Beautiful Boredom: Idleness and Feminine Self-Realization in the Victorian Novel 9780786445554, 0786445556

Citation preview

Beautiful Boredom

This page intentionally left blank

Beautiful Boredom Idleness and Feminine Self-Realization in the Victorian Novel LEE ANNA MAYNARD

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina, and London

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Maynard, Lee Anna, 1973– Beautiful boredom : idleness and feminine self-realization in the Victorian novel / Lee Anna Maynard. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7864-4555-4 softcover : 50# alkaline paper ¡. English fiction — 19th century — History and criticism. 2. Boredom in literature. 3. Self-consciousness (Awareness) in literature. I. Title. PR878.B66M39 2009 823'.809353 — dc22 2009029647 British Library cataloguing data are available ©2009 Lee Anna Maynard. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. On the cover: Mary Cassatt, The Cup of Tea, oil on canvas, 363 ⁄8" × 253 ⁄4", 1879 Manufactured in the United States of America

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 6¡¡, Je›erson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com

For my grandmother, Ethel Lee Smith, who introduced me to nineteenth-century British novels in my idle hours, and my mentor, Bill Richey, who kindly took interest.

This page intentionally left blank

Table of Contents Preface: Discovering the Boring

1

Introduction

5

1. Avoiding the Boring: Boredom, Beauty, and Narrative in Jane Eyre

19

2. The Complexion of Boredom in Middlemarch

72

3. Life on a Grecian Urn: Boredom, Beauty, and Stasis in The Portrait of a Lady

119

4. “The Proper Stuff of Fiction”— A Look Forward

148

Postscript: Boredom’s Beauty: Victorian Visual Representations of a Pervasive Mental State

166

Works Cited

183

Index

187

vii

This page intentionally left blank

Preface: Discovering the Boring This book brings together many topics currently of interest to the intellectually curious within (and beyond) the field of academic English: cultural studies, with attention to contexts such as conduct literature and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century feminist writings; psychoanalytical criticism; feminist criticism; Victorian literature about and largely by women; discussion and analysis of the novel’s structure; and, most prominently, an interrogation and exploration of boredom, a psychological state that fascinates and perplexes in twenty-first as well as nineteenth-century settings.

Why Boredom? The genesis of this project arose from the literary application of a personal preoccupation. Throughout my childhood and early adulthood, I spent seemingly endless holidays and vacations at a hot, dusty farmhouse on a dirt road in rural Georgia, with no toys, radio, television, playmates, or even (mildly) interesting farm animals to entertain me. Complaining of boredom produced no results, as my grandmother subscribed to the rather eighteenth-century notion that professing boredom indicated a lack of moral and intellectual soundness. Somehow, the lack of anything external to occupy myself became less burdensome and more liberating upon the repetition of the experience. I began to value — if not exactly court or enjoy — the state of having nothing concrete to do, and I wondered at my perversity in contentedly experiencing the apparently static condition of boredom. Throughout my life, some of my best ideas and moments of greatest personal revelation were generated during these periods of seeming disengagement, and thus, when, as an adult, I re-read George Eliot’s Middlemarch after perusing psychotherapist Adam Phillips’ On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (Harvard University 1

2

Preface

Press, 1994), I began to more consciously apply my own hobbyhorse to the literature in which I was engrossed. I had long been intrigued by Dorothea Brooke’s brown study in her pale, bluish boudoir, by the positive potential that seemed to me to lie beneath the depressing surface of the scene, and suddenly I felt I had found the key (unlike poor Mr. Casaubon, who never finishes his Key) for deciphering my conflicted reading of the scene and perhaps the entire novel. Boredom, I determined, could be good in this novel, and quite likely in other nineteenth-century novels as well. Analyzing how novelists of the period recognize boredom’s ubiquitousness in their culture and ascertaining the value with which they invest it became especially interesting in the context of Victorian concepts of femininity and womanhood and gave rise to several questions my monograph aims to answer: Is boredom good? Is boredom ladylike? Is boredom a punishment? Is boredom a gift? Is boredom a status symbol? Is boredom sexually and/or aesthetically attractive? Can boredom bring the only freedom available to a proper lady of the period — psychological freedom? Is boredom’s inclusion and promotion a feminist commentary by Eliot, Brontë, and other novelists? What is boredom’s role in the narrative structure of a novel — is it like hitting the pause button or does it, counter-intuitively, put the plot on fast-forward?

Uncovering the Power of Victorian Boredom(s) My study considers three major Victorian texts through the lens of boredom, examining how that state of mind (or those states of mind) effect the novels’ structures and reflect or critique mid- to late-nineteenth-century culture. In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72), and Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881), boredom becomes a more and more insistent narrative presence, a spur to the action and a tool that questions the ideals and sway of beauty and erodes the neat cultural and narratological closure provided by the traditional marriage-plot ending. By the time Virginia Woolf writes To the Lighthouse (1927), boredom has become a standby rather than an aberration in the novel, and the mental plane seems to have superseded the conventional and physical as a source for narrative action and movement. These Victorian novels present boredom not incidentally but purposefully, offering their authors a new means of revealing their unorthodox takes on society and fiction. My study, therefore, examines the pervasiveness of the state of boredom for characters in these Victorian and Modernist novels and argues that discussing “boredoms” is ultimately more instructive and productive, as boredom can manifest in varied ways and to wildly different effect, not only

Preface

3

among a sampling of novels but within individual texts themselves. I propose that two basic labels—fluid/productive and solid/malignant — offer springboards for diagnosing and evaluating types of boredoms and their effects not only on characters but on plot and the novel’s narrative structure as a whole. As I intimated above, boredom’s growing presence and influence in these novels over the course of the Victorian period manages to interrogate social values and practices— especially those concerned with and affecting women — and alters the expectations and possibilities for plot, narrative, and fiction itself. Just as importantly, in these novels, boredom becomes sometimes the sole avenue for female characters to experience freedom, creativity, profound productivity, self-knowledge, and power. As a result of shouldering these narratological, thematic, and, really, philosophical responsibilities, boredom may in fact provide the structural and conceptual bridge from the traditionally conceived nineteenth-century novel to its more experimental Modern counterpart.

Embracing Boredom For me personally, boredom is good, important, and necessary. While revising this book, I found a kindred spirit in philosopher Lars Svendsen, whose A Philosophy of Boredom, translated into English in 2005, articulates some of the same precepts that initiated my own journey into literary boredom. Not only does he suggest and critique some typologies of boredom proposed by international philosophers, but also he argues that boredom “has something to tell us about how we live” (135). Though boredom is perceived by many as a curse or at least a burden, Svendsen proposes that “rather than immediately happen on an antidote to boredom, there could be some point in lingering and maybe finding some kind of meaning in boredom itself ” (141), and this is exactly what my project seeks (and finds) in Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, Portrait of a Lady, and To the Lighthouse, not to mention in my quick and dirty survey of Victorian portraits of women, included as a postscript to this discussion of boredom as something potentially beautiful and certainly worth enduring (possibly worth seeking, too). In bringing this project to print, I have many to thank who embraced the idea that hearing about, reading about, and engaging with boredom didn’t have to be a repressive and stultifying experience. Kate Brown, William B. Thesing, William Rivers, and Alexander Ogden all offered insightful feedback and encouragement, while Lee Farrow gave me hope that the appeal of my research extended beyond English professionals and the academy. A Grant-in-Aid Fellowship from Auburn University Mont-

4

Preface

gomery helped fund a research trip to London to discover the purely aesthetic manifestation of boredom in the Victorian period. My most profound thanks must go to William Richey, an inspiration as a scholar, teacher, mentor, and person, and to my ridiculously understanding and supportive parents, sister, and husband, whose excitement that this book is now concrete is only exceeded by my own.

Introduction All day within the dreamy house, The doors upon their hinges creak’d; The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse Behind the moldering wainscot shriek’d, Or from the crevice peer’d about. Old faces glimmer’d thro’ the door, Old footsteps trod the upper floors, Old voices called her from without. She only said, “My life is dreary, He cometh not,” she said; She said, “I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!” The sparrow’s chirrup on the roof, The slow clock ticking, and the sound Which to the wooing wind aloof The poplar made, did all confound Her sense; but most she loathed the hour When the thick-moted sunbeam lay Athwart the chambers, and the day Was sloping toward his western bower. Then said she, “I am very dreary, He will not come,” she said; She wept, “I am aweary, aweary, O God, that I were dead!” [“Mariana,” lines 61-84]

In Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Mariana, isolated on the moated grange after Angelo’s deception and desertion, is half-demented with her lover’s betrayal, but in Tennyson’s “Mariana” (1830), the eponymous character is plagued instead by the boredom and stasis of her exile. Her natural surroundings are everything that is unchanging, unvarying, and emptied of color, from the stagnant, blackened water of the moat and the sluice to the cold, windy, “grey-eyed” mornings to the treeless, flat, gray waste that surrounds her for leagues (31). The interior of the house mirrors this landscape of boredom, and although less threatening perhaps than the natural world, it is no less oppressive or communicative of stretched and suffocat5

6

Introduction

ing time. Virtually the only sounds Mariana hears are the waxing and waning hum of blue flies, the echoes of old footsteps above her, and the labored ticking of the clock, and she hears these same things “all day” and every day “within the dreamy house.” The “glooming flats” are almost all there is to see, for no one new (it is only “old” faces and voices) ever enters the confines of the moated grange. Mariana’s refrain throughout Tennyson’s poem is that her life is “dreary” and that she is “aweary, aweary” (20): she repeats it in all seven stanzas, and the rhyming of the words gives even greater resonance to this impression of boredom. Despite the exclamation points at the end of each refrain, the overall impression of her delivery is that of a sigh, because she waits without hope (for Angelo’s arrival) and without other avenues for thought or action — all Mariana actually does in the poem is open a curtain, speak her mantra, and cry. Everything about Tennyson’s poem, from the character to the setting to his non-chronological and non-linear treatment of time,1 expresses an unreflecting, dull, impenetrable boredom.2 How, then, do we account for this increasing stress on boredom, for this shift from Shakespeare’s focus on betrayal to Tennyson’s emphasis on utter inactivity? It occurs because Tennyson’s Mariana is quite fully an inhabitant of his own time, a Victorian woman merely placed in the somewhat antique setting of a moated grange. She is afflicted by the unvarying and confining nature of her dayto-day life, as is the typical Victorian woman: she is acted upon, rather than acting; she is barred from the public sphere and virtually imprisoned in the domestic; she has no recourse to education or intellectual stimulation; she waits, for something (anything) to happen and/or for a man to fulfill her destiny; and she can have no vocation outside marriage and the home. Tennyson’s Mariana thus reflects the social expectations and cultural limitations experienced by mid-nineteenth-century women, becoming, rather than an Elizabethan throwback, the very emblem of bored Victorian womanhood. Under the auspices of conduct books and more overtly aesthetic works, boredom had become institutionalized for middle- and upper-class women by the time Tennyson penned “Mariana.” In texts such as Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women (1767) and Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (1774), young women are urged to smother desire for entertainment and activity outside the home while nurturing a self-effacing love for family, hearth, and domestic employments. Fordyce in particular strictly condemns women who wish to venture beyond the confines of their parents’ or husband’s home — activities necessary if one were to gain meaningful education or attempt to pursue any sort of career — and suggests that such escapes from boredom would result in a precipitate fall to immorality and evil.

Introduction

7

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century domestic ideologues uniformly pronounce that woman’s true place is apart from the sordid world of trade, activity, and temptation. The feminine sphere, then, is defined for Victorians by its inactivity, stasis, and confinement: little wonder that boredom is the result. In the words of Fordyce, a “masculine woman must be naturally an unamiable creature” (104; emphasis mine), and it is precisely the spirit of this veiled threat that encourages women to comply with the rather restrictive and unquestionably stultifying tenets set forth by the conduct manuals. The lure, for women, of adopting these standards of behavior and inactivity is what seems a virtual guarantee of attractiveness: in other words, by conforming to conduct-book ideas about woman’s role, Victorian women can attempt to appropriate and embody the beautiful. James Fordyce is but one of the many domestic ideologues whose social mandates were influenced by contemporary formulations of beauty and its relationship to the feminine. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) crystallizes the late-eighteenth-century aesthetic that, when interpreted through the lens of conduct books, makes female beauty dependent on stasis and confinement: he denotes as the beautiful that which is small, smooth, delicate, and pleasing, qualities/terms which are translated by the domestic ideologues into a circumscribed, indoor, inactive, selfless manner of existence for women. Elaine Scarry3 explains that “[Immanuel] Kant and Burke subdivided the aesthetic realm (which had previously been inclusively called beauty) into two realms, the sublime and the beautiful,” that “in the newly subdivided aesthetic realm, the sublime is male and the beautiful female,” and that, more specifically, “the sublime moves” whereas “beauty charms” (83). If the sublime is characterized by movement, then beauty’s “charm” must lie in its stasis. The inactivity of women’s circumscribed sphere thus becomes beautiful, something to be encouraged from an aesthetic viewpoint. In other words, beauty can look like boredom4 and vice versa.5 In Burke’s and Kant’s dichotomy of the beautiful and the sublime, Scarry notes, beauty is demoted, and what we can extrapolate from her observation is that Victorian women, as the “beautiful” designees, are necessarily limited (in the most universal sense) and perhaps consequently more liable to experience boredom. Part of Mariana’s boredom, her sense of the emptiness of her existence, seems to stem from her being an object of beauty with no one to admire or gaze at her. With her primary “use”— embodying beauty — neglected, with no matrimony or courtship on the horizon (she has already cashed in her virginity), she has absolutely nothing to do. Immured in a moated grange

8

Introduction

that is only a very little removed from a nineteenth-century country house, the Victorian Mariana is at a loss, for any potential occupations or activities have been outlawed by conduct literature. Oxen low, moss overcomes the flower-plots, and the house is quite dusty and in disrepair, but still she sits, as she must keep her hands smooth and clean and her body attractively immobile. Like most Victorian women, Mariana is groomed to be an object of beauty more so than a creator of it; therefore, unlike the Lady of Shalott, Mariana does not have recourse to artistic production. Conduct literature decrees that Mariana must be passive, and therefore she merely watches and waits, vainly hoping for a visitor, for some sort of change in her solitude, rather than calling on anyone herself. She cannot even venture forth from her domicile to walk the desolate grounds, except in her dreams, for such adventuresome behavior is prevented by the cultural disapproval cultivated by the conduct books. In fact, the “clinking latch” is “unlifted,” indicating that she never leaves and no one else ever enters, a state of complete social stasis (6). Echoes of the measured ticks of the clock which torment Mariana with their slow inevitability can be heard in countless Victorian drawing rooms and boudoirs by innumerable Victorian women, meting out the duration of their boredom. But while Tennyson’s “Mariana” paints a portrait of bored Victorian womanhood, the Victorian novel often presents another, more active and productive dimension of boredom. What mid- to late-nineteenth-century poems concerned with boredom, such as Tennyson’s “The Lotus-Eaters” and “Mariana in the South” and Christina Rossetti’s “In an Artist’s Studio,” seem unable to envision fully is what goes on inside the bored individual’s mind, the experience of boredom. Is boredom, as these examples might indicate, merely a blank, a sheet of white paper discontentedly remaining uninscribed, or a black hole, greedily devouring thought and inspiration? Or is boredom something more, a presence rather than a lack, a superfluity rather than a paucity, a germ of an idea instead of a nullity? Perhaps these questions remain unanswered by Victorian poetry because only the novel can offer the temporal form in which boredom can fully demonstrate its operations. Boredom is in itself an expression of time, and therefore it only makes sense that a narrative (and one with the possibility of hundreds upon hundreds of pages at that) which unfolds over a period of time might best investigate the psychological state’s true nature and function. The Victorian novel, then, is uniquely qualified to explore boredom’s inner workings between its capacious covers. My study will focus on three texts that span the mid- to very-late-nineteenth century — Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72), and Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881)— and

Introduction

9

I shall investigate, through them, how boredom resonates both structurally and culturally in the Victorian novel. I shall posit expanded definitions of boredom and argue that Brontë, Eliot, and James plumb the depths of this psychological state, devoting successively more and more narrative space and consequence to it, and that they use boredom to interrogate beauty and undermine the stability and satisfactoriness of the standard marriage plot. Through the course of these novels, narrative action will move almost entirely from the conventional realm of physical, external events to a mental plane on which boredom generates more narrative than births, deaths, or engagements. I shall argue that boredom is not merely a casual characteristic of these Victorian novels but instead a defining feature, the medium through which these innovative authors most truly manifest their new ideas about fiction and society.

Defining Boredom(s) With the exception of Patricia Meyer Spacks’s Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (1995), very little work has been done combining the study of boredom with the study of literature. Spacks sees boredom — from the eighteenth century to the present — as an ever-present and oft overlooked sociological barometer and as a spur to literary creativity6 and artistic change. Her work traces the usage of terms such as boredom and ennui,7 providing some sort of historical context for the concept. She suggests that boredom developed in the latter half of the eighteenth century8 in England as a result of the rise of individualism, and I will argue in my own project that what Spacks identifies as the “concomitant increase in personal sense of entitlement” is key to particular characters’ experiences of boredom (23). Not restricting her study to literature proper, Spacks discusses letters, magazine and newspaper articles, conduct books, advertisements, and comic strips, as well as novels such as Sense and Sensibility, Vanity Fair, Daniel Deronda, and Villette. Ultimately, though, she argues that boredom has validity as a literary analytical category and effectively (while not exclusively) associates it with the genre of the novel. When analyzing Victorian literary texts, she focuses on what she considers the polarity of interest and boredom, defining boredom as a lack, a negative state “antithetical to energy and desire, to all forces of action” (24). She asserts that boredom is, by its nature, in “opposition to the activity of literary invention, as to all other activity.” Spacks posits that boredom is also in opposition to the furtherance of the plot, in fact to storytelling itself: she claims that “boredom defies narration” and that “female boredom provides limited narrative resources” (61, 69).

10

Introduction

Spacks’s analysis of boredom’s emergence in both high and low culture is both thoughtful and sweeping, supplying important historical touchstones and generating evocative questions, but my study, while indebted to Spacks’s meticulous research, will spring from a radically different conception of boredom. Rather than her strict and, to my thinking, limiting opposition of interest and boredom, I suggest a triangulation of boredom and beauty and narrative which allows boredom a more central and important role in the content and structure of the mid- to late-nineteenth-century novel. Whereas Spacks perceives boredom as an almost malignant presence in a text, both as an impediment to narrative itself and a danger, within the world of the novel, for (particularly women) characters, I shall explore boredom’s ability to generate plot as well as its positive, freeing potential for (particularly women) characters. I shall argue that instead of always signifying a mental lack or moral misstep, boredom can and does manifest differently and quite often beneficially for characters in the novels under discussion, particularly in the context of marriage. My inspiration for this more expansive interpretation of boredom comes from Adam Phillips’s On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (1993), which is the most well-considered and psychologically grounded take I have discovered in this virtually unmined field. In his chapter “On Being Bored,” Phillips, a psychotherapist, asserts that boredom has or can have positive and analyzable content. He effectually opens the floor for discussion on this topic, proposing that rather than the paucity and psychological nonentity most assume, boredom actually can be open and fluid, a state of “suspended animation in which things are started and nothing begins, the mood of diffuse restlessness which contains that most absurd and paradoxical wish, the wish for a desire” (68). As I read him, Phillips actually postulates multiple boredoms, ranging from the positive explanation above to more negative definitions. To better distinguish between these boredoms, I have coined the terms “fluid (or productive) boredom” and “solid (or constructed) boredom.” Fluid boredom is a childlike, free-floating attention that will allow a character to determine her own mind, while solid boredom is, rather than an exploration, a construction to protect the individual (from her own desires or others’ actions). Among the many possible functions of boredom are the mourning of the disappointment of everyday life; a defense against waiting which is, at one remove, an acknowledgment of the possibility of a desire; the aforementioned state of suspended animation; and a disguise for less acceptable emotions, such as rage. In this project, I shall use the many formulations Phillips suggests to make valuable character judgments; in other words, I shall prove that bore-

Introduction

11

dom manifests itself in discrete forms for different characters, providing a key to deciphering personality and intention. How characters use boredom — whether as a blunt object with which to bludgeon others into submission and compliance, such as Gilbert Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady, or as a tool to self-discovery, such as Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch— seems an accurate index as to their classification as protagonist or antagonist as well as to their behavior in marriage. In fact, boredom, when used as a strategy of power, is always cast negatively in the novels in question, while when used as a meditative state with the potential for creativity, it is drawn as positive and even desirable. This positive incarnation, fluid boredom, is usually associated with the female characters, while the alternate form is more often (but not exclusively) linked to male characters. For instance, Jane Eyre’s fluid boredom enables her original if unsettling artistic endeavors and allows her to fix on a new career path, whereas Tertius Lydgate’s unproductive boredom stalls his ambitious work in anatomical research and Gilbert Osmond’s aforementioned ennui begets nothing but misery. With their circumscribed sphere and diminished opportunity for activity, event, and achievement, Victorian women perhaps have more justification in being bored than their male counterparts, who are always supposed to have something to do, and this may explain in part the generally consistent gender lines between the types of boredom.

Boredom and Narrative Phillips’ assertion that boredom is a much more complex state than merely having nothing to do paves the way for my claim that the relationship between that psychological state and narrative is symbiotic and not, as Spacks asserts, antithetical. I posit that boredom generates rather than stymies narrative in the Victorian novel, and throughout my study I will rely on D. A. Miller’s insightful explanation of narrative form and function to supply the theoretical framework and key terms for that strand of my argument. In Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (1981), Miller proposes traditional narrative as a quest after that which will end questing, an interruption of what will be resumed, an expansion of what will be condensed, a distortion of what will be made straight. He describes what will generate a story as the “narratable” and defines the “nonnarratable” as what will not generate a story, such as the state of quiescence assumed by the novel before the beginning and supposedly recovered by it at the end. Boredom would seem, intuitively, to be nonnarratable since it is commonly perceived as a state in which nothing happens,

12

Introduction

in which meaningful activity is suspended, but I shall illustrate that in Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, and The Portrait of a Lady it is, instead, most definitely narratable. In Jane Eyre, Jane’s boredom creates the rhythm of the narrative: an unsatisfying situation summons a spell of boredom; next, the experience of boredom impels her to initiate dramatic action to find a new situation; then, the newfound situation grows stale and wearisome, and so the cycle continues. Not only does Jane’s boredom act as a narrative catalyst, spurring her dramatically to flee Gateshead, Lowood, Thornfield, and Moor House once she determines her role (or proposed role) at each place is boring and limiting, but it is itself extremely narratable, because during her experiences of boredom, Jane often has epiphanies, such as her realization early in the novel that, as an unattractive and portionless orphan, she will never be appreciated or even tolerated at Gateshead. The moments of discovery facilitated by Jane’s boredoms often expose the vast distance between Jane’s perception of her worth or expectations and other characters’ assessments of her place in a society shaped by conduct-book ideology and Burkean aesthetics. Jane’s boredoms are thus a critique of the limited options Victorian women are offered, and her consequent actions are a direct attempt to find a role beyond the confines of the ladylike and the beautiful. In other words, the narrative of Jane Eyre is itself an account of a reaction to the boredom that stems from nineteenth-century ideals of beauty. In Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke’s boredom signals, like Jane’s, a frustration with the status quo for women. Also like Jane’s, it allows for self-discovery and spurs Dorothea to take decisive action. However, the relationship between boredom and narrative grows more intimate in Eliot’s novel: instead of functioning largely as a response to boredom as in Jane Eyre, the narrative in Middlemarch seems equally as concerned with relating and detailing the experience of the boredom itself. The balance of Eliot’s narrative shifts, then, to make the psychological state of comparable importance to the more traditional action of the plot. Dorothea finds her single life at her uncle’s estate limited and boring, because as a beautiful and wealthy woman she never can accomplish as much social good on as large a scale as she would like. Her reaction to this realization of ineffectualness is not to dash penniless across the moors or even to completely defy societal mores: she marries, perhaps not the man her friends would have chosen, but someone rather acceptable overall. Dorothea’s two major acts in the novel are marrying, and much more of the narrative is devoted to her boredom during and after the first marriage than to that which would have seemed more eventful and narratable. In Eliot’s novel, then, boredom is itself the substance of the plot at least as often as it kick-starts more traditional narrative action.

Introduction

13

Boredom’s presence looms yet larger in The Portrait of a Lady, supplying an even more substantial part of the narrative than in Middlemarch. In the pattern now familiar from Jane Eyre, Isabel Archer’s boredoms spur her to leave America under her eccentric Aunt Lydia’s wing, to refuse marriage proposals, to accept a marriage proposal, and to journey to England from Rome, thus making a temporary separation from her husband. The rhythm of this narrative pattern is differently syncopated, though, because the greater emphasis by far is on the periods of boredom between the actions. Isabel’s fluid boredoms not only facilitate moments of realization and inspiration but also offer her the only real freedom she can savor in her marriage to Gilbert Osmond. The beautiful Isabel is operated upon by other characters’ boredoms, most detrimentally by Osmond’s and Madame Merle’s. Osmond, the aesthete, and Madame Merle, the professional social parasite, are motivated by their solid, destructive boredoms to set a marriage trap for the wealthy Isabel, and it is Osmond’s persistent display of this negating boredom that makes Isabel’s married life so suffocating. Thus, in The Portrait of a Lady as well as Middlemarch and Jane Eyre, boredom, often considered a lack or paucity, really can and does generate a narrative, and it is this seeming paradox that enables my investigations. I shall argue that for all three of the heroines, boredom registers the distance between the ideal and the real, the wished for and the lived, the unconventional and the conduct-book prescribed.9 I propose that if boredom encourages narrative and narrative must cease for closure to occur, then it stands to reason that boredom must be eliminated by the convergence of the ideal and the real. Miller notes that marriage is one of the most favored methods of ending a narrative or achieving the state of quiescence/narrative closure in the nineteenth-century novel, and this being the case, marriage should, by my formulation, equal the ascending of the real to the ideal and the subsequent purging of boredom. However, I shall analyze how unsatisfactorily — in terms of achieving nonnarratability — the marriage plot performs in Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, and The Portrait of a Lady. Because boredom is often both the spur to and result of marriage in these texts, the very narratability of the psychological state has direct ramifications for the effectiveness of marriage as a closural device. Brontë’s narrative ends when Jane stops needing to flee boredom because she has achieved her ideal, a marriage of equals that is certainly not conventional, but Eliot’s story continues far past Dorothea’s first marriage and ends only with her second. Dorothea’s boredom is marked during and after her marriage to Mr. Casaubon, an attempt at the ideal that fails miserably, but it is abruptly banished on her engagement to her second husband, Will Ladislaw, even though there is only a pretense of the real finally matching the ideal.

