Discrimination Act in 1976, to have the title carried on through her into a succeeding generation” (Foss, 180). The request was denied.

16. “Elizabetha Triumphans, 1588,” in Nichols, 2:570.

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