14

Introduction

James’s narrative continues for many chapters beyond Isabel’s only marriage, and it is generated primarily by her boredom. The Portrait of a Lady has a notoriously indefinite (and non-closural) ending, and this stems largely from the persistence of Isabel’s boredom, a result of James’s sustained denial of a convergence of real and ideal. Boredom’s increasing importance for the narrative in Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, and The Portrait of a Lady suggests a movement away from the conventions of the traditional novel, not only in this threatened insufficiency of marriage as closure but in the replacing of physical action with mental action. I shall posit that it is no coincidence that these changes occur in narratives about women,10 because it is Victorian women, not men, who were to be defined by marriage, and it is for Victorian women that the physical, the active, and the public were off-limits. After all of her traditionally narratable travels and physical trials, Jane Eyre finds happiness and equality (and Jane Eyre finds closure) in an innovative marriage based on a mental and spiritual kinship rather than the beauty of her face or body. Dorothea Brooke’s first marriage throws her into an environment where fluid boredom, the plane of the mental, is quite truly the only place she can be active or free, whereas her second marriage, a plunge into the physical, supposedly whisks her boredom away. The sudden absence of Dorothea’s mental activity renders suspect the sufficiency of her marriage to Will to either grant her happiness or create closure. Isabel Archer finds her boredom to be her only respite from her husband’s insistence on her blank physicality, her existing as primarily an art object. She can only escape or mitigate the complete physical stasis he enforces through the vehicle of her mental activity, and James emphasizes this shift to the mental by merely eliding such major physical events as her giving birth and the subsequent death of her son. Given the strictures and limitations of Victorian womanhood, the plane of the mental is perhaps the only terrain into which female characters can venture forth and explore without encountering interference, ostracism, and recriminations.

Beyond the Moated Grange Confined to the moated grange, Tennyson’s Mariana is a Victorian woman unable to find comfort, freedom, or any source of interest on even the mental plane. As a (we can safely project) beautiful and apparently unskilled woman, she is relegated to the sphere of the inert and fairly insignificant; thus, she is even more likely to experience boredom, especially in a situation where her beauty has no value whatsoever. Through the

Introduction

15

lens of Phillips’s definitions of boredom, it becomes possible to interpret her unproductive, dreary weariness as a defense against waiting, one step removed from an acknowledgement of the possibility of a desire, in this case her sexual (and domestic) desire11 for Angelo. This desire would fly in the face of morality and pride, which is why it needs to be disguised behind a façade of strongly fortified boredom. It is the sexual element that defines Shakespeare’s Mariana, but in this Victorian Mariana sexuality is muffled and muted — it cannot survive in the poem’s static environment. She is waiting and hoping for marriage and conceivably for further sexual experience; her boredom is with a life lived alone and unmarried. Mariana’s boredom, as depicted by Tennyson, could, in the space outside and beyond his poem, impel and empower her to take action, to end her inertia, to leave this nonnarratable stasis for traditional physical action. Within the poem, however, and without the benefit of recourse to Shakespeare’s narrative/plot, Mariana’s boredom does none of these things— it is, instead, something more akin to the paucity of intellect and desire and brake to the narrative Spacks outlines. When narrative is taken out of the equation, boredom begins to appear a cardboard cut-out again, something one-dimensional and incapable of psychological depth. For the Victorian novel, though, boredom is invigorating, not stultifying. Tennyson’s Mariana’s boredom is a defense, a static construction, but in novels, where boredom can be played out more fully, it can provide the only freedom a Victorian woman can experience and thus furnish a strategy of liberation. My study shall chart the success of the attempts to accomplish this escape-via-boredom in Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, and The Portrait of a Lady. In these texts, boredom is both multifaceted and multifunctional. I suggest that through the vehicle of boredom, Brontë, Eliot, and James interrogate female beauty and its usual result, marriage, ultimately determining that this causal relationship is unsatisfying and insufficient but yet still unavoidable. In other words, boredom may well prove to be the decisive element that destabilizes the happy ending, the decisive conclusion, the sense of closure supposedly native to the nineteenth-century novel.

Notes 1. Almost every stanza emphasizes the time of day or night in which it occurs, but the relationship of the stanzas to each other muddles any clear idea of relational time: in sequence, Tennyson moves from day, to evening, to the middle of the night, to day, to night, to day, to late afternoon. 2. This is almost pictorial boredom, for Tennyson crafts a beautiful word picture of

16

Introduction

Mariana’s unrelenting weariness and the grange’s physical stasis without really allowing the reader inside Mariana’s head, making this the verbal equivalent of a Pre-Raphaelite painting. 3. Scarry’s publication, On Beauty and Being Just (1999), is first and foremost an attempt to reclaim beauty as a viable and valid arena of literary criticism. She refutes conflicting claims for beauty’s banishment and defamation, arguing that beauty is in fact related to truth and fairness. It is her look back to what she considers the first blow to beauty’s credibility, Kant’s and Burke’s aesthetic categories, that proves most useful for my study, however. 4. Arthur Schopenhauer could provide a different way to think about how boredom’s potentially positive content is associated in the Victorian novel with women and beauty, where woman, as aesthetic object, can translate boredom into a respite for desire. In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer articulates his idea that the will, which we could understand as constant desire, is the essence of human nature. This will reigns supreme, with even the intellect subordinate. The human condition, then, is a negative one overall to Schopenhauer, with only a transitory cessation in desiring/willing when one desire is fulfilled before another one replaces it. Boredom can also result during this time of stasis, because the pleasure or relief at the fulfilling of the desire has been overestimated and is insufficient. Schopenhauer posits that through aesthetic experience we might be able to occasionally escape this seemingly endless cycle of fruitless desiring, the primacy of the will. Schopenhauer thus suggests that perceiving beauty can help individuals make the leap, for a moment, to a position of personal disinterestedness and unaffected contemplation. 5. Not only are the beautiful women characters in these texts often profoundly bored, but in fact they are considered by observers to be at the height of loveliness when engaged most fully in boredom. Consider Dorothea in the Hall of Statues: she is experiencing boredom and Will Ladislaw and the artist Naumann are rhapsodizing over her unbelievable beauty. 6. Spacks claims that it is the “need to refute boredom’s deadening power” which drives both composition and reading (1; emphasis mine). Her argument that writing and reading are activities naturally resistant to boredom does not allow for any positive or productive definitions or manifestations of boredom, however. 7. Boredom and ennui are distinguishable, Spacks suggests, by the importance the sufferer grants his or her condition. Ennui, with its suggestion of long-term dissatisfaction and indifference, smacks more of grandeur than boredom, which might be the “trivial emotion” of a moment (13). 8. Spacks notes that Horace’s satire “The Bore” (Satire 1.9) is not evidence of awareness of boredom in classical times, as it was assigned that title in the twentieth century (8). 9. It is the aesthetically and culturally inscribed ideas of beauty that are largely responsible for the disparity between real and ideal options for Victorian women and therefore for their boredoms. Jane Eyre, as a plain Jane, is by most contemporary standards slated for a life a drudgery and spinsterhood, not marriage, while Dorothea Brooke and Isabel Archer, as amazingly beautiful women, are considered fit only for marriage. All three characters recognize beauty’s limitations and circumscribed sphere, its insistence on stasis and boredom, and all three hunger for some larger role and expanded options. 10. Nancy Armstrong’s thesis in Desire and Domestic Fiction may help explain why this shift to the mental occurs in novels centered on women: she proposes the feminine as the locus of subjectivity, positing that “a modern, gendered form of subjectivity developed first as a feminine discourse in certain literature for women before it provided the semiotic of nineteenth century poetry and psychological theory” (14). 11. In stanza five, Mariana sees the shadow of the sole (poplar) tree cross her bed in the dead of night. This is followed a scant two lines later by her sigh that “he [Angelo]

Introduction

17

cometh not” (58). Mariana’s sexual desire for Angelo, her despoiler, is lurking just beneath the surface, but it must remain unexpressed and screened by boredom because it is unfeminine or, more appropriately, unladylike. However, the absent sexual component is not the most miserable part of her exile, because it is not the nighttime but the afternoon “most she loathed” (77): it is the interminable nature of her pointless waiting.

This page intentionally left blank

1

Avoiding the Boring: Boredom, Beauty, and Narrative in Jane Eyre When Jane Eyre is summoned as an adult to Gateshead by her dying aunt, she encounters two of the cousins who helped make her childhood so miserable, Eliza and Georgiana Reed (her primary tormentor, their brother John, is, happily, dead). Whereas in the novel’s opening pages Georgiana and Eliza both were, unlike Jane, “dressed out in thin muslin frocks and scarlet sashes, with hair elaborately ringletted” (23), by this point in volume two, the sisters have lost any superficial physical similarities from their childhoods: Georgiana is “a full-blown, very plump damsel, fair as wax-work; with handsome and regular features, languishing blue eyes, and ringleted yellow hair,” while Eliza is “very thin … with a sallow face and severe mien” (200). They have become not just women but types; in fact, they represent the two options for women in the world of this novel — the useless, beautiful, marriageable woman and the useful, unbeautiful spinster. In the course of this mid-novel reunion with her cousins, Jane finds that the beautiful Georgiana’s daily activities, removed from the social milieu of the city, revolve around chattering nonsense to her canary bird by the hour, relating her courtship adventures to anyone who will listen, alternately napping and reading novels, and “lying on the sofa, fretting about the dulness [sic] of the house” (206). The “colourless” and “ascetic” Eliza, on the other hand, would not stoop to such useless and frivolous displays of inactivity (200), and she prescribes a harsh remedy for her sister’s “indolence and complaints” (206): devise a system which will make you independent of all efforts, and all wills, but your own…. Take one day; share it into sections; to each section apportion its task: leave no stray unemployed quarters of an hour, ten minutes, five minutes … the day will close almost before you are aware it has begun; and you are indebted to no one for helping you to get rid of one vacant moment [207].

Eliza criticizes her sister (and, by extension, Jane), pronouncing that “exis19

20

Beautiful Boredom

tence for you must be a scene of continual change and excitement, or else the world is a dungeon … you must be admired, you must be courted, you must be flattered … or you languish, you die away” (207; emphasis mine). Eliza claims to find the antidote to this particularly feminine languishing in the strict schedule she both follows and promotes. Of course, Eliza’s assessment of her sister’s condition is only half-right, because Georgiana’s routine, while one of beauty rather than plainness, is still a routine; the opposition between the two sisters, then, is ultimately a false one, as both of their routines lead to boredom. Through Georgiana and Eliza, Brontë presents us (and Jane) with two distilled responses to boredom that both strangely overlap with and clarify Jane’s own reaction. Georgiana has what Jane lacks—considerable conventional beauty, a name, and at least a little money — yet she, like Jane at Lowood and early in her tenure at Thornfield, is haunted by a loathing of dullness and routine. Her response, however, is not actively and consciously to change her situation, as Jane will, but rather to complain and be idle. Eliza, who has no claim to good looks and little hope for a good match, has forsaken society and its conventions of beauty and dress in favor of a selfimposed, semi-monastic, rigorous daily routine. Eliza is busy and seemingly useful without producing anything, spending predetermined periods of time on tasks such as studying the Common Prayerbook, stitching a border on an altar cloth, and regulating accounts. Ostensibly to avoid boredom as well as the frivolity she considers inherent to a social system she has no great place in, she adheres to her schedule with “rigid regularity” (207). She plans to take the next logical step — joining a nunnery, that most old-maidish of communities. Unlike Jane, who repeatedly endeavors to escape boredom by seeking unknown change and unpredictable newness, Eliza merely tries to bury the notion that she actually is bored beneath a mountain of busywork. Eliza and Georgiana are thus merely emblematic of the only socially accepted and prescribed options for women at the time: beauty, accomplishments, and marriage or plainness, utility, and spinsterhood. By opposing Jane to them from the very beginning of the novel,1 Brontë indicates that neither of the courses for women that Georgiana and Eliza come to represent will be fully acceptable or palatable to her heroine. Jane flirts with each possibility throughout the course of the novel (e.g., her first engagement to Mr. Rochester and her stints teaching school, respectively), but she ultimately attempts to create a third option, one in which she can reject both the binaries of beautiful or useful, married or spinsterish which underlie the two usual courses and the boredom she recognizes as the destination of either path. Brontë’s point, then, in reintroducing the Reed sisters as examples of the two usual courses for women seems to be that only Jane’s

Avoiding the Boring

21

approach can truly alleviate boredom, as Eliza’s and Georgiana’s each lead to boredom and confinement.2 While the Reed sisters find nothing but more boredom at every fork in their own paths, Jane hopes to discover excitement and mental action in her explorations of the uncharted wilderness in between. Through the examples of Eliza and Georgiana, Brontë is able to establish a hierarchy of activity in the world of the novel, where pleasing mental activity, epitomized by Jane and Mr. Rochester’s conversations, is the ideal; regular physical activity and industry/industriousness, such as Jane’s duties at the Morton school and her cousin Eliza Reed’s daily schedule, lodge at the middle tier; and indolence and beauty, indicative of physical and intellectual vacuity (linked to both that which is bored and that which inspires boredom) as seen in the examples of Georgiana Reed and Blanche Ingram, register as least desirable and most assiduously to be avoided. Boredom is the common lot of all the women who inhabit the world of the novel, whether they are striking and extremely accomplished, like Blanche, or plain, plodding, and pseudo-productive, like Eliza. Jane’s quest for that which is not boring — mental action — is continually complicated by the prevalence of only two possible roles for women (epitomized by Georgiana and Eliza), one of which seems impossible for Jane and both of which are boring to her: the beautiful woman, who is an inactive objet d’art, and the unbeautiful woman, who is expected to live a life of dreary utility. Both of the paths designated for women are less than exciting and necessarily inferior: to be beautiful, as defined by the leading aestheticians and cultural ideologues of the day, entails being small, weak, and pleasing, while to be useful, as delineated and promulgated by conduct-book writers, requires self-sacrifice, subservience to others, and almost ceaseless physical activity, and it is only by continuously rejecting these that Jane can escape boredom.

Social and Aesthetic Contexts To understand why Brontë establishes this opposition, we must turn briefly to the definitions and theories of beauty and utility which were commonplace by the time Brontë composed the novel. By consulting conduct books and texts concerned primarily with aesthetic theory, we can speculate about Brontë’s reasons and practice in setting up oppositions between surface value and underlying substance and between physical toil/industry and mental activity. The seminal text for this discussion must be Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), which by the mid-nineteenth century had become the

22

Beautiful Boredom

gold standard of aesthetic theory, the one which any writer or theorist who wished to be taken seriously must agree with or dispute, and the one which clearly informed (even if uncredited) popular valuations of attractiveness. Burke wrote the Enquiry because he was troubled “that the ideas of the sublime and beautiful were frequently confounded; and that both were indiscriminately applied to things greatly differing, and sometimes of natures directly opposite” (1), and it is to end this instability and confusion, this “abuse” of both terms, that he defines them in terms of opposition, as antonyms of a sort. Beauty, according to Burke, with its requisite smoothness, regularity, gentle shadings, and smallness, is closely aligned with attraction and romantic attachments: “Love,” Burke writes, is “that satisfaction which arises to the mind upon contemplating any thing beautiful” (83), and it is “personal beauty” which makes men “attached” to particular members of the opposite sex (39). Burke privileges “smallness” as quite often “the real cause of beauty” because “we submit to what we admire, but we love what submits to us; in one case we are forced, in the other we are flattered into compliance” (102). Smoothness, gradual variation of line, variegation of color, and delicacy are also key components of beauty, and these characteristics can perhaps best be found in women, where they may prove intoxicating for the male observer: Observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness; the softness, the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same; the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried [105].

The behavioral traits Burke associates with beauty are likewise associated with women (and couched in such language as to make them desirable): the beautiful, “softer” virtues of “easiness of temper, compassion, kindness and liberality” “engage our [meaning men’s] hearts” and “impress us with a sense of loveliness” (101). The beautiful “turn on reliefs, gratifications, and indulgences; and are therefore more lovely, though inferior in dignity” to those (men) who possess more sublime virtues, such as “fortitude, justice, wisdom, and the like,” which inspire fear, not love. The terror, obscurity, power, darkness, solitude, silence, vastness or “greatness of dimension” (66), and “dark and gloomy” colors (75) characteristic of Burke’s sublime are, as a result of the association of their contrasting terms with the female/feminine, intuitively or implicitly male/masculine. Burke in effect twins the beautiful with the female and feminine, and the sublime with the male and masculine. William Thompson, in An Enquiry into the Elementary Principles of

Avoiding the Boring

23

Beauty in the Works of Nature and Art (1798), finds Burke the only aesthetic theorist to come close to determining the principles of perfect beauty (prior to Thompson himself, of course), and, like Burke, he closely aligns the beautiful with the feminine. Thompson agrees wholeheartedly with Burke’s prioritization of smoothness, judging that “Smoothness is, except Proportion, the most indispensably necessary to [beauty]; its power is highly fascinating and pleasing” (179). He builds upon the earlier writer’s notions by applying Burke’s idea of beauty to women in much more detailed and prescriptive ways, delineating its exact form: we behold in a beautiful female figure the admirable beauty of form increased by the double cone … the general colour, a bright whiteness tinged with a faint tender purplish red … the small of the neck a beautiful white, tinged with a tender turkoise blue…. The forehead should be narrow; a smooth, gently continued convex to the part where the hair joins the temples, which ought of be full, smooth, and round, without any sudden depressure or rising of the bone in those parts [176–79, 190–91].

Thompson mandates hair and eye color —flaxen and sapphire blue, respectively — and the shape of the eyebrows, nose, mouth, chin, neck, and breasts. He notes that “a defective or unpleasing nose” can never be overcome, and that “nothing more injures Beauty, as all hard edges, sharp angles, and every thing pointed destroys it” (201, 195). Although more specific as to details than Burke, Thompson does perpetuate the same basic notions of what comprises beauty (and, interestingly, has broken it down into an almost mathematical formula) and femininity. Georgiana Reed, with her smoothly rounding body, softly curling flaxen ringlets, delicate gradations of color, and fixation with securing men’s admiration and interest, epitomizes the “beautiful” category, as designated by Thompson, Burke, and other aesthetic theorists of the day. Burke and Thompson appear to indicate that possessing beauty would seem the only acceptable mark for young women to follow the Georgiana course (i.e., marriage), but implicit (and sometimes explicit) in the texts of many contemporary conduct-book writers is the idea that virtue, duty, and utility will make their possessor “most amiable” and attractive (ergo, marriageable) in her own right (Gregory 8): James Fordyce writes, in his Sermons to Young Women (1767), that “a good complexion and fine shape are, no doubt, engaging. A graceful mien and lovely features are yet more so. But as the greatest beauty soon fades, and at last vanishes,” it is important to be “a truly pious woman, one who is governed throughout by a sense of duty” (222; emphasis mine).3 Conduct books and avowedly “aesthetic” texts, such as Burke’s and Thompson’s Enquiries, both offer a cultural grounding for definitions of beauty, but in the domestic manuals a much greater

24

Beautiful Boredom

emphasis is placed upon this concept of utility. In other words, even while strenuously advocating personal utility as an added or supplementary beauty, conduct book writers assume and promote the same characteristics and elements of loveliness as the aestheticians.4 Popular conduct-book authors Fordyce, John Gregory, Thomas Gisborne, Mary Astell, and Sarah Stickney Ellis are often quite directive, explaining that women need occupations (in the domestic sense) and should cultivate at least the appearance of usefulness, even if there is no product to show for their labors. Fordyce recommends emulating the models set forth in the Bible, women who “did not waste their lives in a round of dissipation and impertinence, but employed them in works of ingenuity and usefulness” (224; emphasis mine). Some prime venues for this utility are the “domestic accomplishments,” including plying a needle, writing “a fair hand,” keeping household accounts, and monitoring the servants (232). The domestic arts should be studied, Fordyce urges, because their study will be “useful,” as it “not only becomes your sex, but will employ your minds innocently, and virtuously, at hours which you might be tempted to spend in a very different manner.” Most importantly, whereas the subject is not too mentally challenging, it “will take up some time” and thus possibly stave off boredom, or at least the sometimes destructive solid kind. While clearly recognizing that time can hang heavy for women of a certain class, Fordyce challenges his readers to call these “useful” employments “trivial or dull,” labeling those who find them so at “fault,” and deeming this dissatisfaction and admission of boredom “a mark of — but I forbear” (233). Any expression of boredom or unhappiness with this circumscribed sphere of action (which Fordyce believes furnishes “ample scope for the exercise of your faculties”) thus indicates something unspeakable, at least to a mild-mannered minister: a tendency in the young woman/reader toward the willful self-importance and self-indulgence that is on the crest of the slippery slope down to dishonor and prostitution (233).5 Dr. John Gregory, in A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (1774), provides perhaps a gentler echo of Fordyce’s advice, urging his daughters to learn “needle-work, knitting, and such like,” not just because “of the intrinsic value of all you can do with your hands, which is trifling, but to enable you to judge more perfectly of that kind of work, and to direct the execution of others” (51). Aside from this practical, useful purpose, in which no household manager should be untrained, there is “another principal end … [which is] to enable you to fill up, in an tolerably agreeable way, some of the many solitary hours you must necessarily pass at home” (52). Gregory’s words to his daughters are very nearly the same as Eliza Reed’s scathing advice to her sister: he writes “It is a great article in the hap-

Avoiding the Boring

25

piness of life, to have your pleasures as independent of others as possible.” In setting and adhering to a strict schedule, Eliza both avoids what Gregory cautions against —“gadding abroad in search of amusement”— and employs the system Fordyce suggests, which the minister believes is so beautifully illustrated by Bible verses and Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–48). Fordyce praises Richardson as one of the few authors of the “first rank,” and claims women are “under singular obligations for his [Richardson’s] uncommon attention to their best interests,” because through Clarissa, the novelist has presented “the most exalted standard of female excellence that was ever held up to their imitation” (147; emphasis mine). Fordyce finds Clarissa’s habits of duty and utility — which the reader of the novel discovers involve three hours daily for praying and reading pious books, two for domestic management, five for needlework, drawing, and music, eight for assorted other tasks, and only six for rest — in “no way impracticable for any woman who is ambitious of excelling” (148). Eliza follows the letter of this plan, yet she does not manage to exude what Fordyce describes as Clarissa’s “beauty … sweetness … [and] artlessness” (147). If, according to the implications of popular conduct books, a consequent attractiveness which transcends physical beauty is supposed to be one of utility’s major appeals, then Eliza seems to be missing a step somewhere. Perhaps, though, she is merely proving that the true point of the much vaunted feminine utility is to kill time and to attempt to avoid awareness of boredom, and that the inner-beauty byproduct so touted by the domestic ideologues is merely a marketing strategy. Killing time, in fact, is the sole subject of an entire chapter in Thomas Gisborne’s An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797). In “The Employment of Time,” he disputes that young women can claim to “have nothing to do” and propounds that “to occupy the mind with useful employments is among the best methods of guarding it from surrendering itself to dissipation” (210; emphasis mine). Gisborne’s rejection of female boredom seems all-inclusive: he would likely consider fluid boredom, which might enable the young woman to discover her true feelings about her position or sphere, perhaps even more dangerous than the distasteful because sometimes sullen solid boredom.6 Gisborne suggests that regularly engaging in “useful” duties and activities will engender a real taste and love for tasks such as “regularly allotting to improving7 books a portion of each day … at stated hours” (212–213), committing poetry to memory, discharging “relative duties,” relieving a parent “in the superintendence of family affairs,” and promoting “useful institutions” in the neighborhood (220). While Georgiana Reed systematically shirks all these “useful employments,” surrendering herself to dissipation by falling asleep over unsuitable novels, spending

26

Beautiful Boredom

“about five minutes each day in her mother’s sick-room and no more,” and evincing interest only in herself, not the surrounding community or even her family (206), Gisborne’s ideal young woman would, more like Eliza, never allow herself to have an idle minute, or certainly would never admit to it, for such an admission would indicate a lamentable moral weakness. In The Daughters of England: Their Position in Society, Character and Responsibilities (1842), Sarah Stickney Ellis, in the same vein as Gisborne and many others of her manual-writing predecessors, excoriates idleness and wasted time and proposes that understanding “properly” the “kind of duty required” of a young woman must be followed by performing theses duties promptly and habitually (8). “Mrs. Ellis” argues that “in order to make the best use of time, we must lay out beforehand the exact amount proportioned to every occupation in which we expect to engage” (29), because “we are never so capable of being useful to others, as when we have learned to economize our own time” (33; emphasis mine). A primary component of Ellis’ conception of utility, then, is the idea of selfless service, where being of use to parents, siblings, relatives, and the needy is of greatest importance. After educating her audience as to the proper sphere for their utility, Ellis expounds upon the importance of “domestic usefulness” (49), claiming that she herself has never “learned anything, even down to such a trifle as a new stitch, but I have found a use for it, and that in a surprisingly short space of time” (42). She criticizes young women like Georgiana who “might hastily turn away in contempt from” her advice concerning careful time management and patient application to domestic accomplishments (49), warning that waiting to be interested, or amused, by anything that may chance to happen … constitutes the great bane of a young woman’s life, and while dreaming on in this most unprofitable state, without any definite object of pursuit, their minds become the prey of a host of enemies, whose attack might have been warded off by a little wholesome and determined occupation. Their feelings, always too busy for their peace, become morbid, restless, and ungovernable … [29].

Ellis, who also wrote the wildly popular The Women of England (1839) and Family Secrets; or, Hints to Those Who Would Make Home Happy (1842), could almost be describing the adult Georgiana Reed at Gateshead, who summarily dismisses her sister’s suggested lifestyle of “rigid regularity” and seeming utility as merely the only recourse for someone so unbeautiful, who “dare[s] not show … [her] face” in the more rarefied circles of society. Georgiana has lost her “definite object of pursuit,” Lord Edwin Vere, and now is aggravated by the lack of opportunities for amusement at her family’s mournful home. Ellis apparently finds any manifestation of boredom, whether fluid (“dreaming on” with “restless” feelings) or solid, objection-

Avoiding the Boring

27

able and “unprofitable.” Jane would agree with Ellis that “waiting to be interested, or amused, by anything that may chance to happen” is indeed the “bane” of a young woman’s existence (29; emphasis mine), but, rather than consenting either to wait for happenstance or to fill her time with useful activities and strict but meaningless schedules, Jane again and again flees these two options in an attempt actively to make something interesting occur. However, short-term boredom can be profitable for Jane, because it is always the brief period of fluid boredom Jane experiences that allows her to fix on a new path. Mary Astell, in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest (1701), while seeming to recognize these two generally accepted options for women in her society, does attempt to offer a different choice, although couched in the language that became so familiar in the texts of the later ideologues of domesticity discussed above. Astell argues that women have a duty to employ their days usefully, writing that time should neither “be buried in Idleness, nor lavish’d out in unprofitable concerns … for a stated portion of it being daily paid to GOD in Prayers and Praises, the rest shall be imploy’d in innocent, charitable, and useful Business” (21). While Astell offers the same emphasis on duty as later writers, she specifically focuses on a divine direction for usefulness and responsibility. Astell appears to be theorizing a partial convergence of the two traditional paths or courses for women, beauty/marriage and plainness/utility, because her mission is to procure for women a fixed, “lasting and permanent” “Beauty,” which is, of course, of the “inward” kind (1), by using “Time, that mortal Enemy to handsome Faces” to improve the state of her readers’ souls (3). Astell hopes to gain this ultimate utility — usefulness to God — through a sort of educational monastery for women, however, while the writers who follow her, Fordyce, Gregory, Gisborne, and Ellis, purport to speak more to the domestic employment and utility of the real-world gentlewoman, she who must function on a country estate among the snares and attractions of society and the temptations of idleness and boredom. It seems patently clear, based on the brief survey above, that occupying women’s idle hours was a primary concern of conduct books. That these hours be spent usefully — i.e., in acceptable domestic or religious employments befitting the station and sphere of young ladies of a certain class— rather than occupied with amusements and entertainments is the burden of the ideologues’ familiar song. Although Fordyce, Gregory, Gisborne, Ellis, and, most convincingly, Astell, all make gestures toward the spiritual reward for utility, the dual purpose of this domestic busyness seems ultimately much more pragmatic to most of these conduct book writers: the young women’s appearing fit for marriage and motherhood and staving off disquieting bore-

28

Beautiful Boredom

dom. The utility described by most domestic ideologues is a treadmill, keeping women busy but not actually allowing them to progress. While Eliza Reed embraces this course of action (or rather course of meaningless activity), and Georgiana Reed derides it and instead claims the option open only to those endowed with beauty, Jane rejects both the boring routine of utility epitomized by Eliza and the equally boring and static life of the intellectually inactive (and usually beautiful) typified by Georgiana. Jane’s attempt to forge a new trail that veers away from the paths taken by Georgiana and Eliza and that breaks down this binary system of beautiful or plain, married or useful, to offer a viable alternative to stasis and boredom seems indebted to the ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft, especially those from her Vindications and her own foray into conduct literature, The Education of Daughters.8 In Romanticism and Gender, Ann Mellor explains that in the 1790s, Hannah More, Priscilla Wakefield, Catharine Macaulay, Mary Hays and Anne Frances Randall (Mary Robinson) all advocated extensive practical and intellectual reforms in the education and economic condition of women in England. But Wollstonecraft’s Vindication was the most favorably reviewed, widely read, and — despite the scandal surrounding Wollstonecraft’s death and the publication of Godwin’s Memoirs— lastingly influential feminist tract of the period [39].

Wollstonecraft’s The Education of Daughters (1787), her earlier and less famous attempt at a fairly straightforward conduct book, repeats some of the usual phrases and sentiments typically found in the genre, but at the same time manages to advance a few less conventional notions. She admonishes that “no employment of the mind is a sufficient excuse for neglecting domestic duties,” but adds that she “cannot conceive that they are incompatible” (56; emphasis mine). She hints toward the somewhat radical view of marriage she will expound upon in her later manifestos— the companionate union — while maintaining at least a fragment of the party line when she writes that “A woman may fit herself to be the companion and friend of a man of sense, and yet know how to take care of his family.” The utility implied in the ability to care adequately for a husband and family is referenced often in the text, with Wollstonecraft repeating as a sort of mantra slight variants of the phrase “the important [domestic] duties of a wife and mother” (58). Despite this nod to conventional wisdom about women’s roles, duties, and (limited) opportunity, she cannot refrain from opining, in the chapter entitled “Matrimony” no less, that “Reason must often be called in to fill up the vacuums of [a woman’s] life” (99; emphasis mine), a glancing but noticeable shot at the boredom seemingly inherent in the wife (i.e., Georgiana) role as socially construed at the time.

Avoiding the Boring

29

Wollstonecraft turns her readers’ attentions briefly toward the spinster option in this binary system, rebelling (if in a somewhat restrained fashion), in her chapter titled “The Unfortunate Situation of Females, Fashionably Educated, and Left without a Fortune,” against the few avenues possible for a female utility which could be truly productive, economically or otherwise: many who have been well, or at least fashionably educated, are left without a fortune, and if they are not entirely devoid of delicacy, they must frequently remain single…. Few are the modes of earning a subsistence, and those very humiliating…. Perhaps to be an humble companion … it is impossible to enumerate the many hours of anguish such a person must spend. She is alone, shut out from equality and confidence, and the concealed anxiety impairs her constitution; for she must wear a cheerful face, or be dismissed…. A teacher at a school is only a kind of upper servant, who has more work than the menial ones…. A governess to young ladies is equally disagreeable [69–72].

Wollstonecraft’s concerns parallel the experiences of Jane, who, whether at Lowood, Thornfield, or Morton, seems sadly fated for this “disagreeable,” “humble,” and lonely track of utility. In her later work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft sketches the two types of women which seem to be the result of the proliferation of conduct-book ideology: “fine ladies” and “patient drudge[s]” (142, 143). Georgiana Reed is a fine lady to the ends of her ringlets, in that she “has been taught to look down with contempt on the vulgar employments of life … she has only been incited to acquire accomplishments that rise a degree above sense … [and her] imagination … is heated” (144). The fine lady is “teeming with capricious fancies” (143),“occupied merely to please [men]” and content to “merely adorn the earth,” the mistress of her husband only while she has “any hold on their affections; and the platonic friends of his male acquaintance.” Wollstonecraft’s patient drudge, fleshed out in Brontë’s character Eliza Reed, is a “more useful member of society than the fine sentimental lady,” but she possesses “neither greatness of mind nor taste,” and “the intellectual world is shut against” her (143). The drudge “stand[s] still,” intellectually speaking, and she can only be loved in a limited fashion by “a man of sense” “on account of her sex” and respected by him only because “she is a trusty servant.” Husbands, Wollstonecraft explains, while acknowledging that these “notable women” are “good managers and chaste wives,” will desert the family hearth in search of “more agreeable … piquant society.” The household drudge, meanwhile, merely “fulfils her task, like a blind horse in a mill.” Wollstonecraft, and Brontë (via Jane) after her, is frustrated by these limited and necessarily boring roles, although Wollstonecraft resents it on behalf of capital-W Woman, whom she feels must be meant for “better pur-

30

Beautiful Boredom

pose,” “when her soul is capable of rising to” God, whereas Jane seems to reject it on a more personal level — what she finds perfectly acceptable for her cousins9 is not fulfilling enough for herself. In The Education of Daughters, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and A Vindication of the Rights of Men, the foundation of Wollstonecraft’s arguments is that men and women are put on earth to progress and to improve themselves, spiritually and intellectually, and in Jane Eyre, Brontë likewise insists upon progressive improvement for her heroine. “The capacity of improvement,” Wollstonecraft writes in Rights of Men, “gives us a natural sceptre on earth” (13). Neither Georgiana, the fine lady, nor Eliza, the drudge, improves in the ways Wollstonecraft (or Brontë) would like — by “cultivating their understandings” (RW 78), experiencing “sublime emotions” (82), or unfolding their talents “by industry” (RM 44). Instead, they remain in stasis, thus conforming to society’s plan but, according to Wollstonecraft’s philosophy, shirking what their creator has designated as humankind’s “whole duty” (RW 61). Wollstonecraft posits that “improveable reason has not yet discovered the perfection it may arrive at,” and her belief that humans have the potential and even duty to be unlimited and ever more God–like is greatly at odds with the popular conception of women’s spousal role, whether the wife be of the fine-lady or drudge variety. Not surprisingly, Wollstonecraft blames the stultifying two-option system on the theories of domesticity and beauty that we have seen permeating and promoted by conduct books and influential contemporary aesthetic texts. Wollstonecraft’s famous response to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France is also a reaction to his Enquiry, for in Rights of Men she attacks what she determines is his ideological mission: convincing women that “littleness and weakness are the very essence of beauty,” and that God, in giving women the greater share of beauty, is simultaneously mandating that they not “cultivate the moral virtues that might chance to excite respect, and interfere with the pleasing sensations they were created to inspire” (112; emphasis mine). By “thus confining truth, fortitude, and humanity, within the rigid pale of manly morals,” Wollstonecraft declares, men might justly argue “that to be loved, woman’s high end and great distinction! they should ‘learn to lisp, to totter in their walk, and nick-name God’s creatures.’” Wollstonecraft clearly recognizes a gender division in Burke’s aesthetic categories, through which he and his followers thereby exclude women from not only physical sublimity but emotional and moral sublimity as well. Burke’s sublime, which is based on obscurity, sharp, sudden angles, vastness, and isolation, is, as Anne Mellor and other recent critics argue, “distinctly, if unwittingly, gendered…. The sublime is associated with an experience of masculine empowerment; its contrasting term, the beautiful, is associated

Avoiding the Boring

31

with an experience of feminine nurturance, love and sensuous relaxation” (85). Similarly, Mary Poovey cogently argues that Wollstonecraft recognizes that women of her time are kept in their position of helplessness by just such masculine “authorities” as Edmund Burke — men who have nothing to lose by advocating obedience; men who, fearing their own weakness, try to institutionalize weakness in the challenger they can most easily control, women … the implication is that women are unwitting victims not only of Burke’s own psychological insecurity but, in a larger sense, of the insecurity of all men [62].

Therefore, whereas Wollstonecraft tries to advance the notion that “simplicity” is “the only criterion of the beautiful” (RM 5), she believes Burke and his acolytes have cunningly encouraged “artificial weakness” in women, which has “render[ed] them insignificant objects of desire” (RW 78). Women’s “strength and usefulness are sacrificed to beauty,” resulting in a “barren blooming” (RW 74), because for Wollstonecraft, physical beauty should always be subordinate (and seems often antithetical) to utility. Accordingly, she vaunts “prudent mothers and useful members of society” over “vain inconsiderate dolls” (RM 25), and she urges “how much more respectable” a woman is “who earns her own bread by fulfilling any duty, than the most accomplished beauty!” (RW 240). Wollstonecraft considers even utility subordinate to personal improvement, however, and this weighing of attributes clearly influences the hierarchy of activity Brontë establishes in Jane Eyre, where intellectual peers rank above “useful members of society” as well as “vain inconsiderate dolls.” Poovey has convincingly posited that the “general goal” of all conduct material was to provide “emulatable models” for “acceptable behavior, legitimate values, and even permissible thoughts” (xii), and while in Rights of Woman, as Poovey notes, Wollstonecraft holds Rousseau and conduct book writers Dr. Fordyce and Dr. Gregory most highly accountable for a “false system of [women’s] education, gathered from the books written on this subject by men who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than affectionate wives and rational mothers” (Poovey 70), it is apparent that the “false notions of beauty and delicacy” many conduct-book authors perpetuate were institutionalized by Burke. Rather than the fine ladies and patient drudges created by domestic and aesthetic ideologues’ quests for alluring, mistress-like wives and industrious, uncomplaining maiden aunts, Wollstonecraft hopes for rational women capable of self-improvement. To achieve a broadening of women’s roles, though, she believes there absolutely must be a revision of the spousal relationship. Marriage must be based on firmer stuff than the “short-lived

32

Beautiful Boredom

bloom of beauty” (RW 78)— rather than being educated primarily in the elegant accomplishments, which fits them only “for a seraglio” she argues (RW 77), women should be prepared to be “companions” (RW 260). Instead of being satisfied with dreaming “life away in the lap of pleasure, or the languor of weakness,” women should “pursue reasonable pleasures and render themselves conspicuous by practicing the virtues which dignify mankind” (RW 98). Because love, “from its very nature, must be transitory” and “friendship or indifference inevitably succeeds love” (100), it is in women’s best interest to attempt to befriend their husbands, especially as “the most holy band of society is friendship” (99). Wollstonecraft would not conjure passionate love to stay in the marriage state, because “in order to fulfill the duties of life, and to be able to pursue with vigour the various employments which form the moral character, a master and mistress of a family ought not to continue to love each other with passion,” as this single-mindedness would “disturb the order of society” (100). Wollstonecraft posits that friendship, which is “the most sublime of all affections, because it is founded on principle, and cemented by time,” cannot “subsist in the same bosom” with love — they can only “be felt in succession” (151). Wollstonecraft’s implicit point seems to be that love/lust relationships inevitably decline and degenerate, while friendships, alone among relationship types, can progress. Common interests and an ability to converse intelligently and rationally will aid in the formation of these friendships, and the rational and well-educated (in the Wollstonecraftian sense) woman would never lament the “natural death of love” or exchange friendship for the “lordly caresses of a protector” (RW 98). Jane shares with Wollstonecraft a recognition of the binary systems that appear to govern her world — women may be beautiful or useful (both types are boring), fine ladies or drudges, Georgianas or Elizas, married or spinsterish — as well as many aspirations and hopes for new possibilities for women and marriage. Wollstonecraft’s notion of marriage as passionless friendship is perhaps not so very different from what Jane and Rochester achieve by the end of the novel, where the sexually and culturally charged nature of his first proposed union, akin to the conventional seraglio scenario, has been purged. Marriages both purely dutiful (as offered by St. John Rivers) and solely sensual (as expected the first time by Rochester) promise boredom and stasis in Jane Eyre, because the result of either the utility option or the “beauty” possibility would be Jane’s subordination. The marriage relation Jane searches for possesses what Wollstonecraft outlines: friends/companions coexisting in an equal and almost symbiotic relationship. In the innovative relationship Jane ultimately shares with Mr. Rochester, stasis and utility will not be the inevitable result of repeating

Avoiding the Boring

33

vows: through her heroine, Brontë will revise marriage, boredom, and beauty to reflect new possibilities and hopeful options beyond the binary systems of beauty and utility, master and servant, boredom and excitement. Wollstonecraft’s idea of friendship, “the most sublime of all affections,” while clearly not the sole focus and goal of Jane’s many fresh starts, does seem to provide the key for both her dress-rehearsal relationships with Miss Temple, Helen Burns, and Mary and Diana Rivers and the revision of marriage she and Mr. Rochester finally share. (The difference in her relationship with her husband comes from its more dialectical nature than her same-sex friendships, not from the passion conventionally associated with marriage.) Friendship is inherently a non-hierarchical relationship, so for Jane it becomes a site for the breakdown of binaries of power, whether teacher/student, familied/orphaned, beautiful/sublime, or master/servant, and it is the ability to transcend these binaries that will lend her relationship with her husband a progressive rather than static quality. Although Jane often seems initially relegated to the undesirable part of these binaries, her ability to finally elude them perhaps relies on her being a nothing and a nobody, in terms of conventional aesthetics and social class— Jane Air. Jane falls into no Burkean aesthetic category: as someone small and powerless and plain, she resists either the sublime or the beautiful.10 That which is not beautiful is aligned against love, according to Burke’s definitions, and that which is not sublime is incapable of arousing fear or respect. Thus shut out of the conventional female and male provinces, Jane is forced (or rather freed) to redefine traditional aesthetics. Part of the momentum that keeps Jane from remaining in one place is a drive to find a person or community who shares her aesthetic: she, “poor, obscure, plain, and little,” has no positive place in societies structured around ideals of physical beauty/prettiness (222). Instead, her sole hope for a feeling of welcome and belonging is perhaps to discover others who privilege the unusual, the interesting, and the intellectually engaging, because the intellectual sublime is perhaps all a small, unbeautiful, powerless woman such as Jane can actually possess.11 For Jane, the sublime is the supernatural, the imaginative, the mental — and therefore women are allowed and equipped to partake in it.12 Thanks to both her aesthetic and social ambiguities, Jane is able to slip through almost invisible fissures in the seemingly rock-solid power and gender relationships in her society, exploring Wollstonecraft’s much-lauded friendship, a possibility outside the usual binaries. Terry Eagleton argues convincingly in “Class, Power, and Charlotte Brontë” that as a governess, Jane “is a servant, trapped within a rigid social function which demands industriousness, subservience and self-sacrifice; but she is also an ‘upper’

34

Beautiful Boredom

servant, and so (unlike, supposedly, other servants) furnished with an imaginative awareness and cultivated sensibility which are precisely her stockin-trade as a teacher” (226). In the beginning of the novel, at Gateshead, Jane first encounters the binaries she will grapple with for the rest of the novel, learning of her ambiguous/amorphous role in the household as a child who is neither an heir nor a servant, a beauty nor a particularly useful person. Jina Polita, in “Jane Eyre: Classified,” analyzes Jane’s place at Gateshead: Jane, as a girl and dependent orphan, lives her position of subordination, yet this position is fraught with ambiguity. For, like the petit-bourgeois, Jane cannot be placed in the slot of the working class, neither can she be considered part of her aunt’s class since she is propertyless and a dependant. Jane exists in marginality, and the space of this marginality is … embarrassing in relation to the class above…. Rejection occurs from below as well as from above: “No; you are less than a servant, for you do nothing for your keep,” says the maid Abbot [78].

She perplexes her aunt (and the rest of the family and servants) with her resistance to relegation: she cannot be appropriately pigeonholed in terms of power or utility. Her Reed relations certainly make their best efforts to force her into the powerless designation, however.

Jane’s Escapes from Boredom In the novel’s opening, young Jane finds the relentless abuse at Gateshead monotonous and seemingly without end, and she despairs of any way to “get away from Gateshead till [she is] a woman” (20). For almost all of her ten years, Jane has been accustomed to being ignored when she is lucky and punished for perceived faults and unnatural attitudes by both Mrs. Reed and her children when she is not as fortunate. After John throws Bewick’s History of British Birds13 at her, rather than “endure the blow” as she is “accustomed to,” Jane actually engages with him when he begins to manhandle her again (8). This newfound external resistance to her confining, unchanging situation crescendos as the day progresses and leads to Jane’s dramatic red-room episode, which acts as the impetus for Mrs. Reed’s consenting for her to be sent to school. As Jane serves her sentence in Uncle Reed’s bedroom, all of John Reed’s violent tyrannies, all his sisters’ proud indifference, all his mother’s aversion, all the servants’ partiality, turned up in my disturbed mind like a dark deposit in a turbid well. Why was I always suffering, always browbeaten, always accused, for ever condemned? Why could I never please? Why was it useless to try to win any one’s favour?… Georgiana … was universally indulged. Her

Avoiding the Boring

35

beauty, her pink cheeks and golden curls, seemed to give delight … and to purchase indemnity for every fault [11–12].

Her comprehension of the awful predictability of her life at Gateshead is emphasized by her refrain of “all” and “always,” and, as she sits in the gloomy chamber, she affirms to herself that her state of constant oppression (which is psychologically akin to non-productive, solid boredom) and persecution is “unjust!— Unjust!” (12). The “turbid” waters suddenly clear and she has something of an epiphany, realizing the unalterable cause of this inescapable, miserable mode of existence: “I was a discord in Gateshead Hall … like nobody there14; I had nothing in harmony with Mrs. Reed or her children” (12). They regard her, she determines, as a “noxious” and “heterogeneous thing” primarily because she is not a “sanguine, brilliant, careless, exacting, handsome, romping child” (12–13). Unlike the ringletted Georgiana, whom even the servants rate a “beauty” and “doat on,” with her “long curls and her blue eyes, and such a sweet colour … just as if she were painted” (22), Jane is called “a little toad” (21).15 Once Jane identifies the major reason for her ill-treatment — her lack of conventional beauty — she reasons that this can never change and thus she will “always” be subject to “all” the abuse the Reed family can heap upon her. Regardless of any attempts she might make, “from every enjoyment” she will, “of course, [be] excluded” (23). In what becomes a pattern for her life and thus the spring in the mechanism of the plot, Jane takes dramatic and immediate measures to escape the endless, boring days of oppression that stretch before her, making a “dreadful noise” which brings Bessie and Abbot running (14). Although Mrs. Reed interprets Jane’s red-room scream as the ploy of a “precocious actress,” it is Jane’s reaction to an overwhelming feeling of being “oppressed, suffocated,” the moment when her “endurance” of the cycle of boredom “broke down” (14). For the first but not last time in the novel, Jane experiences— and perhaps summons— the sublime to help her escape a trap of boredom and/or beauty. The site of her imprisonment, the red room, is deemed especially beautiful 16: it is “one of the largest and stateliest chambers in the mansion,” with mahogany furnishings, large windows, rich draperies, and a plush carpet. It is touched with the sublime and the supernatural, though, both in its massive proportions (the huge bed, piled high with glaring white mattresses and pillows, the throne-like white chair, etc.) and in its isolation and consequent potential for being haunted. Mr. Reed’s ghost —conjured by Jane’s imagination, Bessie’s stories,17 and strange reflections and lights— supplies what promises to be a long, drawnout punishment of sitting immobile on a chair with some much needed excitement, (mental) action, and suspense. Jane’s violent reaction to the

36

Beautiful Boredom

sublime is what will ultimately lead to the termination of her Gateshead boredom. After Jane’s “species of fit” subsides, she emerges with a new determination to speak her mind and leave off attempting to please, since that will effect no change in the monotony of abuse (15). She does not respond in the affirmative to Mr. Lloyd’s query about the beauty of Gateshead Hall, and when he asks her if she would like to go to school, she replies that she “should indeed,” although she “scarcely knew what school was” (20). While John Reed’s oft-voiced hatred and dislike of school acts as a ringing endorsement for Jane, her real motivation is based on the splendid notion that “school would be a complete change: it implied a long journey, an entire separation from Gateshead, an entrance into a new life” (21; emphasis mine). As a viable alternative to her narrow and unchanging/unchangeable life at the Reeds’, school seems the perfect answer, and, furthermore, she has heard accounts of accomplishments usually learned at school which would necessitate a much wider variety of occupations and opportunities for her, such as art, foreign language, and music lessons. In other words, Jane has hope that life at school will not be so tedious and tediously onerous as her time with the Reeds. Jane’s exit from Gateshead is as contrary to her daily boredom/routine as she could wish: she rises before anyone else awakes, clings to Bessie’s neck with atypical affection on both sides, and is abruptly18 “severed from Bessie and Gateshead” by the emphatic slapping of the coach door, to be “whirled away to unknown, and … remote and mysterious regions (35). Although the day seems “preternatural[ly]” long (35), concurrently it is one of her most exciting, since she passes through several towns and experiences the thrilling dread of being kidnapped (which has to seem much more of a possibility now that she is away from those who know that no ransom would be tendered by Mrs. Reed). After her disorienting first exposure to Lowood’s routines, Jane becomes cognizant of the appearance of the society she has entered, and it seems to potentially offer Jane the chance at homogeneity she was denied at Gateshead: the eighty girls sat motionless and erect: a quaint assemblage they appeared, all with plain locks combed from their faces, not a curl visible; in brown dresses, made high and surrounded by a narrow tucker about the throat, with little pockets of holland … tied in front of their frocks, and destined to serve the purpose of a work bag: all too wearing woollen [sic] stockings and country-made shoes, fastened with brass buckles. Above twenty of those clad in this costume were fullgrown girls, or rather young women; it suited them ill, and gave an air of oddity even to the prettiest [40].

Jane seems to have left a hell of beauty for a haven of utility. At Lowood,

Avoiding the Boring

37

beauty is institutionally eschewed, and this would seem to offer a venue where Jane could find others who are unimpressed by the merits of good looks unsupported by other, more abstract, less boring qualities. As at Gateshead, however, where Jane was “very rarely noticed” in company (23), initially at the charitable institution nobody “seem[s] to take notice” of her, and she stands “lonely enough, but to that feeling of isolation [she] was accustomed; it did not oppress [her] much” (42). Adrift from her previous anchor of boredom and predictability but unsure yet whether she has settled into a course truly superior, Jane enters into a reflective state. In her impetuous rush to be free of the known, hated, and interminable, she has been committed to a path defined so far by rough clothes, “unsatisfied hunger,” no fellowship, and freezing temperatures: “Gateshead and my past life seemed floated away to an immeasurable distance; the present was vague and strange, and of the future I could form no conjecture” (42). Much as do Georgiana and Eliza, Gateshead and Lowood represent different paths for women and venues for boredom (idle beauty and plain utility, respectively). In this new locale, Jane enters into a state of fluid (and potentially productive) boredom, where her attention is free-floating and her mind is unburdened and able to fix on new and perhaps surprising objects. Helen Burns and Rasselas attract Jane’s notice and give her fragmented, disjointed condition sudden focus. We already know of Jane’s love of reading, as well as her taste for the exotic, and Rasselas sounds “strange and consequently attractive” to her (42), but she is disappointed to discover, on skimming its contents, that it appears “dull,” with “no bright variety” (43). In Helen, however, unlike Johnson, Jane finds an object worthy of interest and study, and particularly intriguing is Helen’s ability to disengage mentally from her surroundings. Jane witnesses and is amazed by this ability while Helen is being punished, and it is in fact for this very capacity that Helen is in trouble. Helen explains that it is what I would label a form of fluid boredom: her thoughts “continually rove away” from the lessons being recited, and when Miss Scatcherd speaks, Helen loses “the very sound of her voice,” falling “into a sort of dream” (49). Helen’s thoughts, free to wander though her body is not, take her “sometimes” to a brook near her old home, and perhaps at others to philosophical musings (49). Her reveries are both the result of boredom and an experience of boredom itself, as she does not pursue them when the lesson piques her interest (such as the history of Charles I, for example), but does engage in them when she finds assignments dull and punishments unavoidable. Helen contrasts her boredom to Jane’s razor-sharp attention during class, saying that the younger girl is “closely attentive” and her thoughts “never seemed to wander while Miss Miller explained the lesson and ques-

38

Beautiful Boredom

tioned” her (49). Helen’s ability to use boredom as an escape from unsatisfactory situations fascinates yet fails to satisfy Jane, who must physically escape or at least internally rail against both boredom and unsatisfactory situations (which are often one and the same). Helen’s religious beliefs are grounded on the idea of living for the next, everlasting life, not focusing on the short one in this world, and they equip her to much better engage in boredom than can Jane, whose personal experience of the Christian ideal of turning the other cheek has been that it, too, will be struck, and to whom Helen’s idea of heaven sounds quite a bit like eternal boredom. Using a state of boredom as a merely mental escape hatch, while her body and spirit continue to suffer, violates Jane’s sense of justice: “If people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and unjust, the wicked people would have it all their own way.… I must dislike those who, whatever I do to please them, persist in disliking me; I must resist those who punish me unjustly” (50). Whereas Helen accepts boredom and even uses it as a coping strategy for the unpleasantness of this transitory life, Jane rejects long-term boredom because she resists complying with the subordination and oppression of her own modest ideals and desires. Although Jane does not embrace Helen’s Imlac-like assertion that “great sufferings” are the lot of the human race on this earth (71), she does wholeheartedly admire her fellow student and their superintendent, Miss Temple. Neither the consumptive teenager nor the pale woman conform completely to popular ideals of beauty, but Jane finds them both appealing according to her own criteria. They have irregularities (such as Miss Temple’s over-large forehead and too-pale complexion)19 but, more importantly, they somehow incorporate movement and action into their countenances and bodies. Miss Temple, in contrast to the other teachers, walks “lightly and rapidly” through “bitter wind” to church services, inspiring Jane if no one else, smiles (an important facial movement Jane has seen little of ) at Jane in approbation, embraces, and takes pulses, and her eyes beam (62). Helen harnesses and reveals the “powers within her” over tea with Miss Temple and Jane, and as a result her visage changes, with her usually “pale and bloodless” cheek glowing bright and her eyes acquiring a “beauty more singular than that of Miss Temple’s— a beauty neither of fine colour nor long eyelash, nor pencilled brow, but of meaning, of movement, of radiance” (63; emphasis mine). Helen’s internal, intangible beauties of mind and soul are to Jane visible and appreciable in her face — so much so, in fact, that Jane is “struck with wonder” (63). This aesthetic valuing of movement seems to correspond more with the concept of the sublime than the beautiful, which Brontë often connects to the static (lovely Georgiana, for instance, looks like a painting, and Miss

Avoiding the Boring

39

Temple grows less attractive the longer she is exposed to Mr. Brocklehurst, her moveable and expressive features taking on the quality of carved marble). While Burke’s visual/pictorial beauty only “insensibly” shifts and deviates from the “right line,” evocative of relative stasis, his sublime is characterized by “suddenness” and “strong” deviations, suggestive of movement. As a youth, Jane seems somewhat unconscious of her controlling philosophy of art and beauty, for when she earns the privilege of drawing lessons, she imagines herself producing “Cuyp–like groups of cattle, sweet paintings of butterflies hovering over unblown roses, of birds picking at ripe cherries, of wrens’ nests enclosing pearl-like eggs, wreathed about with young ivy sprays” (65). These beautiful hypothetical artworks are a far cry from Jane’s later, more sublime artistic creations, which certainly owe more to her exposure to Swift’s grotesque images in Gulliver’s Travels and Bewick’s stark and sometimes startling plates in A History of British Birds than to the picturesque tradition and Cuyp’s serene and dignified cows. With the art and French lessons underway, Jane declares that she “would not now have exchanged Lowood with all its privations, for Gateshead and its daily luxuries” (65). What makes the charity school, a bleak and harsh enough place, certainly, more attractive to Jane than the relative opulence and creature comforts of her aunt’s domicile is that she is mentally active, excelling in her studies in the company of other learners, whereas at Gateshead she was left to her own devices intellectually while surrounded by the indolent, banal, and cruel. Jane thus partly illustrates Brontë’s hierarchy of boredom, in which satisfying mental activity and intellectual conversation are least boring; sloth, beauty, and vacuity are most boring; and physical activity and utility fall somewhere in the middle. Eight years after her enthusiastic comparison of Gateshead and the charity school, however, Jane’s sentiments about Lowood and its placement in the hierarchy of activity abruptly “altered” (73). During that long interval, her life is “uniform” but “not unhappy, because it was not inactive” (73; emphasis mine). She invests her energies in learning as much as she can and excelling, becoming “the first girl of the first class” and then a teacher. Once she exhausts Lowood’s progressive possibilities, however, and, more importantly, Miss Temple, Jane’s mentor, marries and leaves, Jane is confronted with impending boredom: “I tired of the routine of eight years in one afternoon” (74). Lowood promises now only a dull round, not the upward movement she previously enjoyed. The figure of Miss Temple is a foreshadowing of Mr. Rochester, both in that she is a mental peer for Jane, and the absence of this intellectual/mental peer triggers boredom and in that their (Jane’s and Miss Temple’s) relationship demonstrates that friendship can dissolve inequities of power. Immediately after Miss Temple’s departure, Jane retires

40

Beautiful Boredom

to her room and spends her half-holiday in solitude, realizing, after an afternoon spent musing over her loss, that she is “beginning to feel the stirring of old emotions,” or, in other words, beginning to feel the discontent of repetition and sameness (73). What some might call “doing good works” turns for Jane, in the absence of her mental peer, into mere physical drudgery. She begins to rank Lowood at a lower rung on the hierarchy of activity and to envision herself being forced into the adult–Eliza/patient-drudge mold. Her “motive” to stay and behave according to the Lowood strictures vanishes with Miss Temple, “she who had stood me in the stead of mother, governess, and, latterly, companion.” Without Miss Temple’s soothing presence, she loses the desire to adhere to Lowood’s standards of “beauty”— a spiritual beauty characterized by obedience and self-abnegation almost identical to that encouraged by the domestic ideologues to augment or substitute for good looks. Jane finds the supposed beauty of usefulness to others an oppressive and boring trap that is as undesirable (and perhaps as personally impossible to attain) as the lifestyle that accompanies physical beauty, for each possibility would demand subordination. With Miss Temple’s exit, Jane suddenly allows herself to long for “a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements” far from the “prison-ground” Lowood now seems (74). She gazes out her window toward the “hilly horizon,” her eye passing “all other objects to rest on those most remote … blue peaks: it was those I longed to surmount…. I traced the white road winding round the base of one mountain and vanishing in a gorge between the two: how I longed to follow it further!” Jane’s attraction to the distant mountains illustrates her desire for the sense of limitlessness communicated by the Burkean sublime (in contrast to the confining “boundary of rock and heath” in which she is “exile[d]”). Lowood’s very problem, then, is that it is decidedly not limitless or “varied,” and thus in no way sublime. There, she cannot possibly anticipate any personal experiences to parallel the sudden change and dramatic shifts characterized in her physical world by the distant gorges. Jane has been trained in sublimity in her childhood, via Bessie’s mystical tales, the books she preferred to read, and her own imagination and experience in the red-room, and these prepare her in some way to escape from the mundane routines she will suffer under throughout the novel. At Lowood, for example, while other students/inmates do not get away, except perhaps Helen through death and Miss Temple through marital bliss, Jane is able to break sharply out of the utility routine, thanks to the familiarity with the sublime she learned when isolated and/or excluded at Gateshead. Inspired by the sublime but far-off mountains, Jane prays for freedom and change:

Avoiding the Boring

41

I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer; it seemed scattered on the wind then faintly blowing. I abandoned it and framed a humbler supplication; for change, stimulus: that petition, too, seemed swept off into vague space: “Then,” I cried, half desperate, “grant me at least a new servitude!” [74].

If liberty is too great a request, Jane will fall back on her refrain from Gateshead — she must have a new situation; even if it is not measurably better, it will be different. Jane decides she wants “a new place, in a new house, amongst new faces, under new circumstances” (75); perhaps there she will be able to find a choice of life (to quote Imlac) other than the Georgiana/fine lady/Gateshead possibility or the Eliza/useful drudge/Lowood probability. This boredom of an afternoon is another instance of fluid boredom, because she is in a free-floating state of suspended anticipation that allows her, in the space of a few hours, to know her own mind and discover what actions to proceed with to change her situation and thus hopefully relieve herself of the oppressive routine of Lowood. Her deep-rooted desire for the novel wards off any passing difficulties she can conjure, such as having no connections or friends to help her in her search, and she puts her plan for a “new servitude” into effect by sunrise of the next day, by which time she has already composed her advertisement. The speed with which she decides upon and undertakes this major change in her state is certainly reminiscent of her sudden outward revolt against tedium and oppression at the hands of the Reeds, and it seems to signal a similar shift into a more sublime time scheme.20 Not all characters move with the rapidity (dare I say sublimity?) of Jane, however, and while waiting for a response “the succeeding week seemed long” to someone with little patience for boredom (76). More aggrieving yet, Jane must endure “most tedious delay” while her request to leave circulates round Lowood’s executive committee and they compose a testimonial to her character and capacities (78). Once the eve of departure finally arrives, her grudging boredom mutates into the undirected energy of anticipation — after packing her trunk, she has “nothing more to do, [and] I sat down and tried to rest … I could not, though I had been on foot all day — I could not now repose an instant — I was too much excited” (78). Jane is extremely conscious that, under her own auspices, “a phase of my life was closing tonight, a new one opening tomorrow…. I must watch feverishly while the change was being accomplished” (78). Only the timely entrance of Bessie can put a stop to Jane’s “wandering like a troubled spirit” in the lobby (78). On the cusp of this new, and she hopes exciting, phase in her life, Jane is confronted again with the information/assessment that she still has no physical beauty and that one of the two prescribed paths for women remains

42

Beautiful Boredom

effectually closed to her. While Bessie has become “very good-looking, with black hair and eyes, and a lively complexion,” the servant “could have told her [Jane] anywhere!” Bessie responds to Jane’s inquiry that Georgiana, the character against whom young Jane was most often counterpointed, is “very” handsome and was much admired in London. John Reed is now called by some “a fine-looking young man,” and Mrs. Reed remains “well enough in the face” (79), while Jane merely looks “like a lady, and it is as much as ever” Bessie expected of her because she was “no beauty as a child” (80). Whether it be the type of physical beauty prized by the inmates of Gateshead or the brand of spiritual beauty (a.k.a. utility) endorsed by the establishment at Lowood, Jane seems destined to disappoint. Any sense of relative attractiveness her time at Lowood may have conspired to give her is replaced by the “conviction” that she has “not an exterior likely to second that desire [to please]” (80), and she begins the new phase of her life with a reminder that it is still impossible to find the homogeneity which she seemed to both reject and covet at Gateshead and Lowood. Once she arrives at Thornfield, Jane rises the first morning full of care and concern over her appearance: It was not my habit to be disregardful of appearance, or careless of the impression I made: on the contrary, I ever wished to look as well as I could, and to please as much as my want of beauty would permit. I sometimes regretted that I was not handsomer: I sometimes wished to have rosy cheeks, a straight nose, and small cherry mouth; I desired to be tall, stately, and finely developed in figure; I felt it a misfortune that I was so little, so pale, and had features so irregular and so marked. And why had I these aspirations and these regrets? It would be difficult to say: I could not then distinctly say it to myself; yet I had a reason, and a logical, natural reason too [86].

The “logical, natural” reason Jane regrets her lack of beauty is because, as she has already learned, physical beauty smooths the social path, makes acquaintance easier, apparently compensates for any other deficiencies or oddities, and seems to automatically endear its possessor to others. She possesses an apparently unappealing blend of features, for whereas she is both small and delicately colored, usually characteristics of the beautiful, she is also “irregular” and strongly “marked.” While Jane does usually find the most stereotypically attractive characters the most tiresome and trying, she apparently cannot help but consider it a “misfortune” that her interior merits are seldom appreciated fully (rather than merely seen as a weak consolation prize) because of her dearth of exterior charm. Perhaps her violently bored reaction to beautiful characters such as Georgiana and Blanche Ingram is linked to their complicity in and perpetuation of the social/aesthetic constructs that relegate her to Eliza–like, utilitarian, uninteresting

Avoiding the Boring

43

roles such as poor relation, plain governess, and unglamorous missionary help-meet. The boredom that suddenly overwhelmed Jane at Lowood returns in full force at Thornfield, where the plain governess role quickly wears thin. Before Mr. Rochester’s entrance, Jane chafes at the placid, circumscribed routine which speedily develops for her at Thornfield. She climbs to the roof of the house, searching for the sublime, longing “for a power of vision which might overpass that limit [of the skyline]; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen,” as well as “more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character, than was here within my reach” (95). Her “new servitude,” while not unpleasant, lacks the excitement, interest, variety, and, most importantly, differently construed society where she will be valued (perhaps even aesthetically) for which she had dared to hope. Jane’s new servitude is becoming simply utilitarian servitude, the middle rung on the hierarchy, little superior to the indolence Georgiana typifies and far inferior to the intellectual action and mental excitement at the top. Bored and feeling almost physically cramped by her role, Jane finds relief only in pacing the thirdstory corridor and imagining a tale full of “incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence” (96). Physically and figuratively walking yet getting nowhere, she inveighs against the boredom to which women are culturally condemned and consigned, believing that they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags … [96].

She proclaims that it is “in vain” to say that humans (and, implicitly, women in particular) should be satisfied with “tranquility,” which she considers synonymous with “boredom,” and she unblinkingly declares that “they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it” (96). Faced with the interminable drudge role, Jane again resorts to the sublime, much as she did at Lowood. By pure force of will, Jane seems to conjure the dramatic and somewhat preternatural advent of Mr. Rochester, thereby vanquishing her boredom for the moment and radically altering her social (and aesthetic) environs: On the hilltop above me sat the rising moon; pale yet as a cloud, but brightening momently: she looked over Hay, which, half lost in trees, sent up a blue smoke from its few chimneys; it was yet a mile distant, but in the absolute hush I could hear plainly its thin murmurs of life…. A rude noise broke on these fine ripplings and whisperings, at once so far away and so clear: a positive tramp, tramp; a metallic clatter…. The din was on the causeway; a horse was coming; the wind-

44

Beautiful Boredom ings of the lane yet hid it, but it approached…. In those days I was young, and all sorts of fancies bright and dark tenanted my mind: the memories of nursery stories were there amongst other rubbish; and when they recurred, maturing youth added to them a vigour and vividness beyond what childhood could give. As this horse approached, and as I watched for it to appear though the dusk, I remembered certain of Bessie’s tales, wherein figured a North-of-England spirit, called a “Gytrash,” which, in the form of a horse, mule, or large dog, haunted solitary ways and sometimes came upon belated travelers, as this horse was now coming upon me. It was very near, but not yet in sight, when, in addition to the tramp, tramp, I heard a rush under the hedge, and close down by the hazel stems glided a great dog … exactly one mask of Bessie’s Gytrash, — a lion-like creature with long hair and a huge head…. The horse followed, — a tall steed, and on its back a rider. The man, the human being, broke the spell at once [98; emphasis mine].

At first glance, this would seem an action-packed scene straight out of a gothic romance, rife with elements of the sublime (courtesy of Bessie’s tales of the supernatural and Jane’s childhood reading), but the key distinction that must be made is between what Jane thinks might be happening and what is happening. Jane imagines Rochester’s horse as the fabled Gytrash, Pilot gliding past her as if some sort of supernatural ghost-dog (98), the mysterious stranger suffering a mishap, and herself offering invaluable assistance, but this romantic drama is quickly undercut by the reality of a man tumbling off his horse and rather grouchily —“What the deuce is to do now?”— submitting to being assisted back on. It is Jane who invests the incident with the sublime, supernatural, and exciting. Even though the encounter appears to be but a short-lived moment, an incident of no further import to Jane’s life, it functions as an instantaneous antidote to the too-persistent boredom she has been suffering under, as “it marked with change one single hour of a monotonous life” (101). Not only is Jane able, in helping Rochester back on his horse, to do “an active thing” in contrast to “an existence all passive,” but, more importantly, the incident has added something of interest to her mental furniture, and she will be able to revisit and recreate the action in this way. She has a “new face … like a new picture introduced to the gallery of memory; and it was dissimilar to all the others hanging there” (101; emphasis mine). The identification of action and excitement with the mental more so than the physical is reflected in the frequency with which she envisions this new face as she carries out her errand at the post office, the half-hopeful glance for horse and rider she gives on returning to the scene of the incident, and, most significantly, her reluctance to return to Thornfield, the environs of which now seem even more restricting and static: I did not like re-entering Thornfield. To pass its threshold was to return to stagnation; to cross the silent hall, to ascend the darksome staircase, to seek my own lonely little room, and then to meet tranquil Mrs. Fairfax, and spend the long win-

Avoiding the Boring

45

ter evening with her, and her only, was to quell wholly the faint excitement wakened by my walk, — to slip again over by faculties the viewless fetters of an uniform and too still existence … [102].

Almost every word seems to communicate the stultifying routine/drudgery Jane associates with her new position that is quickly getting old, from the emphasis on the length of the December evening, to the hushed hall, to the blinding tranquility, to the disassociation of Thornfield from any exciting new mental or physical action. So disinclined is Jane to go inside the hall and reenter the pleasant but far from intellectually stimulating society of Mrs. Fairfax that she “lingered at the gates,” “lingered on the lawn,” and “paced backwards and forwards on the pavement” (102). Even though in the opening lines of the novel Jane expresses pleasure in there being “no possibility of taking a walk” with the Reed children (5; emphasis mine), the important point of similarity is that in each instance she prefers solitary amusement and reflection to encountering the torpor of intellectually stagnant society. At Gateshead she must stay inside, protected by the scarlet draperies and clear panes of glass, to avoid the mentally stultifying, whereas at Thornfield she must push the boundaries of the mansion, walking the battlements and the edge of the drive. To her surprise and delight, though, Thornfield is “a changed place” when she finally submits to cross the threshold, an alteration due entirely to Mr. Rochester’s presence. Their intellectual connection (or mental interaction), which becomes clear in their mutually delightful ensuing conversations, makes this time at Thornfield the happiest of Jane’s life thus far. The specter of endless, Eliza–like utility is thus at least temporarily chased away. Thornfield has become exciting for Jane, not the prison it was beginning to seem (although Bertha might disagree). Satisfying mental action thus replaces the falsely exciting physical action of Rochester’s accident in Hay Lane. In other words, Rochester as gothic hero has been replaced by Rochester as mental or intellectual peer. That his society is to be new, different, and more congenial to Jane is initially apparent with his careful consideration and appreciation of her art. He is intrigued by her three most personally conceived and sublime pictures, which depict a cormorant holding a gold bracelet torn from the arm of a “drowned corpse” in a “swollen sea,” the Evening Star in the form of a woman, and a colossal head before the background of a soaring iceberg. Rather than inspiring pleasing contemplation, these works depict and stimulate the sensational emotions of fear, desperation, awe, and hopelessness. As the subjects “rose vividly on [Jane’s] mind,” painting them was “one of the keenest pleasures” she had ever known (111), and for someone of education and experience to value her vision and its execution would have to

46

Beautiful Boredom

rate as nearly as keen a pleasure. Mr. Rochester ranks the drawings as “peculiar” and the thought behind them as “elfish,” yet he most certainly means these as non-pejorative terms, and “elfish” in particular seems to signal his understanding of Jane, for it is fittingly indicative of both the supernatural and the small. This approbation (and the even terms in which it is expressed) signals the possibility of a divergent, non-traditional aesthetic (and perhaps ultimately social) model, one in which Jane, as well as her work, can be considered different from but moreover superior to beauty and the beautiful. Mr. Rochester’s entrance thus signals a potential alternative to the traditional Georgiana or Eliza roles for Jane. From studying and evaluating her art, Rochester and Jane progress to analyzing one another’s physiognomy. Although “most people would have thought him an ugly man” (116),21 Jane soon finds him “more than beautiful” (albeit according to her revisionist definition of beauty, which is heartily infused with the sublime), because his “colorless, olive face, square, massive brow, broad and jetty eyebrows, deep eyes, strong features, firm, grim mouth” are “all energy, decision, will … full of an interest, an influence that quite mastered me” (152). His looks, while not handsome, are expressive of movement, power, and action, all of which are more sublime characteristics Jane elevates over boring, traditionally conceived beauty such as Georgiana exemplifies. Céline Varens, his gorgeous former mistress, “waxed rather brilliant” on his “personal defects— deformities she termed them” when talking to a new lover, and this seems to be when Rochester learns the same lesson Jane has about the importance of beauty in conventional social relationships (but he, of course, has the benefit of being male and wealthy) (127). While Céline always praised to him his “beauté mâle,” Jane tells him from the beginning that he is not particularly Adonis–like, and this provokes his response that she is “not pretty any more than I am handsome” (116). Even though he withholds the appellation of beautiful or pretty, he does say that “a puzzled air becomes” her (116). Importantly, he refuses to accept the commonly bandied phrase that “beauty is of little consequence,” indicating that he, too, has identified the aesthetic underpinnings of most of society and could possibly, since he is no more endowed with beauty than Jane, consider rejecting or transmuting it. Despite the truism that beauty is not as key for a man in their society, his similar aesthetic role and analogous inability to alter his appearance in any material way suggest that he may also find the beautiful unexciting and inferior to other attributes. Much as Georgiana provides the beautiful and boring foil to Jane in the environs of Gateshead, Blanche Ingram is the governess’s polar opposite at Thornfield Hall. Brontë insists upon the comparison, most overtly

Avoiding the Boring

47

through Jane’s drawing of her own and an imagined Blanche’s portraits for the explicit purpose in the story of a point-by-point contrast: Listen, then, Jane Eyre, to your sentence: tomorrow, place the glass before you, and draw in chalk your own picture, faithfully; without softening one defect: omit no harsh line, smooth away no displeasing irregularity; write under it, “Portrait of a Governess, disconnected, poor, and plain.” Afterwards … delineate carefully the loveliest face you can imagine; paint it in your softest shades and sweetest hues, according to the description given by Mrs. Fairfax of Blanche Ingram: remember the raven ringlets, the Oriental eye … recall the august yet harmonious lineaments, the Grecian neck and bust: let the round and dazzling arm be visible, and the delicate hand … call it “Blanche, an accomplished lady of rank” [141].

Moreover, not only does Blanche have the reputation of great beauty, but she also possesses formidable accomplishments. She sings admirably, plays with brilliant execution, speaks French with fluency, and can converse knowledgeably of botany. Like Georgiana, she both benefits from and propagates popular notions of female beauty and its social/cultural importance, saying that “loveliness … [is] the special prerogative of woman — her legitimate appanage and heritage! I grant an ugly woman is a blot on the fair face of creation” (157). Despite the general acclaim in which Blanche is held by the circle of nobility and landed gentry staying as houseguests at Thornfield, Jane detects traits and behavioral patterns that immutably align this (supposed) rival for Mr. Rochester’s affections with boredom, the boring, and the tiresome. In language reminiscent of Mary Wollstonecraft’s description of the fine lady, Jane finds Blanche “very showy, but … not genuine: she had a fine person, many brilliant attainments; but her mind was poor, her heart barren … she was not good; she was not original” (163; emphasis mine). While Jane’s thoughts, as demonstrated through conversation and her art, intrigue Rochester with their singularity, Blanche, instead of formulating and articulating her own opinions, is accustomed to repeating “sounding phrases from books.” She often verges on the shrill with her repartee, and she is so self-conscious and self-absorbed as to be absolutely mind-numbing. During Rochester’s absence from Thornfield, Blanche evinces hostile, solid boredom, during which she “repelled” efforts to draw her attention and interest and doggedly pursues a dramatically bored attitude, first murmuring over “some sentimental tunes and airs on the piano, and then, having fetched a novel from the library, had flung herself in haughty listlessness on a sofa, and prepared to beguile, by the spell of fiction, the tedious hours of absence” (168). Like everything else Blanche does, this is yet another tiresome display calculated for its impact on an admiring and absorbed public. Although the mansion and estate have changed (from Gateshead to Thornfield), Jane

48

Beautiful Boredom

is again encountering one of the two archetypes for women in her world — the boring fine lady. Jane will go far to avoid this tedious, grating, and callous woman, especially in the context of Blanche’s becoming mistress of Thornfield — even to consider going to Bitternutt Lodge, in Connaught, Ireland. On returning to Thornfield after her aunt’s death, Jane is greeted with news of Mr. Rochester’s impending marriage, and though she wishes to avoid Blanche Ingram in the role of mistress of the estate at all costs, she is woeful about leaving because she has not been bored there very often, and, even more, she has felt that she at times found the unconventional society she seeks: “I love Thornfield … because I have lived in it a full and delightful life, momentarily at least. I have not been trampled on. I have not been petrified. I have not been buried with inferior minds, and excluded from every glimpse of communion with what is bright and energetic, and high” (222). If shuttled off to some other, random governess post, Jane fears the return of fossilizing boredom. She also dreads losing the only sense of belonging, of homogenous heterogeneity, if you will, that she has ever experienced; she believes that Rochester, unlike the Elizas and Georgianas of the world, is of her kind, she “feel[s] akin to him, — I understand the language of his countenance and movements; though rank and wealth sever us widely, I have something in my brain and heart, in my blood and nerves, that assimilates me mentally to him” (154). This newfound social unity will be difficult for her to relinquish, as it is still too novel and too uniquely to her taste to be tedious. Part of what makes Jane so distraught over Rochester’s apparent choice of Blanche as a wife is that it reinforces rather than subverts the Georgiana path, the traditional male-female social compact in which the woman brings to the table, above all else, beauty. Jane declares her spiritual, intellectual, and emotional fitness to be his soul mate, crying, do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!— I have as much soul as you, — and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh — it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal, — as we are! [222].

He seems to be voluntarily courting life-long solid boredom, in the form of the socially and aesthetically acceptable Blanche, when he could, if he were true to the disparate ideals and aesthetics of the redefined sublime and beautiful that Jane wishes to establish, enjoy mental stimulation and true companionship. Jane’s manifesto/declaration is not addressed solely to

Avoiding the Boring

49

Rochester, but to all who are governed by these ideas of beauty, and, to a lesser degree, money/status, above all else in women, because he is, after all, only the latest to misjudge and discount her due to her appearance. He regains her faith by affirming that she is his equal and his “likeness” (223), “small and plain” as she is (224). Rochester’s words indicate that he, too, desires and recognizes a shifting and blurring of Burke’s aesthetic categories, for he is suggesting a marriage of the plain (Jane) and the ugly. Jane doesn’t adhere to one traditional definition or the other, because the standard aesthetic categories and traditional social structure base ideas of the sublime and the beautiful on the physical, a plane where she certainly could not claim to be Rochester’s equal. But by amalgamating aspects of the sublime and the beautiful and moving all to a mental plane, she can defy the class and aesthetic roadblocks to their union. Mr. Rochester’s apparent acceptance of these redefinitions of beauty and marriage, via his choosing Jane rather than Blanche as a fiancée, is quickly called into question, however. Virtually as soon as she has consented to marry him, Jane is discomfited by Mr. Rochester’s compliments and intentions, because they seem to have reverted to convention rather than adhering to the new aesthetics and nontraditional relationship she thought they had forged. Jane herself feels that her face is “no longer plain” (226), largely because it looks hopeful, but Mr. Rochester will not be content until he has amplified her slim pretensions to beauty: he claims she looks “blooming, and smiling, and pretty, truly pretty,” and contrasts this to the “elf ” and “mustard-seed” of the day before. He unveils plans to put a diamond circlet on her forehead, which has been “stamped” with the “patent of nobility,” bracelets on her “fine” wrists, and rings on her “fairy-like fingers” (227). Despite Jane’s protests that he not address her “as if I were a beauty” (certainly a negative term, to her mind, in this situation) and her reminders that she is his “plain, Quakerish governess,” Rochester is adamant that she is a “delicate and aerial” beauty whom he will make the world acknowledge (227). In rejecting his desires to bedeck her in bright silks and valuable jewels, Jane also rejects the traditional concept of the marriage relation, one that she finds both boring and confining and that she suspects Mr. Rochester also will quickly tire of (and, resultantly, he will tire of her). She attempts to provoke him into calling her his accustomed epithets of “elf,” “sprite,” “salamander,” and “changeling”— terms which bespeak her amorphous status— so that he will desist in behaving like a sultan (236). His efforts to dress her “like a doll” make her “feverish and fagged, ” not excited and energetic, as she has been previously when on the verge of a new chapter of her life. That she intends to spurn wholeheartedly any attempts on his part to

50

Beautiful Boredom

drift into a boring, conventional marriage/courtship construct is apparent in the vigorous language with which she discusses some traditional/historic types of relationships: she would “stir up mutiny” among his hypothetical harem (236), and, significantly, she “will not be your English Celine Varens…. I shall continue to act as Adele’s governess; by that I shall earn my board and lodging, and thirty pounds a year besides” (237). Not only does this foreshadow Jane’s rejection of the mistress role, but it is an attempt to redefine marriage, to remove the economic (and thus nearly total) dependency of the wife on the husband, and to craft a more active, presumably less boring role for Jane. Although the governess role has proven far from exciting before, in its utility it is still preferable to the Georgiana/ Blanche role of fine lady and beauty, which is at the lowest rung of the hierarchy Brontë has established. Jane wishes to stave off boredom in more than one quarter: wisely, she analyzes Mr. Rochester’s previous relationships, realizes how quickly he appears to grow weary of lavishing gifts and compliments, and decides that that is another strong reason to keep him “cross and crusty,” as well as “excellently entertained” (241). He even admits that he is “capricious” to “women who please me only by their faces … when they open to me a perspective of flatness, [and] triviality” (228): the Italian, Giacinta, and the German, Clara, were “both considered singularly handsome,” but “what was their beauty to me in a few weeks?” (274). He “tired [of the unprincipled Giacinta] in three months” and was relieved to “get decently rid of ” the “heavy, mindless, unimpressible” Clara as soon as he could. Despite his repeated forays into the conforming, traditional relationship of sponsor and mistress, Rochester invariably finds the system — and its beauty-based foundations— insufficient and tedious. With Jane, he believes there is a gemlike permanency to his feeling “at once content and stimulated,” because the connection is based on the intellectual and spiritual rather than the transitory bloom of beauty (276). He, like Jane, is perhaps truly in search of a mental and intellectual peer, one who can stave off boredom. Jane’s fears about the turn her relationship with Mr. Rochester takes during this first engagement seem supported not only by her own deductive reasoning but also by the philosophies of Mary Wollstonecraft. She echoes Wollstonecraft’s mistrust of marriage based primarily on lust22 rather than companionate friendship as well as her language concerning the conventional husband-wife relationships, and as Mr. Rochester’s behavior toward her becomes more and more masterful and sultanic, and his intention to mold her into a fine lady rather than some newly conceived role becomes more and more obvious, Jane seems likewise to conclude that the current system of marriage is degrading to both women and men.

Avoiding the Boring

51

Jane’s refusal to be Mrs. Rochester only “virtually” and “nominally” seems to stem at least as much from a recognition of Mr. Rochester’s history of boredom with this arrangement as from her fear for her own moral and potentially bored states (267). She draws from his avowal of “now hat[ing] the recollection of the time … passed with Celine, Giacinta, and Clara” the “truth” that if she “were so far to forget” herself and her teachings as “to become the successor of these poor girls, he would one day regard … [Jane] with the same feeling which now in his mind desecrated their memory” (274). That he would associate her with the boring is too horrible to contemplate, and even total separation from him is preferable to that eventuality. His earlier attempts to claim and assert her physical beauty would seem to dovetail with an eventual relegating of her, as a beautiful woman, to the sphere of the boring. He undertook his pre-existing marriage to the once-beautiful Bertha (the Georgiana of the West Indies) under the influence of conventional social and aesthetic values, and it is a notorious failure. As a second son, Mr. Rochester brings a name to the union, whereas Bertha offers those two paramount female attributes, beauty and wealth. She is “the boast of Spanish Town for her beauty,” “a fine woman in the style of Blanche Ingram” (268). Initially, Rochester is “dazzled” and “stimulated” by her face, figure, and accomplishments. His attraction turns to a disgust that is the opposite of beauty, however. Once he truly possesses and knows her, he quickly tires of her, suddenly finding “her nature wholly alien to mine; her tastes obnoxious to me; her cast of mind common, low, narrow, and singularly incapable of being led to anything higher” and that he “could not pass a single evening, nor even a single hour of the day, with her in comfort” (268). Her “pigmy intellect” cannot sustain the excitement her beauty (at first) generated, and Mr. Rochester can hardly wait to be free of her company to explore Europe, where he can ferret out the new and the interesting. Smallness ranks high in Edmund Burke’s listing of the characteristics of beauty, but when this attribute pertains to intelligence, it can be (for Mr. Rochester, at least) transfigured from the lovable to the contemptible. Perhaps even more than his own looks (or lack thereof ), Bertha’s transformation from the beautiful to the hideous may have affected his (sporadic) adoption of a new aesthetic — where he seeks “a good and intelligent [rather than beautiful] woman whom [he] could love”— that is more sympathetic to Jane’s formulations (273). Bertha’s “scarlet visage,” “red balls,” mask-like face, and “bulk” take on monstrous characteristics, and, next to them, Jane’s mere lack of beauty becomes a positive rather than a negative, since she does possess humanly normal, if not unexceptionable, features. Since Jane has no Bertha–, Blanche–, or Georgiana–like loveliness, what first

52

Beautiful Boredom

gained her Mr. Rochester’s notice was his sense that she had “an unusual” and “perfectly new character,” which interested and intrigued him (276). His state when with her is the very antithesis of boredom (as he and Jane construe it)— he is “at once content and stimulated” (277). Attuned to her mental state, he is able to diagnose the boredom she suffered both at school, which led to her accepting the position at Thornfield, and at Thornfield itself, before his arrival: “ I saw you had a social heart; it was the silent school-room — it was the tedium of your life — that made you mournful” (277). In each other they seem to have found the cure for tedium and discontent, at least for as long as they resist a conventionally construed husband-wife or sponsor-mistress relationship. When presented with the impossibility of being Mr. Rochester’s wife and the unpalatable option of becoming his mistress (both models of Wollstonecraft’s fine lady), Jane’s instinctual rebellion against threatened longterm boredom 23 orders her unequivocally (in the form of a sublimely supernatural mother-figure) to “leave Thornfield at once” (261). At a point when her love and desire to stay near him jeopardize her rejection of boredom (and immorality), she experiences and almost certainly summons a supernatural and/or psychological intervention. She returns in a dream to the red-room of Gateshead, the scene of her first dramatic act to avoid the boring, and there the ghostly gleam is transformed into a lunar super-human who urges Jane to “flee temptation” (281), the temptation to enter into a state where boredom is predicate to immoral joy. Jane wakes from the “trance-like” dream to utter “I will,” and she determines that “it cannot be too early to commence the task I have to fulfill,” speedily packing her few belongings and little money and leaving Thornfield Hall (281). As she slips away from the estate, Jane experiences her passionate love and longing as almost the temporary insanity Wollstonecraft believes is antithetical to happiness in the married state: she “pant[s] to return” to him, feels “goad[ed],” “torn,” and “sickened,” weeps “wildly,” and walks “like one delirious” (283). As soon as Jane makes the positive determination that to remain in a situation will lead only to stultifying, unrewarding, solid boredom, she takes dramatic and immediate action to forego the known in favor of the new and unknown. What Jane finds, at the end of her trek across the moor, is the society of intellectual peers. Spying Mary and Diana through the tiny casement of the Grange, the wanderer decides that while ladylike, these women cannot be called “handsome — they were too pale and grave for the word … they looked thoughtful almost to severity,” and it is this, Jane’s initial exemption of them from the world of the beautiful Georgianas (and, consequently, the boring), which lays the foundation for the sisters to become her men-

Avoiding the Boring

53

tal peers (292). Like Miss Temple, they are pale, and this cosmetic similarity is perhaps indicative to Jane of their being more involved in the world of the mental than of the physical. Jane somewhat revises her evaluation of their looks as she comes to know and love them, but the excellence of their minds is always what most appeals to her. Jane is content of an evening to rest her head on Diana’s knee and “listen alternately to her and Mary; while they sounded thoroughly the topic on which I had but touched…. Our natures dovetailed: mutual affection — of the strongest kind — was the result” (308). Jane exults in the glow of these Wollstonecraftian friendships. That they perceive her as an equal, intellectually speaking, is clear in their desire to teach her foreign languages they themselves are studying and in their interest in taking drawing lessons from her. In stark contrast to her experience of the passage at time at Lowood (post–Miss Temple) or Thornfield (pre–Mr. Rochester), Jane finds that “thus occupied, and mutually entertained, days passed like hours and weeks like days” (308). Considering that the activities pursued at Marsh End are not dissimilar to those of Lowood and Thornfield — studying and teaching languages and art — the importance of mental parity to Jane’s perception of time and happiness comes into sharp relief/focus. After Jane’s inheritance enriches the whole family and enables Diana and Mary to leave their posts and return to the Grange, the three women spend a week in a “merry domestic dissipation”24 of which Jane never wearies, because “they could always talk; and their discourse, witty, pithy, original, had such charms for me, that I preferred listening to, and sharing in it, to doing anything else” (347). Her extreme enjoyment in talking with the Rivers sisters suggests her capacity for future fulfillment and contentment in marriage to a changed Mr. Rochester as well as the necessity of an intellectual connection and spark for her happiness. Mary and Diana, Helen Burns, and Miss Temple all act as precedents for Mr. Rochester, but, sequentially, each of these female mental peers is taken away from her and boredom ensues. For example, Jane is perfectly satisfied when in the company of Mary and Diana, when she is doing very little physically but is engaged and active mentally. When they must leave Marsh End and she must gain her own living by teaching at the local school, thus embracing the Eliza/utility option, her boredom is intense. It seems, then, that Jane clearly rejects any sense of wanting to perform worthwhile actions domestic ideologues like Gisborne or Fordyce would recommend for the killing/filling of time, such as cultivating barren minds at the school, and favors instead doing no active good but having a satisfying mental and intellectual life. When Jane acts in the capacity of student or teacher without Mary or Diana’s involvement, her enjoyment in each role greatly diminishes as her

54

Beautiful Boredom

level of boredom and sense of oppression concurrently increase. Under St. John Rivers’ influence, Jane abandons German lessons with Diana for Hindostanee tutorials with her brother and becomes the mistress of the Morton school. Although she attempts to comfort herself with the notion that it is far preferable “to be a village schoolmistress, free and honest, in a breezy mountain nook in the healthy heart of England” than Mr. Rochester’s mistress in the South of France, she finds her pupils “hopelessly dull,” “heavylooking, gaping rustics” and her duties “truly hard work” which she tries to acquit as “actively and faithfully” as possible (322). Jane tries on the Eliza role quite seriously at this point, striving to content herself with utility, physical busyness, and self-abnegation, and thus with the middle tier of what she perceives as the hierarchy of activity and boredom. However, even when she has become “a favorite in the neighborhood,” gaining the “regard of working people,” she ultimately finds “this calm, this useful existence” unsatisfying (322). She escapes from it at night with strange dreams, where her fluid boredom finds expression: dreams many-coloured, agitated, full of the ideal, the stirring, the stormy — dreams where, amidst unusual scenes charged with adventure, with agitating risk and romantic change, I still again and again met Mr. Rochester, always at some exciting crisis [323; emphasis mine].

Much as Jane may try to subordinate and suppress her desires for the sublime and what she considers meaningful mental activity, they will find an out. When given the opportunity by her inheritance to leave the seemingly noble work of developing young peasants’ minds, Jane admits to St. John that she “could not go on forever so [teaching]: I want to enjoy my own faculties as well as to cultivate those of other people” and voices her new desire, which is “To be active: as active as I can” (343). Jane and St. John have rather disparate notions of activity, for while he urges her to “toil” longer, devoting her life to “The task of regenerating her race” (the spiritual utility option), Jane intends to clean and redecorate Moor House in anticipation of Diana and Mary’s arrival (the domestic yet not quite useful option) (343). St. John attempts to make Jane discontent with her domestic dissipations, and he also poaches Diana’s German student. Working with St. John on Hindostanee, Jane feels something quite foreign to the freedom and bliss of translating texts with her women cousins. Although she wishes “daily more to please him,” she fears that in so doing she “must disown half my nature, stifle half my faculties, wrest my tastes from their original bent, force myself to the adoption of pursuits for which I had no natural vocation” (351). Far from the delight of intellectual dialogue and brisk, natural exchange she enjoys with Diana and Mary is the one-sided/stilted, confining nature of her interaction with St. John:

Avoiding the Boring

55

By degrees, he acquired a certain influence over me that took away my liberty of mind: his praise and notice were more restraining than his indifference. I could no longer talk or laugh freely when he was by, because a tiresomely importunate instinct reminded me that vivacity (at least in me) was distasteful to him. I was so fully aware that only serious moods and occupations were acceptable, that in his presence every effort to sustain or follow any other became vain: I fell under a freezing spell [350].

Jane’s compulsions to suppress her nature when around St. John illustrate a definite point of disconnection with her usual standards/requirements for a mental peer. Despite this obvious difference (freezing rather than freeing) in Jane’s reactions and feelings, however, St. John does seem to possess some element/characteristic that makes her truly desire to please him (as she never did with Mrs. Reed or Mr. Brocklehurst, for example). More than by being merely “a good and great man” (366), St. John earns Jane’s interest and allegiance by recognizing an at least partial sympathy between them. St. John tells Jane that “in your nature is an alloy as detrimental to repose as that in mine; though of a different kind” (312), and he does not see in her eyes anything which “promises the maintenance of an even tenor in life” (313). He compares her teaching the Morton school to his continuing to preach in the parish, asserting that she “cannot long be content to pass your leisure in solitude, and to devote your working hours to a monotonous labour wholly void of stimulus: any more than I can be content,” he added, with emphasis, “to live here buried in morass, pent in with mountain — my nature, that God gave me, contravened; my faculties, heavenbestowed, paralysed — made useless … I … almost rave with my restlessness” [313].

St. John, while finding Jane too ruled by her emotions and passions, does seem to understand her need for some sort of “stimulus,” some path in life differing from the usual and “monotonous.” In the lines above, he could almost be describing her early time at Thornfield Hall, not merely the situation he anticipates for her at Morton school. He himself is verging on the manifestation of solid boredom that is the boredom of protest, a screen for rage, so upset is he by the contravening of his “heaven-bestowed” talents. (Interestingly, in sketching his own sense of frustration and stagnation, he captures, at least in broad strokes, not only Jane’s notions of the waste of her faculties in the traditional Eliza– and Georgiana–style roles offered to her thus far — governess, charity school teacher, society wife/mistress— but also her evaluation of how a life as his wife would affect her.) Like Jane, he has been “intensely miserable” with the burden of boredom, the result of the unchanging and ever-dull routine of his work, the ministry; he confesses to her that “its uniform duties wearied me to death…. I burnt for the more active life of the world —for the more exciting toils of a literary career —

56

Beautiful Boredom

for the destiny of an artist, author, orator; anything” (318; emphasis mine). His very language echoes hers, for, if you will recall, she proclaims earlier in the narrative that human beings “must have action” (96), that “for liberty [she] gasped” (74), and that the “real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who had courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst its perils” (74). These turns of phrase and aspirations suggest the cousins’ possible compatibility as fellow searchers. Jane and St. John, then, seem to share a longing for experience, stimulation, and full expression of their gifts and talents, and his pinpointing of this commonality is the key to his nearly successful courtship of her. St. John’s recognition and, to Jane, flattering notice of her willingness to explore new roles is perhaps one of the best weapons in his arsenal to win her over to the life of missionary wife. He cites her qualities of mind and spirit, such as her “capacity,” “tact,” courageousness, gentleness, and heroism (355). He also speaks favorably of her “unflagging energy” and restlessness, but he is perhaps more interested in her for the less exciting qualities he has himself brought out in her, such as her performing “well, punctually, uprightly, labour uncongenial to [her] habits and inclinations,” and evincing “tractability,” “the flame and excitement of sacrifice,” and “humility” (355). He makes painfully obvious to her that he is in no way physically attracted to her: “God and nature intended you for a missionary’s wife…. It is not personal, but mental endowments they have given you: you are formed for labour, not for love” (354). The other characteristics he cites as evidence that he should be able to “claim” her as his wife are even less congenial to Jane’s desires, tastes, and hopes: they include the very Christian but rather bland descriptors “docile, diligent, disinterested, faithful, constant” (355). In his self-proclaimed rejection of romantic love and lust and insistence on a marriage of utility, duty, and pragmatism, St. John produces the major stumbling block to Jane’s acceptance of his proposal. Entering into a marriage contract under these circumstances would violate Jane’s primary goal, the one for which she quests throughout the novel — being with those who appreciate her (mentally and physically), who delight and delight in her, and who can meet her as intellectual peers— a goal which can perhaps only be realized through a new form of marriage. A life as St. John’s wife would entail much physical activity and hardship (and much mental anguish) for Jane, but it would not create an environment conducive to the ideal of mental activity she enjoyed with Mr. Rochester and Diana, because while Jane’s objective is individual self-improvement and progression in the tradition of Wollstonecraft, St. John’s mission is the improvement of the

Avoiding the Boring

57

race. He offers her a regimented, industrious, impersonal routine not so different from Eliza Reed’s (albeit in a more exotic locale). Furthermore, with St. John, Jane is not on the footing of peer, but rather is and would continue to be the subservient, suppressed, self-abnegating member of the pact, as St. John elucidates by telling Jane that he wants “a wife: the sole helpmeet I can influence efficiently in life and retain absolutely till death” (357). In this sentence, St. John emphasizes that he recognizes and adheres to the traditional aesthetic and social categories for women, where the Georgiana role of beautiful, fine lady is quite simply out of the question for Jane and the Eliza/utility role of patient drudge is all Jane can really hope for. This self-abnegation and utility is what St. John has tried to encourage in Jane, via his “marble kisses” and verbal approbation for her trips to the Morton schoolhouse in foul weather (350), and it is what proves to be her sticking point in his proposal. To erase her desires for the society of intellectual equals and persons who love her in the concrete, not in the Christian abstract, is, finally, impossible: she would have to relinquish all belief that she was created for anything more exciting or fulfilling than the role of “helpmeet.” Jane concludes that “such a martyrdom [of self-abnegation through loveless marriage] would be monstrous” (356). St. John, on the other hand, has mastered at least one manifestation/application of self-denial in his rejection of Rosamond Oliver and thus the Georgiana option in a wife, a fine (beautiful) lady. Jane sees in Rosamond Oliver St. John’s equal, at least in terms of aesthetics: St. John can boast a pure Grecian profile, and Jane describes Rosamond as having a “face of perfect beauty … perfect beauty is a strong expression; but I do not retrace or qualify it” (319). Rosamond conforms to Burke’s principles of beauty even more closely than Georgiana Reed, with her “sweet features,” “pure hues of rose and lily,” “regular and delicate lineaments,” smooth cheeks and forehead, small dimpled chin, and even, flawless teeth displaying pleasing gradations of smallness, roundedness, and color (319). While Jane is able to admire her “with my whole heart,” and even to consider her “very charming,” she yet relegates her to that realm where beautiful and boring are synonyms, judging her “not profoundly interesting or thoroughly impressive” (324). Aesthetically, she and St. John seem made for each other, as he is “nearly as beautiful for a man as she for a woman” (321), but, like Jane, Rosamond discerns between St. John and herself a great point of difference intellectually and temperamentally. Rosamond is even able to observe that Jane, on the other hand, is “like Mr. Rivers,” although she does not articulate the exact site of kinship, their restlessness: Jane is “‘not one-tenth so handsome … [but is] however, good, clever, composed, and firm, like him’” (324).

58

Beautiful Boredom

St. John ignores or overcomes his desire for the beautiful Rosamond, denying himself the physical and sexual pleasures of the Georgiana–type fine lady in favor of a utilitarian Eliza–figure : a “partner,” an appropriate “labourer,” “sufferer,” and “female apostle” (329). Relinquishing his “first passion” is difficult, and he seems to struggle even physically with the effort of refusing her invitations and advances: “flushed and kindled … his chest heaved once, as if his large heart, weary of despotic constriction, had expanded, despite the will, and made a vigorous bound for the attainment of liberty … but he curbed it” (321). He is, as his sister Diana claimed, “inexorable as death” about making this “sacrifice” (321). That Rosamond “could sympathise in nothing [St. John] aspired to” outweighs the potential pleasure and “rapture” he would find as her husband (329). St. John’s aspiration is for “a foundation laid on earth for a mansion in heaven,” and Rosamond — and the indulgence of his physical, emotional, and aesthetic desires— is not deemed a suitably solid underpinning for the accomplishing of this goal. Jane is his chosen mate — remembering that St. John has declared it is not “the mere man, with the man’s selfish senses— I wish to mate: it is the missionary”— and he seems to come close to convincing her to “cease struggling with him — to rush down the torrent of his will into the gulf of his existence, and there lose my own,” as she for a moment is tempted to sacrifice “all here” “in a second” for the “safety and bliss” of eternity (357, 368). Jane’s second major moment of decision comes at this point in the novel: her first was when Mr. Rochester tried to convince her to follow the Georgiana path as his nominal and virtual wife. She knew the result of assuming the fine-lady role would be boredom (both her own and Rochester’s), but she struggles a bit more with the Eliza choice she is confronted with as St. John enjoins her to join the ranks of God’s favorites. In each instance, Jane would have to lose herself, thus destroying the dialectic dynamic that is key to a fulfilling, progressive (and progressively interesting) relationship/friendship. On the scale of activity Brontë asserts throughout the novel, productive physical utility would rank second only to the ideal of mental and romantic connection Jane perhaps believes she has lost forever in giving up Mr. Rochester. What rescues Jane from life of self-denial (in every sense — mental, emotional, and physical), subordination, and, consequently, boredom, is the mystical call across the moors of “Jane! Jane! Jane!” (369). As at previous junctures in the narrative when a promise of monotony looms large, Jane experiences something akin to the sublime. Importantly, only Jane witnesses the event, as St. John neither sees nor hears anything, asking, “What have you heard? What do you see?” This tends to support the idea that Jane is on some level conjuring, willing, or creating the supernatural in order to

Avoiding the Boring

59

quit a scene which holds out little or no hope for variety, meaningful mental activity, or simultaneous stimulation and contentment. The intervention of the sublime as a response to the boring or the threat of the boring again acts as a narrative catalyst, spurring Jane to quit Marsh End to seek Mr. Rochester and possibly a revisionist relationship. With a statement of identity and agency, she is able to break off abruptly St. John’s attempts to indoctrinate and commit her to a life of self-abnegation and “to assume ascendancy,” crying into the wind, “I am coming!… Wait for me! Oh, I will come!” Jane’s ascendancy continues into the environs of Thornfield: she does not rebel against St. John’s proffered self-denial, suppression, and subordination merely to embrace them in another locale. When Jane rejoins Mr. Rochester, the traditional roles offered to her before —financially and socially dependent wife or paramour — have been effectually erased. She is now independently wealthy and connected with an old family of good repute, while he is blinded, maimed, dispossessed of his manor house (symbol of his wealth and prestige), and dramatically widowed. Jane underscores this shift in their power balance, asserting to Mr. Rochester that “I love you better now, when I can really be useful to you, than I did in your state of proud independence, when you disdained every part but that of the giver and protector” (392). Rather than sultan and master, Rochester is in the position to be, as Wollstonecraft recommends, a friend, an equal, and a companion. Jane does not recoil from this type of “utility,” because rather than being meaningless busywork or mere duty, it is personally fulfilling — productive, pleasing, and flattering (indicating that she is the center of his world). Instead of the “inward dimness of vision” and suffocating life as a missionary’s wife Jane anticipates with St. John, she can kiss Mr. Rochester’s “rayless eyes” and enjoy being the person on whom her husband is dependent, not only as “his vision” and “his right hand,” but to “kindle the luster of animated expression” (369, 397, 386; emphasis mine). Jane is neither Eliza nor Georgiana, passively performing assigned tasks or existing as an art object. Instead, she takes pleasure in thus creating movement and causing stimulation rather than being immured by St. John’s static, marble, icy kisses. Her response to St. John’s proposed marriage of duty, service to God, and grueling physical activity is “If I were to marry you, you would kill me. You are killing me now” (363). As St. John’s wife, she believes she would be slowly smothered by boredom and the repression of her natural instincts, if she isn’t “grilled alive in Calcutta” first (366). In marked contrast, her interaction with Mr. Rochester is characterized by little physical activity but much mental exercise:

60

Beautiful Boredom my spirits were excited, and with pleasure and ease I talked to him during supper, and for a long time after. There was no harassing restraint, no repressing of glee and vivacity with him; for with him I was at perfect ease, because I knew I suited him: all I said or did seemed either to console or revive him. Delightful consciousness! It brought to life and light my whole nature: in his presence I thoroughly lived; and he lived in mine [384].

Jane “suits” her Edward in every way, even physically, as he evidences in his exclamations over her “small, slight fingers” and his affectionate appellation for her of “mocking changeling —fairy-born and human bred,” which demonstrates yet again his appreciation for her unique amalgamation of the sublime and the beautiful (386). In her long-sought marriage of equals to Mr. Rochester, Jane inverts St. John’s formula/equation that she is “formed for labour, not for love” by reassigning the values for variables such as beauty and boredom, utility and activity (354).

Boredom and Narrative Theory One final issue in Jane Eyre needs to be discussed: the relationship of boredom to plot and traditional narrative action, because it is by relocating the site of narrative action that Brontë accomplishes her shifting of definitions and values. Traditional narrative action takes place primarily in the physical world, but, as the novel progresses, Jane’s emphasis will turn more and more toward the internal and the mental rather than to external, physical action. In fact, I would argue that by the end of the novel, the privileging in the plot of mental action over traditional physical action has deepened to the extent that action and boredom (along with marriage) are effectually conflated. As an outcast at Gateshead, and again after Miss Temple leaves Lowood, Jane seems to resort to relying reflexively on traditional narrative, in that her method of dealing with boredom is to somehow get from point A to point B, under the assumption that in a different setting, something will have to be varied, and that even in the process of moving to the new setting, some sort of action will necessarily arise. A noticeable shift in this pattern begins with Mr. Rochester’s advent in Hay Lane, because although Jane’s excitement might initially seem to stem from traditional narrative action, it is clearly her mental action/imagination that provides the true stimulation. By the last chapter of the novel, Jane tells us that I am my husband’s life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am; ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. I know no weariness of my Edward’s25 society; he knows none of mine, any more than we each do of the pulsation of the heart that beats in our two separate bos-

Avoiding the Boring

61

oms; consequently, we are ever together. To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude and as gay as in company. We talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking [396–7].

Although there is no extraordinary physical action in this innovative marriage of equals— just a surfeit of reading and gazing, activities the old Jane might have found less than thrilling as the alpha and omega of her day — there is also no weariness, no desire for a change. This represents a radical shift in narrative strategy, since up to this point Jane’s attempts to avoid boredom have largely determined the novel’s plot, whether it be in her escape from Gateshead and the Reeds’ predictable and perpetual persecution, her quitting of Lowood and the strictures of what is virtually a secular nunnery, her flight from Thornfield and the clichéd positions of society wife and/or mistress, or her refusal of St. John Rivers and his proposed loveless marriage and missionary work. The novel’s narrative structure, then, is largely influenced by what Jane finds fundamentally unacceptable — boredom — and will thereby often literally flee by means of seemingly outrageous or at least unconventional action (for a young heroine of her time and circumstances). The shape of the novel is therefore one of alternating periods of boredom and of action, with the action typically propelled by the periods of boredom.26 D. A. Miller, whose Narrative and Its Discontents (1981) I discussed in the introduction, suggests ways of conceptualizing traditional narrative that are particularly helpful in analyzing Jane’s mission to avoid the boring. He defines traditional narrative as “a quest after that which will end questing,” an “expansion of what will be condensed,” “a distortion of what will be made straight,” or a “holding in suspense or a putting into question of what will be resolved or answered” (4). Miller calls that which will generate a narrative “narratable,” and that which will not generate a story “nonnarratable.”27 The nonnarratable is, furthermore, the “state of quiescence assumed by a novel before the beginning and supposedly recovered by it at the end” (ix). Instances of “disequilibrium, suspense, and general insufficiency from which a given narrative appears to arise” are then, of course, narratable. Jane’s periods of boredom might seem at first glance to be logical points of narrative stasis, and thus classified as nonnarratable, but since boredom is rarely static and can even be a productive state where things change, for Jane boredom — at least her short-term fluid boredom — is most definitely narratable. Therefore, in Jane Eyre, boredom is not only a prelude to narrative (and thus to traditional action), but also it can generate its own story, which will involve action of a different sort — mental action. Consider, for example, Jane’s fluid boredom at Lowood after Miss Temple’s marriage: rather than summarizing Jane’s psychological state or glossing it with a sen-

62

Beautiful Boredom

tence or two, Brontë details (i.e., narrates) the thought processes and negotiations of desire through which Jane arrives at the decision to attempt to dramatically alter her environs and thereby perhaps achieve “liberty” and stimulus” (74). By the end of the novel, Brontë appears to have led Jane to a state where what might once have seemed boring has become progressive and positive. While boredom should not be discounted as a “bad thing” in the world (or structure) of Brontë’s novel, since it repeatedly and reliably provides the catalyst that motivates Jane to progress toward her goal, it must be eliminated for the very same reason, because it is no longer needed as a narrative catalyst or as a site for narrative in its own right: closure depends on a move into the realm of the nonnarratable. By the end, the plot has achieved a relative stasis, in terms of physical activity, but Jane is content to remain in the situation because her focus has shifted largely to the field of mental action, which seems always new and exciting with Mr. Rochester. (And, of course, Rochester is maimed and crippled, and thereby relegated to the mental.) Jane’s relationship to the peripatetic illustrates the promotion in the hierarchy of activity she achieves by the conclusion of the novel. At Gateshead, the untaken walk would have been an empty activity with no purpose but to move from point A to point B and back to point A again. In the pre–Rochester days at Thornfield, she must pace the third floor and the roof, experiencing physical and mental stasis because there is no progression on either plane, as she goes nowhere and can only imagine being the heroine of her own story. In her walks with Rochester at Ferndean, Jane again gains no geographic ground, but she has transcended the idea of physical progression to achieve a mental progression where she is the heroine. The dialogue and progression in her dialectical relationship with Mr. Rochester supply any needed movement. The opposition between male and female makes their relationship even more dynamic than her friendships with Diana, Helen, and Miss Temple, because Jane’s and Mr. Rochester’s interaction (characterized by contrasts of body and his “masculine” mind as well as similarities of heart and soul) is necessarily more dialectical. Action is almost purely intellectual by the end of the novel, and, further emphasizing the shifting to a mental plane, our characters are approaching a nebulous physical status, as the grotesqueness of Mr. Rochester’s mutilations is ignored, as are the differences in Jane’s and his size and bodies. The result of this transformation is that both action and the relationship cease to be narratable — we would have virtually a platonic dialogue between Jane and Rochester (if not a platonic relationship) rather than a narrative. But, at the same time, boredom is transfigured — by the end, what

Avoiding the Boring

63

used to be boredom (physical and/or geographical inactivity) has become something that doesn’t propel the plot — it is satisfying in itself, it doesn’t require change, and it is infinitely progressive because it is dialectical. The back and forth movement of the dialectical and the dialogue replaces the physical action and concurrent strongly forward movement of the plot. Before, Jane’s isolated, fluid boredom always spurred change, but in this post-action state at the end of the novel, she is not solitary. Desiring liberty (à la Lowood, with her plea for a “new servitude”) signified a reflexive retreat into traditional narrative, the idea that if she moved from A to B there had to be something to generate interest and a story. Jane no longer desires liberty, though, thereby shifting her story into the realm of the nonnarratable (because mental). The final/complete reversal of traditional narrative action achieved by the conclusion of the novel, where mere Eliza–like activity is equated with boredom while doing nothing, in terms of tangible utility or corporal movement, but being engaged mentally is equated with satisfaction, enables Jane’s groundbreaking, Wollstonecraftian marriage to become both nonnarratable and non-boring. The love, contentment, and sustained pleasure in each other’s society (and thus the non-narratability) Jane and Mr. Rochester (and we are perhaps to assume, the Rivers sisters and their husbands) gain by the conclusion of the novel results from a shuffling of priorities— Jane’s and the reader’s. For the happy ending — and this trial balloon of new formulations of traditional gender relations and aesthetics— to float, the plot’s/novel’s focus must shift from conventional (physical) narrative action to mental interaction, for otherwise the forward movement would necessarily be arrested, as it is in a conventional marriage plot. Brontë seems to suggest that only through a true meeting of mind and soul, a continual dynamic interaction, a state of intellectual and spiritual equity not to be found in the marriage relation as culturally inscribed, can boredom be avoided. Throughout the novel, the options for women typified by the Reed sisters have been earmarked as boring: the Georgiana/beauty/fine lady path is boring because there is no intellectual activity and the only perceptible movement is downhill, and the Eliza/utility/drudge path is stultifying because, while physically active, it is predicated on repetition and thus cannot be progressive. Each of these options for women is tied inextricably to the marriage plot, either positively (Georgiana, for example) or negatively (like Eliza), and there seems to be no other option in fiction (or polite society) for women than society matron or useful spinster. In Romantic and early Victorian novels, perhaps only Austen’s Anne Elliot, in Persuasion, offers something close to what could be termed an “old-maid” plot, where the heroine spends a life of utility, serving others (usually her selfish family

64

Beautiful Boredom

members) and performing small humanitarian deeds. But of course, Anne is ultimately rewarded for — or rescued from — this life of self-abnegating drudgery by marriage. The only alternative ending to marriage for women protagonists in the novels of the eighteenth and early and mid-nineteenth centuries seems to be death (the ultimate stasis, perhaps); consider the corpus of just one author, Samuel Richardson, whose stories of women conclude either with marriage, à la Pamela (1740), or death, as in Clarissa (1747–48).28 If the usual options in conventional novels for women characters are wife or old maid, Georgiana or Eliza, does Brontë truly manage to avoid the stasis of “happily ever after” and the cyclical drudgery of a utilitarian plot29 by giving something different? We aren’t completely distanced, as in an Austen novel, where the final chapter is just a tying up of loose ends, a summary that is nonnarratable, such as the quick gloss over Emma Woodhouse’s marriage and transformation into Mrs. Knightley,30 but in Jane’s last chapter the action is described rather than enacted (as it was for the rest of novel). As a result, the reader does lose some intimacy with Jane, but this must perhaps suffer because of Jane’s codified intimacy with Rochester — because she is now one with him, we can no longer be as one with her. This unique ending, which extends for many pages beyond “Reader, I married him” (395), seems to grow out of the progressive dimension of their relationship. By thus rejecting the freeze-frame, fairy-tale-style ending, Brontë implies that what happens later (after the novel) will be progressively better than what happened earlier. Jane and Rochester’s narrative line and relationship will neither decline nor plateau, because they have achieved the narrative anomaly of transcending the physical for the mental. In following Wollstonecraft’s blueprint for a companionate, married friendship by purging unbalancing, short-lived lust and social inequality that threatened their first proposed union, Jane’s later relationship with Mr. Rochester escapes stasis and an assumption of boredom because it is both intellectually active and progressive. How does St. John Rivers’ reintroduction in the last pages of the novel, which has long perplexed critics and readers alike, mesh with either conventional marriage plot endings or the new progressive conclusion I believe Brontë is attempting? Why is a character who seemed intent on forcing Jane into a narrower life than she wished (one of the accepted components of the binary system — the drudge role) given such prominent placement and Brontë’s last words? Why does Brontë make us reconsider St. John Rivers at the end of the novel (when we do not want to)? Gilbert and Gubar theorize in The Madwoman in the Attic that Brontë is by then parodying Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and that her purpose in writing the book was “to

Avoiding the Boring

65

repudiate such a crucifying denial of the self ” as St. John offers (370–371). Other critics, writes Charmian Knight, detect in Jane’s “sidelong glance at the man she did not marry” an “inner dis-ease” (26).31 Knight herself suggests that Brontë’s “using the solemn prophetic language of Revelation, and focusing on the apotheosis Rivers expects, throws a light of enquiry onto the future of the woman who chose a different path. Jane too will die, but when and how and whether with such certainty of heaven, who knows?” (29). Another critic who finds the suggestion of death particularly important, Carolyn Williams, explains in “Closing the Book: The Intertextual End of Jane Eyre,” that St. John’s reinsertion is a strongly “ambivalent” gesture, where (among other agendas) Brontë/Jane is able to conjure images of death and eternal life: the one thing an autobiographical narrator cannot do … is to narrate her own death. As we close this book, its closure deftly has us thinking about death without its being Jane’s death, and to be thinking about the possibility of another world without its seeming to be Jane’s idea. As we close her book, it is another Book that has us thinking about these last things, another voice invoking the apocalyptic marriage, the new heaven and the new earth. The only kind of eternal life that secular fiction can bestow is to leave Jane in the middle of her fictional life, and so her story ends in medias res, in the middle of worldly things, on this earth [83].

Williams’ idea that St. John’s death is something of a closural sleight of hand that somehow allows Jane to remain in medias res is most closely aligned with my own interpretation of the end of the novel, although it does not quite encompass the sense of progressiveness I believe Brontë is attempting to embed. I would argue that St. John Rivers’ reintroduction, rather than an authorial misstep or a signal of any sudden doubt over the validity of Jane’s choices, is an aberration of Brontë’s only in the light of conventional marriage plot conclusions. She includes his story and its anticipated end exactly to help create a progressive — although nonnarratable —future for Jane and Mr. Rochester. His plot, which decidedly ends, what with his certain death and equally certain but nonnarratable apotheosis, lends a sense of narrative closure without Jane’s own story having to freeze in happy-ending stasis. Furthermore, in forcing our minds back to St. John, Brontë is making even more prominent and aggressive her agenda of blurring gender distinctions and expectations and subverting traditional roles. As I mentioned above, St. John and Jane do share some important traits, such as intelligence, restlessness, and a longing for experience. The key point of departure (other than the disparity in their personal beauty) is Jane’s eventual rejection and St. John’s ultimate embrace of self-abnegation. Their

66

Beautiful Boredom

decisions regarding self-denial lead to a gender chiasmus, where Jane takes on some traditionally masculine prerogatives and roles (protector and guide) while St. John exhibits the exact qualities he was looking for in a bride/helpmeet. At the novel’s conclusion, Jane has everything St. John lacks, from a son to money to love to sex (at least once). She likens him to “the warrior Greatheart” from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, who sternly “guards his pilgrim convoy from the onslaught of Apollyon” (398), and the comparison seems apt, for not only does Greatheart accomplish feats of bravery and spiritual strength, such as slaying the giant Despair, but his own commitment to the Lord is unwavering: he describes himself as “a servant of the God of Heaven; my business is to persuade Sinners to Repentance: I am commanded to do my endeavor to turn men, women, and children, from Darkness to Light, and from the power of Satan to God” (237). Like Greatheart, St. John also believes that the world is bewitching, and his description of Rosamond, when he imagines resting his temples on the breast of temptation, where the pillow is burning (329), is reminiscent of Greatheart’s injunction that “whoever doth lay their head down in her [the World’s] lap, had as good lay it down upon that block over which the axe doth hang; and whoever lays their eyes upon her beauty, are counted the Enemies of God” (293). While certainly admiring in overall tone, Jane’s comments on St. John do not neglect the “rocks and dangers,” the “labours,” or the “toil” which is drawing “near its close” (398), descriptions which contrast markedly with her own comfortable and seemingly limitless experience of animated tete-a-tetes with her loving husband on their estate in the glorious English countryside. Had Jane accompanied St. John to India as his wife, his role would have remained the traditionally masculine one of primacy and domination. Without her, however, as an unmarried man who “will never marry now” (398), he can become the spouse of Christ. Jane speaks of St. John as “faithful, devoted, full of energy, and zeal, and truth,” a “good and faithful servant” who will be “called” before long “into the joy of his Lord.” In embodying the characteristics which he himself desired in a bride and helpmeet, St. John is, in effect, arraying himself for eternal marriage to Christ as described in Revelation 19: 7–9: Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to him: for the marriage of the Lamb [Christ] is come, and his wife hath made herself ready. And to her was granted that she should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white: for the fine linen is the righteousness of saints. And he saith unto me, Write, Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb.

The mixing of gender markers in this final description of him — both womanly and warrior-like — indicates that he has given up many of the cultural

Avoiding the Boring

67

signifiers of manhood and thus prepared himself for the eternal reward he has long wished for, becoming the bride of Christ. Through feminizing him, Brontë allows St. John to achieve his goal and his potential through selfabnegation. By declining to go to India, Jane in effect enables St. John to assume an Eliza–like role32 and thus anticipate a union with God, the intimacy of which recalls Jane and Mr. Rochester’s own relationship, although the heavenly union clearly is not one of equals. Even St. John’s (and Brontë’s) last words echo Jane and Mr. Rochester’s supernatural dialogue over the moors (“I am coming! Wait for me! Oh, I will come!”): “‘My Master,’ he [St. John] says, ‘has forewarned me. Daily he announces more distinctly, —“Surely I come quickly!” and hourly I more eagerly respond, —“Amen; even so come, Lord Jesus!” (398). The italicized phrases, from Revelation 22:20, the next-to-last verse of the final book of the Bible, are said by Jesus and John, respectively, and by aligning St. John with John (the man entrusted with relating Christ’s message about the apocalypse), Brontë is demonstrating that her character, perhaps because of his frustrated effort to marry Jane, has fulfilled his potential and will surely attain “his incorruptible crown.” Despite the tone of tribute in Jane’s description of St. John’s “sure reward,” his feminization itself could function also as a critique, both of the man and of societal conventions: earlier in the novel, St. John is the epitome of the authoritative male, but when denied that role by Jane’s refusal, he becomes almost the angel in the house (or, rather, the angel in the mission), subordinating his will to a higher authority and devoting himself to the service of others. The blending of traditional ideals for the two genders, warrior Greatheart and self-abnegating angel, somehow results in a composite, androgynous character who is not to be considered the ideal. St. John becomes an interesting experiment, the feminine ideal in the public sphere. The blurring of gender in the final paragraphs of the text makes it difficult to distinguish where reverence and amplification leave off and belittling judgment begin, for St. John is ultimately subservient and supremely useful (an Eliza), with hope of being arrayed in gorgeous robes, the beautiful bride of Christ (a Georgiana), and he thus is relegated to the top of the second rung in the hierarchy of activity, the highest level to which a woman can usually hope to ascend. By gaining the very top rung via her shift from the physical to the mental, Jane sidesteps both of these conventionally feminine choices and essentially breaks through a glass ceiling to the (masculine) realm of the intellectual, where, as Wollstonecraft laments, women are not supposed to venture. To take this revolutionary step, Jane must work against prevailing notions of gender, and she demonstrates her willingness to transcend gender lines much earlier in the text, during her “spirit to

68

Beautiful Boredom

spirit” speech, and confirms her ability at the end, when she says she has become bone of her husband’s bone and flesh of his flesh. As a result, Jane ultimately finds with Mr. Rochester a course that offers movement within apparent stasis, progression without geographical journeying, thus transcending the typical cyclical female avenues to attain a projected plot line that instead spirals up. Only at death, on the other hand, is St. John able to transcend the treadmill to which his transgendering sentences him, in the other world where he will finally find that for which he has been questing. In the end, Brontë leaves us reasonably secure in the knowledge that Jane has finally succeeded, once and for all, in avoiding the boring, for she has rejected all of the charted, summarizeable courses and dissolved the traditional binaries in favor of a marriage of equality and difference, a loving friendship that is progressive and, we are to believe, constantly improving. In ascending to the top level in the hierarchy of activity and boredom, Jane has transformed and retained some aspects of the typical Eliza and Georgiana roles, just as she has imported and transfigured some characteristics of traditional aesthetic categories. Experience and observation have taught her that boredom must necessarily result from the usual female (and feminine) possibilities of beauty, conventional marriage, and indolence (circumscribed mental and physical activity) or plainness, spinsterhood, and utility (ceaseless physical activity), but this very boredom is banished from the new course Jane charts for herself. By blending sublimity and beauty on the personal and mental plane, she is able to realize an exciting, dialectical, intellectual and emotional relationship. Instead of retreating to sublime images of solitude, such as Bewick’s stark arctic seascapes, Jane can enjoy the comfort and stimulation of mental interaction without being subordinated as someone merely beautiful or useful, small or powerless (all synonymous with female). The marriage of the plain and the ugly, physically and aesthetically speaking, thus can result in the interesting and even the sublime, intellectually and emotionally.

Notes 1. As I will discuss later, Jane considers herself (and is considered) a “discord” and “heterogeneous” thing at Gateshead. 2. During her “tedious” return trip to Thornfield after her stay at Gateshead, Jane muses on the situations of Georgiana and Eliza, the first “the cynosure of a ball-room” and the second the “inmate of a convent cell” (213). Jane “dwelt on and analysed” these images and seems to consider both cousins effectually “walled up alive,” so little does either option they embody offer in the way of interest, stimulation, or freedom (212). 3. The terms “duty” and “utility” are often conflated in conduct books, for even those duties which might not seem, initially, to involve domestic tasks, such as duty to one’s parents (most manuals have chapters specifically devoted to this topic), for instance, do

Avoiding the Boring

69

ultimately concern utility, for most often filial duty is constituted by obeying parents’ wishes concerning one’s disposal in marriage and by offering parents whatever aid and pleasure one can. Fordyce writes that “duty begins” with one’s parents (12), and that “by shooting up like fair but modest flowers,” daughters can in part (they “never can repay the whole of that immense debt”) make up for “the pains and fears formerly suffered…on your account” (15). 4. Sarah Stickney Ellis, author of The Daughters of England, so clearly recognizes the force and power of these aesthetic formulations that she identifies female beauty thus conceptualized as a true social and cultural force, writing that “there is something sad in the contemplation of [beauty] … so great is the disproportion between the estimation in which it is regarded by young people in general, and its real value in the aggregate of human happiness….when we think of its frailty, its superficial character, and the certainty of its final and utter extinction; and connect these considerations with the incalculable amount of ambition, envy, and false applause, which beauty has excited — we should rather be inclined to consider it a bane than a blessing to the human race” (124). To Ellis, the parties at fault in this harmful ideation are clear: “Were there no men in the world, female beauty would be valued as a charm, but by no means as one of the highest order” (125). 5. Interestingly, Jane manages to be at once an example and the antithesis of this— she is described as willful and self-important by various authority figures, and yet she purposefully avoids the fallen-woman state. 6. Patricia Meyer Spacks suggests that conduct books manage to create a “double bind” for young women, conveying to readers that their lives should contain little interest but yet also requiring that the women “under no circumstances allow themselves to be bored” (67). 7. Gisborne defines as improving “whatever writing may contribute to her virtue, her usefulness, and her innocent satisfaction” (212). 8. While there is no direct evidence of Charlotte Brontë’s having read Wollstonecraft’s texts, the earlier writer’s influence appears quite plausible, whether because of the striking parallels in their ideas or through the agency of Mary Taylor, one of Brontë’s best friends at Roe Head School and her intellectual peer. Taylor’s observations on women’s economic and social position in England, which Brontë biographer Lyndall Gordon finds strongly reminiscent of Wollstonecraft’s 1787 protest in The Education of Daughters that “few are the modes of earning a subsistence and those very humiliating” (Wollstonecraft 69), were published in a series of articles written for the Victoria Magazine between 1865 and 1870 and dramatized in her novel Miss Miles, or A Tale of Yorkshire Life Sixty Years Ago (1890). Brontë fictionalized Taylor as the outspoken young feminist-in-training Rose Yorke in Shirley. Gordon posits that “where Mary [Taylor] concerned herself with rights for women to work in other than menial positions, Charlotte concerned herself with states of mind — the images of womanhood which were, in their way, more deeply enslaving than absent rights” (48). The lively intellectual exchange documented between Brontë and Taylor, and Brontë’s own admission that Taylor was “nearly as mad as myself ” (47), strongly suggest that the two shared feminist ideas which quite likely germinated from the seeds sown by Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindications. Taylor destroyed nearly all of Brontë’s letters to her, perceiving them as dangers to her friend’s reputation, possibly because they were strongly feminist in voice. 9. When Eliza tells Jane of her intention to take the veil in France, Jane “neither expressed surprise…nor attempted to dissuade her” (212). Instead, Jane thinks “the vocation will fit you to a hair…much good may it do you!” 10. Jane manages to have a few characteristics of beauty without actually being beautiful — she is small and delicate-looking. 11. Anne Mellor suggests that the association of the feminine and female with the sublime is not as ridiculous as Burke might have us think. She argues for a “positive Rad-

70

Beautiful Boredom

cliffean sublime” the contemplation of which, in the texts of some early–Romantic women writers, calls forth sensations “of personal exaltation, a consciousness of virtue and selfesteem, and hence of tranquility, a mental freedom from the tyrannies of men and women who are now reduced to impotent insignificance” (96). Jane’s experience of the sublime is more closely akin to this definition than to Burke’s associations of it with fear, powerlessness (in the observer), and terror. In Jane Eyre, the sublime, whether in the form of distant mountains or eerie supernatural occurrences, often acts in tandem with boredom to spur on the plot and thus Jane’s search for a wider canvas. 12. Burke would argue that people cannot be sublime, per se, but the ideas of limitlessness and infinity characteristic of the sublime seem (to Brontë and Jane) intellectually transportable. Those characters who can most nearly approach the sublime are the most attractive to Jane: Mr. Rochester’s and Helen Burns’ appeal are very connected to the idea of limitless interest and vast intellect. 13. Bewick’s functions as a tangible symbol of the sublime for Jane, for it provides some of her early training in the elements of this aesthetic category. Growing up the Reed household, with books as virtually her only safe companions, Jane focuses on the plates in Bewick which depict arctic or oceanic solitude, sinister crimes, and gothic churchyards, although the majority of the volume’s illustrations depict harmless, light, and pleasing scenes. 14. As neither a servant nor an heir, Jane even lacks utility. 15. Later, Mr. Brocklehurst will characterize her as evil and thus far from beautiful even spiritually, but the novel has prepared the reader to see this as only more proof of the opposition between surface and underlying substance Jane must encounter. 16. Interestingly, Jane uses some of the same design principles when she redecorates Moor House. 17. Just as the books Jane peruses—Gulliver’s Travels, History of Rome, Arabian Nights, and Bewick’s British Birds—fall outside the Reeds’ construction of beauty and indolence (but not power — John Reed will own them, he insists), the local legends and superstitions are shared with Jane by Bessie, someone outside the social norm, a representative of the more subversive lower-class perspective. 18. If we relate the properties of the sublime and the beautiful to time, sudden changes would fall into the first category, while gradual shifts would belong to the second. 19. Jane, who often speaks of physiognomies, would appreciate these aesthetic imperfections as evidence of an active mental life (rather than the less desirable active and/or utilitarian physical life). 20. Burke characterizes the beautiful as gradual and shifting in almost imperceptible degrees, but his sublime consists of jagged edges and abrupt movements from dark to light and high to low. 21. Of “ugliness,” Burke writes that though it “be the opposite to beauty, it is not the opposite to proportion and fitness. For it is possible that a thing may be very ugly with any proportions, and with a perfect fitness to any uses. Ugliness I imagine likewise to be consistent enough with an idea of the sublime. But I would by no means insinuate that ugliness of itself is a sublime idea” (108–109). 22. In A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters, John Gregory implicitly connects lust and boredom, advising that in marriage “Violent love cannot subsist, at least cannot be expressed, for any time together, on both sides; otherwise the certain consequence, however concealed, is satiety and disgust” (88). 23. Rather than the dialectical dynamic of difference within equality, both the conventional wife and mistress roles would lead to Jane’s subjugation and resultant boredom. 24. Although Jane may seem here to be swerving toward the domestic duties and accomplishments advocated by the domestic ideologues, she is again disrupting conventional binaries: many conduct-book writers specifically mention domestic tasks as an

Avoiding the Boring

71

antidote or vaccine for “dissipations,” and by combining the ideas of the domestic and the non-utilitarian, Jane is still steering clear of the patient-drudge/Eliza role. She makes it clear that she chooses these household occupations, and that her mind, stimulated by witty conversation, is not circumscribed by the domestic sphere. 25. Notice that she has made the transition to his Christian name, symbolic of the equality she revels in of their union — he long called her Jane. 26. Jane’s redefined sublime plays into this narrative structure as well, helping her first to navigate the hazards of the traditional binaries of gender, power, and boredom and then (in its intellectual manifestation) to satisfactorily resolve the opposition between physical movement and mental progression that is present from the outset of the novel. 27. The nonnarratable is not the same as the simply unnarrated or the unspeakable — it is that which has no narrative future. 28. Jane would perhaps choose death, given these options: consider her near-suicidal trek through the moors, all to avoid the (boring) conventional wife/mistress role. 29. The utility plot is common to stock side characters, who cannot be the heroines because their treadmill lives are incapable of generating narrative (they are ultimately nonnarratable). 30. Austen summarizes the ceremony and matrimony itself, all in the very last sentence of Emma, telling us only that “the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions of the small band of true friends who witnessed the ceremony, were fully answered in the perfect happiness of the union” (440). 31. Annette Tromly, for instance, in “The Cover of the Mask — The Autobiography in Charlotte Brontë’s Fiction,” posits that Jane is comparing her own “pedestrian existence” with the “epic scale” of St. John’s undertaking, thus demonstrating that she “is not in fact free from either doubt or desire” at the end of her own story (61). 32. Though she serves as the spinster type in the novel, Eliza converts to Catholicism and takes holy orders, becoming a bride of Christ (a nun) and eventually a mother superior.

2

The Complexion of Boredom in Middlemarch As I intimated in the previous chapter, a major problem the Victorian author faces is how, when contemporary society mandates separate spheres for the sexes, to create traditional narrative action in a novel centered on a woman. One solution to this dilemma is reconfiguring action to be mental rather than physical, as we saw by the end of Jane Eyre. In Middlemarch, George Eliot amplifies Brontë’s strategy — to such a degree, in fact, that we are alerted to the potential danger of operating entirely on the plane of intellectual action, most notably through Dorothea Brooke’s decision to marry Mr. Casaubon (Dorothea imagines and aspires to a union like Jane and Rochester’s, but what she attains in her first marriage is, in actuality, much more akin to what Jane struggles to avoid). A result of Eliot’s venturing more fully into the realm of the mental than Brontë is her more detailed and dramatic exploration of boredom: while fluid boredom makes regular appearances in Jane Eyre, it is never played out as explicitly as in Middlemarch. In each novel, boredom functions as an important narrative catalyst, but Middlemarch plays out the conventional plots that Jane Eyre (and Jane Eyre) rejects as too boring, and in the later work, the psychological state in its various manifestations functions (perhaps even more than their actions) as an index to characters’ classifications as positive or negative/constructive or destructive. If, as Dorothea suggests earlier in Middlemarch, “souls have complexions” (6), then boredom does as well, and no two characters have as different a complexion of boredom as the novel’s two female protagonists, Dorothea and Rosamond Vincy. These two characters, sometimes considered the heroine and villain (or at least anti-heroine) of the piece, share a characteristic that differentiates them quite decidedly from Jane Eyre — exceptional physical beauty. In Jane Eyre, beauty is de-valued, redefined, and, ultimately, subverted, for Jane is not caught in a beauty trap at the conclusion of the novel: there is never anything beautiful about Rochester, who is both ugly and unable 72

The Complexion of Boredom in Middlemarch

73

to see his unlovely wife. Beauty, however, is problematized in Middlemarch as well, for it seems both to endow inappropriate power, as in the case of Rosamond with Tertius Lydgate, and to limit uncomfortably one’s field of action, as with Dorothea. Thus, while Jane is attempting to find a new space outside the beauty/utility opposition, Dorothea, on the one hand, grapples with but ultimately capitulates to her designated (but boring) place in this paradigm within which Rosamond always operates. Rosamond, on the other hand, suffers from thwarted desire for a large portion of the narrative, but her boredom of frustration arises from her being denied what the beauty/fine-lady model to which she carefully subscribes is supposed to offer — admiration, decorativeness, and freedom from utility. In other words, Dorothea and Rosamond find most boring that which the other most strongly desires: for Rosamond, utility is boring, and for Dorothea, uselessness is. For the majority of the novel, Dorothea is determined to find personal utility, and her repeated and insistent efforts to distance herself from her own beauty indicate her desire to claim another, more useful role than that of beautiful heiress. She has a great and persistent impulse toward the social (and public) sphere, but this, more than once in the novel, is redirected, lost, and/or appropriated by the romantic sphere. Despite her attempts to become useful although beautiful, Dorothea finally gravitates toward beauty (and boredom), thus reinforcing her limitations as a woman, because to be involved in forwarding beauty1 does not challenge the conventional paradigm, even if one is advocating social causes.

Beauty and Utility: A Troubled Relationship The narrator emphasizes that Dorothea Brooke is beautiful in the very first sentence of the novel, explaining that she “had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress” (1). Thus invested from the beginning with the sort of good looks that belong in fairy tales,2 Dorothea is quickly granted a beauty sanctified by religious and biblical associations, with her hand and wrist … so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible [1].

The narrator confides further that local men find her “bewitching” when she indulges in the “pagan” and “sensuous” activity of horseback riding (3),

74

Beautiful Boredom

thus rounding out the impression that Dorothea’s beauty is the stuff of myth and legend, Christian and pre–Christian alike. Despite her “undeniable beauty” (64), though, Dorothea is not the neighborhood’s uncontested it-girl. When newly engaged to Mr. Casaubon, Dorothea is “naturally the subject of many observations” (59), and though the lawyer, Standish, declares her “a fine woman … an uncommonly fine woman, by God!” (60), he agrees with Mr. Chichely, the bachelor, that she is not everyone’s “style of woman.” Dorothea, with her “silver-grey dress” and demurely parted brown hair, is not one of those girls who “lays herself out a little more to please us” (59, 60). Rather than this image of Santa Barbara,3 serene and un-self-conscious, the “middle-aged fellows” prefer “something of a coquette,” such as the blond and swan-necked Rosamond Vincy. This veritable Greek chorus of minor characters voice a sense of dissatisfaction with Dorothea as an ideal of perfect beauty and therefore of perfect potential-wifehood: they detect in her almost other-worldly beauty a unsettling undercurrent of originality and ambition. A “girl so handsome and with such prospects” is not the most sought-after commodity on the local marriage mart precisely because of her “love of extremes” and her tendency to kneel down suddenly “on a brick floor by the side of a sick labourer” and pray “fervidly” (3). Such a woman might, as a wife, awaken her husband “some fine morning with a new scheme for the application of her income which would interfere with political economy and the keeping of saddle horses.” Although her disappointed suitor, Sir James Chettam, considers Dorothea the “mirror of women still,” Mrs. Cadwallader and Lady Chettam, voices of conventional marital wisdom, opine in favor of Celia Brooke, who, “though [she has] not so fine a figure” as her sister, “is fonder of geraniums, and seems more docile” (61). “Little Celia”4 is often heralded in the community as the Brooke sister with common sense, as more “amiable” and “innocent looking” than Dorothea, all qualities, along with her appreciation of that most domestic and ordinary of flowers, the geranium, that suggest she would make an excellent, uncomplicated bride and matron (61, 3). Significantly, “rural opinion” holds that Dorothea’s “large eyes,” rather than augmenting her beauty, symbolize her idea and practice of religion — they are “too unusual and striking” (3). Dorothea does not court rural opinion, which is, of course, at the heart of some of the popular quibbles with her beauty (a term synonymous with her marriageability). Her deliberate eschewing of frippery, ornament, and fashionable hairstyles sometimes lends her the appearance of a saint, Madonna, or novitiate, and it extends even to jewelry with sentimental value: she tells her sister “we should never wear” the necklaces and rings left to them by their mother, and shudders that “not for the world, not for

The Complexion of Boredom in Middlemarch

75

the world” would she wear as a “trinket” the pearl and diamond cross Celia urges on her (5).5 This ascetic quality and over-niceness about religion detract from the marketablility of her looks in Middlemarch at the same time that they invest her beauty with some indefinable difference. Will Ladislaw’s friend, the German Romantic painter Adolf Naumann, who can appreciate her Quakerish beauty from the perspective of art rather than commerce or matrimony, recognizes in her “beauty in its breathing life, with the consciousness of Christian centuries in its bosom” (131). At the Vatican, Naumann importunes and drags Will to the Hall of Statues in order to see this living embodiment of loveliness: They were just in time to see another figure standing against a pedestal near the reclining marble [of the Ariadne, “then called the Cleopatra” 6]: a breathing, blooming girl, whose form, not shamed by the Ariadne, was clad in Quakerish grey drapery; her long cloak, fastened at the neck, was thrown backward from her arms, and one beautiful ungloved hand pillowed her cheek pushing somewhat backward the white beaver bonnet which made a sort of halo to her face around the simply braided dark-brown hair” [131].

The artist would, however, prefer her to be dressed as a nun, regardless of the wedding ring on “that wonderful left hand.” Will, too, reveres her special brand of minimalist beauty, declaring plastic art incapable of capturing her complete divineness, but most particularly that of her voice, which is like “the voice of a soul that had once lived in an Aeolian harp” (53). So, Dorothea is beautiful, undoubtedly, unquestionably. The important question becomes why. Brontë had already demonstrated, in Jane Eyre, that a female protagonist did not have to be lovely to be loved (by readers or by other characters), and she had quite convincingly made beautiful characters almost universally unsympathetic in the world of that novel. Therefore, it is difficult to believe that the main purpose in Dorothea’s beauty is merely to court readers. Instead, we can perhaps analyze the significance of this characteristic in the very terms it was dealt with by Eliot’s literary predecessors, Brontë and Wollstonecraft7— the beauty or utility/marriage or spinsterhood options for women, both of which usually lead to boredom. While for Jane and Brontë the question is whether or not an unlovely, bored, and (reluctantly) useful woman can find love and marriage, the question for Dorothea and Eliot is perhaps whether it is possible for a beautiful woman to eschew marriage and boredom for a larger utility. The faux utility with which marriageable and married ladies are to be satisfied both frustrates and wearies Dorothea: With some endowment of stupidity and conceit, she might have thought that a Christian young lady of fortune should find her ideal of life in village charities, patronage of the humbler clergy, the perusal of “Female Scripture Characters,”

76

Beautiful Boredom unfolding the private experience of Sara under the Old Dispensation, and Dorcas under the New, and the care of her soul over her embroidery in her own boudoir — with a background of prospective marriage to a man who, if less strict than herself, as being involved in affairs religiously inexplicable, might be prayed for and seasonably exhorted. From such contentment poor Dorothea was shut out. The intensity of her religious disposition, the coercion it exercised over her life, was but one aspect of a nature altogether ardent, theoretic, and intellectually consequent: and with such a nature, struggling in the bands of a narrow teaching, hemmed in by a social life which seemed nothing but a labyrinth of petty courses, a walled-in maze8 of small paths that led no whither, the outcome was sure to strike others as at once exaggeration and inconsistency [17].

This “narrow” concept of utility, which Dorothea finds unbearably boring and unfulfilling, is outlined and promoted in many of the conduct manuals of her day. Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women advocates cultivating only the “beautiful and useful accomplishments suited to their rank and condition,” such as embroidery, the supervision of servants, minor nursing skills, and the love of clean and neat homes, claiming these as “the chief ornaments of their sex; these will render them truly lovely as Women” (7; emphasis mine). Fordyce, like many of his contemporaries, earnestly advises being “in love with home” and seeking “happiness” only there and within the scope of “domestic accomplishments” (108). He cautions most strongly against “breaking loose through each domestic enclosure, and ranging at large the wide common of the world,” for this “wandering abroad” is dangerous9 for “a young person (supposing her dispositions in other respects ever so good)” (108, 250). Any young woman who despises these accomplishments as “trivial or dull” or boring will find that “the fault is in” her, for they offer “ample scope for the exercise of ” her faculties. Dorothea’s boredom and lack of “contentment” with the prescribed behavior and (limited) actions for a woman of her “rank and condition” is thus perceived by those who think conventionally about gender as at the least an unnatural moral failing and, at the worst, an indication of unacceptable sexual vulnerability. Dorothea ardently wishes for opportunities to help and improve the lives of others, and not via exceptional needlework or pleasant musical artistry, both of which she finds exceedingly tiresome, but in meaningful and important ways, such as housing and education. Rather than nurturing the traditional feminine accomplishments (which comprise the only “utility” offered to one of her station) as espoused by Fordyce, she prefers to read Pascal and Taylor and visit the infant school she “set going” in the village, but the kind of “work which she delighted in” most is drawing up plans for model cottages (4). The “idea of some active good within her reach” informs Dorothea’s actions, or, more often than not, her desire for action,

The Complexion of Boredom in Middlemarch

77

and her personal creed could easily be “I hope I shall be more useful” (139). Improving the standard of living for the lower classes, thus making many people happier, interests her much more than the accepted/acceptable pursuits for one of her gender, age, and position: however, she is prohibited by her beauty and rank from engaging in these useful aims. Jane Eyre, as an unbeautiful woman of indeterminate class, is considered (by society at large) perfect for a strictly utilitarian, non-romantic role, and Dorothea is conversely designated by her beauty and rank to be useless and a romantic object. Whereas Jane Eyre rejects travel to India and the far-reaching (although debatable by modern ideas) utility of converting and educating multitudes, the reader must believe Dorothea would leap at this prospect which is, however, inaccessible to her. Just as Jane fears the mission to India with St. John would mean submission to the loveless utility trap, Dorothea fears a socially approved and conventionally constructed marriage to Sir James would indicate capitulation to the useless-beauty/marriage trap. In Middlemarch, Eliot is quite possibly interrogating the plausibility of any path outside the beauty/utility opposition, and the possibility of a goal of epic (or at least extra-domestic and non-boring) scope for any woman, even a woman blessed with beauty, intelligence, social standing, and not a little money.10 Middlemarch’s “Prelude,” which focuses on the epic figure of Saint Theresa of Avila, communicates (if somewhat indirectly) Eliot’s ideas about women’s vocation and work in the nineteenth century. The narrator asks, Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom among the Moors? Out they toddled from rugged Avila, wide-eyed and helpless-looking as two fawns, but with human hearts, already beating to a national idea; until domestic reality met them in the shape of uncles, and turned them back from their great resolve. That child-pilgrimage was a fit beginning. Theresa’s passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness … [xiii].

That Theresa functions as an emblem for Dorothea is apparent from oblique references to “uncles” (her uncle, Mr. Brooke, always belittles all women’s intellectual capacity11), the intrusion of “domestic reality,” which consistently derails Dorothea’s plans, and the insufficiency of ladies’ light literature and Sir James Chettam’s attentions to this other “brilliant girl.” And, Dorothea is perhaps but the representative of a type, the “later-born There-

78

Beautiful Boredom

sas” who “found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action” (xiii). Thus, Eliot poses the question of whether every village has a Dorothea — less beautiful or wealthy, perhaps, but just as full of potential and just as unable to really “do” anything of importance or interest. The “Prelude” is a favorite subject for modern critics of Middlemarch, and while they agree on a connection between Saint Theresa and Dorothea, they debate its nature. In “The Image of St. Theresa in Middlemarch and Positive Ethics,” for example, Franklin Court suggests that “Eliot must have known enough about Theresa’s life and her religious reforms to realize that the Discalced Carmelite order that Theresa established in the 16th century was one of the most intensely restrictive, cloistered, and contemplative orders of all the religious orders for women” (22). He goes on to say that “It was also, as Eliot surely realized, a life style that could exert an irresistible appeal in the mind of a naïve young devotee convinced of her own blessedness and desirous of sainthood, a young innocent intent on sacrificing herself to some great, divinely conceived, ‘illimitable’ ideal or cause.” Hilary Fraser, in “St. Theresa, St. Dorothea, and Miss Brooke in Middlemarch” takes Court’s idea about self-sacrifice even further, arguing that while “most critics have persisted in interpreting George Eliot’s identification of Dorothea with St. Theresa simply in the light of the Spanish saint’s epic life as a founder and reformer of religious communities,” and that whereas “Certainly the author herself directs the reader’s attention to this particular aspect of the St. Theresa myth in order to underline the fact that such heroic fulfillment is unavailable to the modern woman,” yet “there are two further aspects to the St. Theresa story which parallel Dorothea’s most characteristic traits: her earnest desire for martyrdom and her ardent capacity for love” (400–401; emphasis mine). Most recently, Sherry Mitchell has constructed a more radical reading of both the saint and the later-day Theresas (Dorothea and Mary Ann Evans): in “St. Teresa and Dorothea Brooke: The Absent Road to Perfection in Middlemarch,” she theorizes that “By utilizing Saint Teresa as a figure who represents vistas of accomplishment that are no longer available to even the most talented of Victorian women, Eliot achieves a two fold purpose: she foregrounds the problematic position of Dorothea’s relation to contemporary discourses of normative femininity, while implicitly illuminating her own assumption of a subtly subversive speaking position analogous to that held by Teresa of Avila” (32). Mitchell discovers this latent subversiveness in Theresa’s less-known practices of directing “the spiritual development of her Carmelite nuns, establish[ing] a number of convents, and, over the course of her lifetime, us[ing] multiple rhetorical strategies to defend herself in writing from the increasing misogyny of the Inquisition.”

The Complexion of Boredom in Middlemarch

79

While these interpretations are well reasoned and nicely argued, in my analysis, beauty, utility, and boredom, not subversion and martyrdom, constitute the meaningful subtext of the St. Theresa analogy. Rather than so much emphasis on what Theresa’s biography is known to be, the focus perhaps should be on what of Theresa’s life Eliot chooses to relate and how she describes it. Through this approach, specifics of historical religious misogyny and details of martyrs’ deaths fade into relative unimportance when weighed against contemporary, commonplace notions of gender. A close reading of the “Prelude” underlines the picturesque beauty of young Theresa’s first essay to find the Moors: “who … has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl … [and] her still smaller brother … out they toddled … wide-eyed and helpless-looking as two fawns” (xiii). Theresa is “smiled” on by Eliot’s and Dorothea’s societies for attempting something the conduct books they embrace declare is unsuitable for women, and for the reason that she exactly embodies “helpless” beauty while she does it, with her wide eyes, small size, and innocence of childhood. (Perhaps even more importantly, she fails and is “turned … back” (xiii).) This beauty is apparent in the role expected of a “brilliant girl” like her — making purely “social conquests.” Her “weariness” or boredom with the limitations of this expectation — the beauty trap — is what drives her to seek greater utility and a life outside the conventional domestic sphere. Interestingly, her “epic” life is not detailed; it is merely glossed as “the reform of a religious order,” an activity which furthermore seems the province of ages past, and perhaps this is why the collective “who” of Eliot’s audience can humor Theresa’s freaks of conduct. Whereas Theresa was able to attain a life of epic and historic usefulness— reforming the church — as well as of “soaring” beauty and “spiritual grandeur” (xiii), those women of the novel’s time period who might have some spark of genius or inspiration are denied either/both meaningful beauty or/and utility, achieving only an ugly and unproductive “life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity.” Even if the later-born Theresas do manage to “shape their thought and deed in noble agreement,” to “common eyes[,] their struggles” seem merely “inconsistency and formlessness” when viewed through the lens of nineteenth-century gender politics.12 In other words, the “Prelude” instructs that in the 1830s, acts and desires for true beauty and usefulness (and thus against boredom) would be condemned by society as “extravagance” or “lapse[s]” and left unrecorded by history. Eliot’s contemporary definitions of feminine beauty and usefulness deny the possibility and opportunity for “long-recognisable” deeds, instead creating “hindrances” and engendering the meaningless dispersion of talent, energy, and effort. Boredom is thus a mandate, not a call to arms (or

80

Beautiful Boredom

utility), and any attempts to find an “epos” outside the beauty paradigm will be frowned upon by the Middlemarch community. Rosamond Vincy is no later-day Theresa, for she finds that she can usually operate quite happily and successfully in the circumstances/parameters of the beauty construct that women like Dorothea find so boring and frustrating. Rosy has all that is needed for conventional success— beauty and accomplishments— and, more importantly, a complete satisfaction with the horizons engagement and marriage (to the proper husband) should provide. Unlike Dorothea, who agonizes over decisions about the right or best thing to do, Rosamond is confident that “what she liked to do was … the right thing” (404). Only deviations from the “right thing” as thus defined will engender boredom for her. Rosamond is consumed with the “manyvolumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests” that the later-day Theresa considers unfulfilling, and her actions, precisely because not on an epic scale or involving a long-recognizable deed, are always approved of and even vaunted by the society at large. In fact, she functions as a perfect foil for Dorothea in the matters of beauty, utility, boredom, and marriageability. In contrast to Dorothea’s unsettling avoidance of artifice and frills is Rosamond’s “excellent taste in costume, with that nymph-like figure and pure blondness which give the largest range to choice of costume,” her grey gowns to Rosamond’s “garment seeming[ly] made out of the faintest blue sky” (109), and her lack of vanity, always ascribing Sir James’ visits to an admiration of Celia, to Rosamond’s admiring glances at her own lovely neck in mirrors (65). Rosamond is always aware and in control of the impression she makes: “Every nerve and muscle in Rosamond was adjusted to the consciousness that she was being looked at.13 She was by nature an actress of parts that entered into her physique: she even acted her own character, and so well, that she did not know it to be precisely her own” (80). Rosamond thus follows conduct-book decrees to the letter and also illustrates what Mary Wollstonecraft predicts is the price of such adherence: “had I nothing to object against his [Dr. Fordyce’s] mellifluous precepts, I should not allow girls to peruse them, unless I designed to hunt out every spark of nature out of their composition, melting every human quality into female weakness and artificial grace” (RW 194; emphasis mine). Wollstonecraft is appalled that Fordyce advises piety for its attractiveness and marketability: he counsels young women that never, perhaps, does a fine woman strike more deeply, than when, composed into pious recollection, and possessed with the noblest considerations, she assumes, without knowing it, superior dignity and new graces; so that the beauties of holiness seem to radiate about her, and the bystanders are almost induced to

The Complexion of Boredom in Middlemarch

81

fancy her already worshipping amongst her kindred angels! [196–197; emphasis mine].

Rosamond operates on the same wavelength as Fordyce, perceiving all around her as bystanders, onlookers— in short, an audience (usually of the opposite sex). Rather than considering herself “rendered [an] object of pity,” however, as Wollstonecraft suggests, Rosamond believes herself empowered by these operations of the gaze. It is her beauty, of course, which grounds this contentment, for Rosamond is fortunate in the possession of “small feet,” “perfectly turned shoulders,” exquisite curves of lip and eyelid,” “infantine blondness,” “self-possessed grace,” and “wondrous hair-plaits” (109–110), and she has cultivated “the impression of refined manners” and a virtuosic level in most accomplishments. Her piano playing especially indicates more talent and breadth of soul than she actually has, for she mimics/parrots her former piano master’s “large rendering of noble music with the precision of an echo,” making herself seem “something exceptional” to her startled listeners. Utility, for Rosamond, consists of being always “her own standard of a perfect lady” (115). This is a utility tempered and, happily for her, limited by her beauty; not for her the boring drudgery of unattractive spinsters, such as Miss Morgan14 or Mary Garth,15 who must wait on the surly and misanthropic old miser Peter Featherstone only as a preferable alternative to attaining a post as school mistress or governess.16 No, Rosamond has been trained to believe her function/use, such as it is, is to be primarily decorative, light, and pleasantly inconsequential. For instance, she is rarely without her embroidery or sketchpad or away from the piano, suitable and attractive occupations for one of her beauty, but hardly anything either epic (such as Dorothea aspires to) or grinding (such as those unlovely members of the utility half of the paradigm must perform). She manages to charm both the elderly and young men who visit the house with her profitless industry, garnering the sentiment that she is “the best girl in the world! He will be a happy fellow who gets her!” (115). Rosamond’s ambition17 is to garner this same admiration in a substantially elevated social circle, one far removed from her middle-class, manufacturing background: while Dorothea rebels against the image of the fine lady as depicted by Wollstonecraft, finding it unrewarding and numbingly boring, Rosamond wants nothing so much as to be recognized as one. It is commonplace married utility, the everyday minor drudgery of paying bills or keeping accounts or economizing or listening to boorish husbands, that Rosamond finds boring. Unlike the ardent and self-sacrificing Dorothea or the merely pragmatically selfsacrificing Mary Garth, Rosamond has vowed she “would never do any-

82

Beautiful Boredom

thing that was disagreeable to her,” and this is perhaps a luxury of uselessness only the beautiful can indulge in (115). While Dorothea is anxious to prove her utility on a larger canvas, Rosamond is disturbed, discomfited, and bored by any definition of usefulness that falls outside her perception of being a perfect lady, and in her marriage to Lydgate she blankly abstains from any true (if ordinary) utility such as keeping track of the budget and only performs such falsely useful acts as playing piano, singing, and working her needlepoint. Although the community in general finds Dorothea difficult to pigeonhole, Rosamond and Mary seem fairly typical and representative of the beauty/utility paradigm. Mr. Featherstone is proud to introduce Rosamond as his niece yet “he had never thought it worthwhile to refer to Mary Garth in that light” (79), and the difference in his treatment reflects the difference in their looks and relative placement on the conventional hierarchy of beauty and utility: he dismisses all nieces but Rosamond as “dark and ugly” and therefore not worth contemplating (73). When Mary’s and Rosamond’s images are reflected in a common mirror, Eliot neatly illustrates the relationship between the useful and the decorative in their world: Mary comments laughingly —“What a brown patch I am by the side of you, Rosy! You are the most unbecoming companion.” “Oh no! No one thinks of your appearance, you are so sensible and useful, Mary. Beauty is of very little consequence in reality,” said Rosamond, turning her head towards Mary, but with eyes swerving towards the new view of her neck in the glass. “You mean my beauty,” said Mary, rather sardonically [77; emphasis mine].

The two women’s attitudes reveal a clearly understood line of demarcation between the two standard varieties of women, their prospects and their attitudes.18 Since Mary is not beautiful, Rosamond assumes that the only important measure or notice to be taken of her plain cousin is the degree of her utility — to her, it is silly for Mary to even think about her appearance, since her plainness automatically marks her for the other (spinster) path. Rosamond cannot comprehend why Mary seems offended by her remarks19; after all, praising a plain woman’s usefulness, which is her defining characteristic, is the highest compliment such a woman should/could expect. Even Dr. Tertius Lydgate, the progressive and self-consciously “enlightened” physician and newcomer to this particular society, completely swallows the conventional ideas about two sole types of women — the patient drudge/spinster and the beautiful fine lady, who is a possible object of affection and possession. The narrator asks (rhetorically) how there could “be any commonness in a man so well-bred, so ambitious of social distinction,

The Complexion of Boredom in Middlemarch

83

so generous and unusual in his views of social duty” as Lydgate, and responds that Lydgate’s spots of commonness lay in the complexion of his prejudices, which, in spite of noble intention and sympathy, were half of them such as are found in ordinary men of the world: that distinction of mind which belonged to his intellectual ardour, did not penetrate his feeling and judgment about furniture, or women … [103].

The listing of women with furniture indicates a good deal about Lydgate’s conceptions of the opposite sex: they are completely separate from the “intellectual” sphere and instead are a piece with comfortable or decorative accessories. Mary Garth, he tells Reverend Farebrother, “is very quiet — I have hardly noticed her” (121), and when he first meets her he only looks closely at her because Rosamond is talking earnestly with her. He seems to immediately relegate her to the realm of the unbeautiful20 and useful, and, since not directly useful to him, unworthy of too much time or notice. Mr. Farebrother, on the other hand, has nothing but admiration for Mary,21 whom he calls “an excellent girl” and “a favourite of mine” (121). However, he notices every last detail of Rosmond’s comportment, whether her “adorable kindness,” her “pretty lightness,” or her “flower-like head” (79–80). She is, based on her appearance, promptly classed into the marriageable/beautiful/useless designation, for before long, Lydgate is musing that if falling in love had been at all in question, it would have been quite safe with a creature like this Miss Vincy, who had just the kind of intelligence one would desire in a woman — polished, refined, docile, lending itself to finish in all the delicacies of life, and enshrined in a body which expressed this with a force of demonstration that excluded the need for other evidence [113].

Even if Lydgate believes he entertains these notions only in the abstract, he does see in Rosamond every indication of a perfect wife, one who would “bring him the sweet furtherance of satisfying affection — beauty — repose — such help as our thoughts get from the summer sky and the flower-fringed meadows” (245). He imagines that Rosamond, as an emblem of “perfect womanhood,” is “an accomplished creature who venerated his high musings and momentous labours and would never interfere with them; who would create order in the home and accounts with still magic, yet keep her fingers ready to touch the lute and transform life into romance at any moment” (243). The womanly features encoded as desirable and attractive for Lydgate are closely related to that which is fairly impractical, domestic (in terms of scope and sphere), non-utilitarian, and tranquil, and the language he uses to describe this ideal mate echoes the tone Mr. Rochester’s comments begin to take after his first engagement to Jane Eyre. As I mentioned in my first chapter, Mr. Rochester’s seemingly progressive notions

84

Beautiful Boredom

about women (or at least Jane) and marriage jerk into reverse almost as soon as she has accepted his proposal, and she is annoyed and bored by his ever-more-importunate attempts thereafter to transform her from plain Jane into a beautiful fine lady, the object of his sultanic gaze and lust rather than his intellectual and emotional peer. Lydgate’s marriage to Rosamond is a playing out of this conventional marriage plot Jane and Brontë so vehemently reject (via Bertha and the flight across the moors), and the stultifying boredom it engenders for both bride and groom in Middlemarch would come as no surprise to Jane, who identified this as one of the greatest dangers of succumbing to Mr. Rochester’s desires. A marriage between Dorothea and Lydgate, which would be perhaps the closest parallel Middlemarch could have offered to Jane and Rochester’s eventual union, seems a narrative possibility largely uncontemplated by both the characters most concerned and the Middlemarch community. Although, in a vein similar to Dorothea’s, Lydgate’s own personal ambition is “to do good small work for Middlemarch, and great work for the world,” he is incapable of appreciating this reforming impulse in a woman,22 at least initially. Unlike Rosamond, whose beauty symbolizes that which is decorative and pleasing rather than useful and questing, Dorothea conjures no images of domestic bliss for Lydate in the early stages of their acquaintance. Whereas Rosamond has a “true melodic charm,” producing, as all lovely women should (in Lydgate’s reckoning), “the effect of exquisite music,” Dorothea manages, despite her “undeniable beauty,” to strike an unharmonious chord with Lydgate. After their first conversation, he determines that she does not “look at things from the proper feminine angle…. The society of such women was about as relaxing as going from your work to teach the second form, instead of reclining in a paradise with sweet laughs for birdnotes, and blue eyes for a heaven” (64). He recognizes that Dorothea is “a good creature” (“that fine girl,” he calls her), but he declares that “it is troublesome to talk to such women,” because “they are always wanting reasons, yet they are too ignorant to understand the merits of any question, and usually fall back on their moral sense to settle things after their own taste” (62). Lydgate correctly divines that Dorothea craves the knowledge and learning she believes is only accessible via conversation with/instruction by an educated man, and he disparages the idea of an intellectual connection and dialogue with a beautiful (perhaps any) woman — his likening of Dorothea to the “second form” is both patronizing and self-protective. Her intellect, he implies, must be like that of a schoolchild, callow and unformed, and, though he thinks he wants an establishment where his intellect reigns supreme, he does not relish the role of schoolmaster (which is hardly a romantic or upwardly mobile one, class-wise).23

The Complexion of Boredom in Middlemarch

85

Though we learn that he truly cannot afford it, what Lydgate wants is a wife who by her very uselessness, beauty, and lack of intellectual curiosity communicates that he is someone to reckon with, intellectually, professionally, and socially speaking. The more pragmatic Farebrother advises his new friend to define a suitable mate as “a good unworldly woman” who “may really help a man, and keep him more independent” (120), but Lydgate, while realizing that “taking a wife is something more than a question of adornment,” still is “disposed to give it [adornment] the first place among wifely functions” (64). Lydgate, who has very little money, perceives of marriage and potential wives in many of the same ways as does a man much his senior and, as is universally acknowledged, considerably less dashing — Mr. Casaubon24: both want wives who conform to the beautiful/fine-lady role Wollstonecraft outlines. The wealthy scholar takes “a wife … to adorn the remaining quadrant of his course, and be a little moon that would cause hardly a calculable perturbation” (64). Like Lydgate, Mr. Casaubon wants a wife who is as lovely and chaste as the moon but who recognizes that she is merely a satellite to the powerful sun of his intellect: the clergyman’s desire is for a blooming yet “modest young lady,” who, “with the purely appreciative, unambitious abilities of her sex, is sure to think her husband’s mind powerful” (192). Casaubon fails to perceive what Lydgate (even in his limited and condescending early opinion) does about Dorothea, which is that she, although beautiful, wants to be “of use” as a wife, not just an adornment. Just as Casaubon is blind to Dorothea’s fitness (or, rather, lack thereof ) for the wife-role as he imagines it, she is utterly mistaken as to the nature and potential of her new station. Dorothea rejects the notion of choosing a mate by the traditions of “custom”—“by good looks, vanity, and merely canine affection”— and, in fact, makes conscious efforts to distance herself from these superficialities (2). In vigorously rejecting the Maltese puppy Sir James plans to give her, Dorothea actually reveals her pent-up frustration and weariness with the conventional, beautiful/useless wife role: she vents that it is “painful” for her to even see “these creatures that are bred merely as pets,” for “all the petting they are given does not make them happy” (18). Oblivious (or innured) to the puppy’s “expressive” black eyes, she declares that they are “too helpless” and “too frail,” almost “parasitic,” and certainly much less “interesting” than “a weasel or a mouse that gets its own living.” Accepting a man like Sir James would, to Dorothea, signal a surrender to the decorative but parasitic and boring life of Wollstonecraft’s fine lady, and Dorothea honestly believes she would be happy in a role closer to the patient drudge — or the weasel or mouse. Her marriage to Casaubon, on the other hand, is an embrace of util-

86

Beautiful Boredom

ity25 reminiscent of the marriage plot Jane rejects, that of loveless union but great missionary work in India with St. John Rivers. (The aesthetic values have been exchanged in this reformulation, however, because instead of a plain woman potentially marrying a remarkably handsome man, as in Jane Eyre, Eliot has a remarkably beautiful woman marrying a plain man.) Instead of Sir James, a confident, young nobleman with a nice leg and “sleekly waving blond hair” (18), Dorothea believes she finds her perfect mate in a man remarkable for his physical unattractiveness and insufficiency. Casaubon, we learn, is middle-aged26 and of questionable health, and he has “iron grey hair,” “deep eye sockets,” and “the spare form and the pale complexion” which indicate a life of the mind, not the body (8). Dorothea, relegated by her own beautiful physique to a fate of marriage and its usual consequence of artful/artistic uselessness, mistakes his weak physical presence for an omen of an amazing intellectual brilliance. Her friends and family agree that Casaubon’s “got no good red blood in his body” (only “semi-colons and parentheses” ooze through his veins), and it is this dryness and lifelessness that Dorothea mistakenly identifies as a promise of communicable education and utility (47). His aphysicality and apparent asexuality27 suggest that he might discount beauty and decorativeness but value and even encourage useful, unusual occupations for her. Her ideal husband, she believes, might have been the judicious Hooker, if she had been born in time to save him from that wretched mistake he made in matrimony; or John Milton when his blindness had come on; or any of the other great men whose odd habits it would have been glorious piety to endure; but an amiable handsome baronet, who said “Exactly” to her remarks even when she expressed uncertainty, — how could he affect her as a lover? The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father,28 and could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it [4].

The role of amanuensis is quite possibly all she can aspire to, and Casaubon’s less than robust health gives her hope that perhaps she will be able to exercise her gifts and perform a useful service by one day helping to bring his book project into print. Despite all her attempts to overthrow beauty, however, in her first marriage, Dorothea is still beautiful by others’ standards and fairly useless by her own. Because of her society’s perceptions of both her beauty and the state of matrimony, her attempt at freeing herself from boredom and restriction via a marriage of utility (as Jane and St. John’s would have been) is an utter failure. Dorothea has achieved a state as close to spinsterhood as is possible in marriage, and from this non-productive relation will come only disappointment, boredom, and frustration.29

The Complexion of Boredom in Middlemarch

87

Boredom and Marriage: A Symbiotic Relationship Dorothea and Boredom’s Potential That Dorothea is bored by the impossibility of utility (as a beautiful heiress in Middlemarch) can be extrapolated from the thoughts that run through her mind as she contemplates marriage to Casaubon. After first hearing Casaubon speak “at any length,” Dorothea is immediately struck by his mission and the possibilities of activity it could afford: “To reconstruct a past world, doubtless with a view to the highest purposes of truth — what a work to be in any way present at, to assist in, though only as a lampholder!” (9). She simply glows to think that “here was a man who could understand the higher inward life, and with whom there could be some spiritual communion; nay who could illuminate principle with the widest knowledge” (13). Casaubon sparks her latent, somewhat Wollstonecraftian desire to be better educated, and, further, to be educated as men are educated. As he explains the great task that lies ahead of him in finishing the Key to All Mythologies, Dorothea revels in the idea of all the effort30 the book would take, since “to gather in this great harvest of truth was no light or speedy work,” and silently wishes she could participate in such a project, such a “crowning task” (14; emphasis mine). Much more than the drawing up of plans for cottages her uncle will not build, a useful “task” like this has far-reaching and long-lasting ramifications, and to Dorothea it seems quite masculine in its heaviness, seriousness, and laboriousness. After all, she cannot personally construct the cottages— engaging in true domestic labor — no matter how much she might like to, but she could perhaps pursue an intellectual activity like this in private (safe from the censoriousness of “rural opinion”). After Casaubon precisely articulates to Dorothea his feeling that he may perhaps benefit from some “cheerful companionship,” she is elevated from her routine of ineffectual attempts to be useful by a “vision of a possible future for herself to which she looked forward with trembling hope” (16). The boredom Dorothea has been merely alluding to thus far becomes explicit: For a long while she had been oppressed by the indefiniteness which hung in her mind, like a thick summer haze, over all her desire to make her life greatly effective. What could she do, what ought she to do? [17].

This “indefiniteness” is fluid boredom, that “precarious process,” akin to free-floating attention, in which “hope is being secretly negotiated” (Phillips 69). As she experiences this secret hopefulness, Dorothea (who is always alone when she indulges in her boredoms) walks briskly in the “bordering

88

Beautiful Boredom

woods with no other visible companionship than that of Monk, the great St. Bernard dog,” looking “before her, not consciously seeing, but absorbing into the intensity of her mood, the solemn glory of the afternoon with its long swathes of light between the far-off row of limes,31 whose shadows touched each other” (16). Although this brand of boredom can feel confusing and irritating, it is only through Dorothea’s “reaching to a recurrent sense of emptiness” that her “real desire can crystallize” (Phillips 69). Dorothea’s “real desire” is for utility, education, enlightenment, and a “grand life,” but even after she realizes this, she must direct it through acceptable channels (18). Jane Eyre, on the other hand, never attempts to direct the desires she discovers through her boredom into “acceptable channels,” and, in this light, the freedom Dorothea gains through her experiences of boredom is somewhat attenuated. In other words, what emerges from Dorothea’s fluid boredom, this state of suspended anticipation, is the conviction that if she married Casaubon, there would be nothing trivial about our lives. Everyday things with us would mean the greatest things. It would be like marrying Pascal. I should learn to see the truth by the same light as great men have seen it by. And then I should know what to do, when I got older: I should see how it is possible to lead a grand life — here — now — in England. I don’t feel sure about doing good in any way now [18; emphasis mine].

The equation is simple: marry a great academic and learn how to be truly useful and productive on a grand scale, or remain single (or marry a conventional suitor) and have aspirations of utility slowly wither, succumbing to the numbing weariness of the routine, the trivial, the everyday, the inactive. The common denominator or one real option here is, of course, to marry. Dorothea has the blessing and curse of “an active conscience and a great mental need” which are “not to be satisfied by a girlish instruction comparable to the nibblings and judgments of a discursive mouse” (17). Her education has been wholly unsatisfactory, as evinced in her admiration over the Key to All Mythologies: “Here was something beyond the shallows of ladies’school literature” (14). By her “ardent, theoretic, and intellectually consequent” nature, she is barred from finding happiness and interest in her socially constructed role, that of patronizing the humbler clergy, perusing Female Scripture Characters, cultivating her soul “over her embroidery in her own boudoir,” and praying for and “seasonably exhort[ing]” a husband less divinely religious (17); instead, the very idea of this bores and oppresses her. Always yearning to acquire the knowledge available to men but forbidden to proper women, Dorothea thrills to think that if she were to wed Casaubon, she “should learn everything then…. It would be my duty to

The Complexion of Boredom in Middlemarch

89

study that I might help him the better in his great works” (17; emphasis mine). What Dorothea envisions in her marriage to Casaubon is akin to what Jane achieves in her marriage to Mr. Rochester — an endless progression approaching a mental or intellectual sublime. She could satisfy her own desires while serving the needs of another — be at once selfish and selfless. As Mary Poovey points out, the nineteenth-century woman’s primary role was to function as helpmeet, offering “sympathetic, nonjudgmental affection” to her husband to help “offset the frustrations and strains a man suffered in his workplace … and [help] renew his energies for another day’s labors” (10). Marriage to Casaubon, then, is for Dorothea a socially sanctioned way of accessing the subjects always previously denied her; as the narrator states, “the union which attracted her was one that would deliver her from her girlish subjection to her own ignorance, and give her the freedom of voluntary submission to a guide who would take her along the grandest path” (23). Rather than offsetting his strains with singing or playing the harp, Dorothea wishes to interpret helpmeet in terms of more pragmatic utility. Early in their engagement, Dorothea convinces Casaubon to teach her Latin and Greek, arguing that she wants to save his eyesight by reading to him, as blind Milton’s daughters did for him32: she wants to begin “preparing” immediately to “be more useful” (42). Although Mr. Brooke thinks “such deep studies … are too taxing for a woman,” a widely held view which puts Casaubon on the defensive, Dorothea already hopes for even more — “perhaps Hebrew might be necessary — at least the alphabet and roots” (43). Dorothea is not coldly calculating or merely intellectually mercenary in these thoughts; she has largely pure intentions, truly wishing, as Casaubon puts it in his letter of proposal, to “supply aid in graver labours and to cast a charm over vacant hours” (27). Whether primarily due to social indoctrination or to her own ardent and rather strict religious beliefs, Dorothea has completely swallowed the idea of self-abnegation, and Casaubon seems to her the only man worthy of glorifying. Upon receiving Casaubon’s letter of proposal, Dorothea enters into a state of utter absorption, but, strangely, as with her earlier boredom, she is in flux. She “could not pray; under the rush of solemn emotion in which thoughts became vague and images floated uncertainly, she could but cast herself, with a childlike sense of reclining, in the lap of a divine consciousness which sustained her own” (28). In marriage to him the desires which have risen from her boredom for education and activity —“her discontent with the actual conditions of her life”— seem to have found an outlet (28). Dorothea envisions “a fuller life … opening before her…. [S]he was going to have room for the energies which stirred uneasily under the dimness and pressure of her own ignorance and the petty peremptoriness of the world’s

90

Beautiful Boredom

habits” (28). Now, she believes, she will be able to “devote herself to large and definite duties” (28). Despite his defensiveness about teaching her manly languages, Casaubon excites her hopes for a somewhat unorthodox marital relationship by placing no positive value on musical accomplishments, saying he “never could look on it in the light of a recreation to have my ears teased with measured noises” (43). Dorothea imagines that, like her, he has “slight regard for domestic music and feminine fine art” (43), and reads this as an indication that he intends her for a higher purpose than mere ornamentation or pleasant distraction.33 In the first of several would-be warning bells that ring only dully in Dorothea’s consciousness during her engagement, Mr. Brooke laments “it’s a pity you should not have little recreations of that sort [playing piano]” (43). The next two foreshadowings that her marriage will not bring the activity and utility she anticipates but instead boredom occur during her trip to Lowick. After Celia suggests the bow-window room as her sister’s boudoir, the family troops upstairs to inspect a room that is so furnished as to provide a microcosmic view of married life: it contains faded blue furniture; miniatures of ladies and gentlemen with powdered hair; a piece of tapestry which “also showed a blue-green world with a pale stag in it;” thin-legged, fragile furniture; and a “light book-case contain[ing] doudecimo volumes of polite literature in calf ” (emphasis mine; 50). As signaled by the apparently non-referential “also,” a wife will be alone, like the pale stag, in this faded blue world, a world of ladies’ light literature and impractical, inconsequent furniture. It is a room, declares the narrator, where “one might fancy the ghost of a tight-laced lady revisiting the scene of her embroidery” (50). Dorothea ignores the implications of marriage-as-usual and rejects her uncle’s idea of altering the room in any way. The last significant warning occurs when she views the Lowick cottages, which are “like a row of alms-houses— little gardens, gillyflowers” (50). Dorothea learns that everybody … was well off in Lowick: not a cottager in those double cottages at a low rent but kept a pig, and the strips of garden at the back were well tended. The small boys wore excellent corduroy, the girls went out as tidy servants, or did a little straw-plaiting at home: no looms here, no Dissent; and … not much vice [51].

In an ironic foreshadowing of her later uselessness, Dorothea realizes “that there was nothing for her to do in Lowick,” sinks into silence, and ashamedly wishes that “her home would be in a parish which had a larger share of the world’s misery, so that she might have had more active duties in it” (52; emphasis mine). She admits that she “wishes that the people wanted more done for them here,” and that her “notions of usefulness must be narrow” (52). Still hopeful, however, she decides that she will just have to devote her-

The Complexion of Boredom in Middlemarch

91

self more completely — and, implicitly, actively — to Casaubon’s high and lofty academic aims, channeling all her desire for utility into her husband. Her betrothed assures her that her position as “mistress of Lowick, will not leave any yearning unfulfilled” (52). Dorothea’s boredom actually begins again as soon as her honeymoon. When Naumann and Ladislaw see her in the Hall of Statues,34 it is her “brooding abstraction” as much as her beauty that catches their artistic fancies (185). Though she appears to be gazing at a streak of sunlight, she was inwardly seeing the light of years to come in her own home and over the English fields and elms and hedge-bordered highroads: and feeling that the way in which they might be filled with joyful devotedness was not so clear to her as it had been [141].

Dorothea’s fluid boredom allows her to begin to entertain certain truths and fears she has attempted to deny and ignore. All the “new duties” Dorothea had anticipated remain “untried” (134), and, in Rome, time seems to stretch unpleasantly: that new real future which was replacing the imaginary drew its material from the endless minutiae by which her view of Mr. Casaubon and her wifely relation, now that she was married to him, was gradually changing with the secret motion of a watch-hand [135].

The distortion of time is born of the wearisome minutiae, little chips at her belief in any real utility resulting from her change in marital status. If anything, her situation seems worse now than when she was Miss Brooke, for her mind is plagued more and more often by “forlorn weariness” at her utter uselessness to her husband. From her old feeling of unrealized potential, she seems to be moving slowly toward “stifling depression” (136). She begins to sound like Tennyson’s Mariana, feeling that all choices “alike were dreary” (137); however, she is not locked into the static boredom of defense. The fluidity of her boredom allows for recognition, adaption, and adjustment: “Dorothea’s ideas and resolves seemed like melting ice floating and lost in the warm flood of which they had been but another form” (138). As in her earlier boredom, Dorothea is both waiting for something and looking for something, and this time the two are the same: that Casaubon will finally let her use her energies to help him in his studies. Although the possibility of “joyful devotedness” seems to be fading, she is still using her boredom to negotiate hope: Dorothea tells her husband that “I hope when we get to Lowick, I shall be more useful to you, and be able to enter a little more into what interests you” (139). She repeats this refrain of usefulness when Will comes to visit, vaunting her husband’s “perservering devoted labour” and criticizing her own uselessness—“how I wish I had learned Ger-

92

Beautiful Boredom

man35 … but now I can be of no use” (144, 145). Will defines this type of utility she hopes for as drudgery, vowing that he personally “never succeed[s] in anything by dint of drudgery” and that “If things don’t come easily to me I never get them” (144). Will rebels against the mundane and circumscribed sphere of action he anticipates for Dorothea when she returns to England, prophesizing that she will “be shut up in that stone prison at Lowick … buried alive” (153). Even the utility she now has limited herself to hoping for, aiding Mr. Casaubon in the secretarial part of his writing process, lends itself to this image of imprisonment, because it would require she confine herself to Lowick’s library. This is hardly the expanded horizon and larger canvas Dorothea dreamed of when she contemplated marriage to Mr. Casaubon. When she returns home to England, to her faded blue boudoir, “the duties of her married life, contemplated as so great beforehand, seemed to be shrinking with the furniture and the white vapour-walled landscape” (189; emphasis mine). With the free-floating attention that characterizes her boredom, she is “absorbed in looking out on the still white enclosure which made her visible world,” concentrating on a blank expanse (189). She gazes out on the “long avenue of limes lifting their trunks from a white earth, and spreading white branches against the dun and motionless sky,” noting that the “distant flat shrank in uniform whiteness and low-hanging uniformity of cloud” (188; emphasis mine). This “chill, colourless, narrowed landscape” acts, much as does the interior design of the Lowick boudoir, as a landscape of socially mandated boredom, an external representation of her psyche, a physical manifestation of the “moral imprisonment” of married life (189). The hope of usefulness Dorothea was still negotiating in Italy is being dampened more and more in England, just as the “snow and the low arch of dun vapour” seem to suffocate and silence the grounds of Lowick. All Dorothea can immediately anticipate is a mere pretense of meaningful activity, the “wedding visits received and given,” which she recognizes as but “keeping up the sense of busy ineffectiveness” (189). Dorothea wonders “when would the days begin of that active wifely devotion which was to strengthen her husband’s life and exalt her own?” and concludes “Never perhaps as she had preconceived them, but somehow — still somehow” (189). Although she still retains a little hope, she is trapped by “the gentlewoman’s oppressive liberty” in “dreary oppression” (189). This “gentlewoman’s world” she inhabits is one where “everything was done for her and none asked for her aid,” and she has not even “the ruminant joy of unchecked tenderness” to “[fill] her leisure” (189). Denied the chance to be useful or active even on her own behalf, she finds it increasingly difficult to see, “even in her imagination,” the “clear heights” she had thought to

The Complexion of Boredom in Middlemarch

93

achieve. She clings to the thread that surely “duty would present itself in some new form of inspiration and give a new meaning to wifely love.” Marriage has, thus far, provided no “guidance into worthy and imperative occupation.” Here, boredom is valuable not for its possibly productive results but for its fluidity — the only freedom Dorothea can exercise is to be bored. Stifled and hemmed in by her claustrophobic physical environment and her marriage, she can only escape the reality of the winter landscape, “the shrunken furniture,” the “never-read” books, and the ghostly stag that seems to be “vanishing from the daylight” by surrendering herself to her own state of boredom, in which she can swirl and float like a mote in a streak of sunlight. The blue-green boudoir which is the site for most of Dorothea’s boredom begins to function not only as a symbol for her restriction and enforced decorativeness in marriage but also as a comfort zone, a place of quiet empathy where the pale stag seems to express mutely, “Yes, we know,” and the miniatures of long-departed ladies make a sympathetic and interested audience (256). Just as Dorothea outshines the masterpieces of art with her living, breathing, but bored beauty in the Hall of Statues, she enlivens the cold stagnation of Lowick with good looks that seem to gain even more power in her boredom. During this winter morning in her boudoir, she is, the narrator tells us, glowing from her morning toilette as only healthful youth can glow: there was gem-like brightness on her coiled hair and in her hazel eyes; there was warm red life in her lips; her throat had a breathing whiteness above the differing white of the fur which itself seemed to wind about her neck and cling down her blue-grey pelisse with a tenderness gathered from her own, a sentient commingled innocence which kept its loveliness against the crystalline purity of the out-door snow [189].

Unlike Rosamond’s beauty, which is completely self-conscious and strongly coded with to-be-looked-at-ness, Dorothea’s, as I discussed earlier, is almost utterly unconscious. (That she is somewhat aware of her looks is made obvious by her attempts to diminish them, divorcing herself from what popular culture considered beautiful adornments and accessories.) Since we have no artists conveniently passing through her boudoir to pass judgment on her looks, the narrator is at great pains to emphasize just how lovely Dorothea is: her beauty has the power seemingly to reanimate her dress’s fur dress trim, which then curls around her body lovingly. That this moment of great beauty, like the one in Rome, is again concurrent with her particular experience of boredom, an un-self-conscious self-absorption, indicates that even as she chafes at the strictures and limited opportunities offered by married life, she fulfills the one real purpose expected of her as a wife — looking pretty.

94

Beautiful Boredom

That she must be bored in her marriage is supposed by those fairly intimate with the household: her faithful servant Tantripp and Mr. Casaubon’s man Pratt agree “that it must be dull for Madam” (250), and Tantripp wishes that “every book in that library was built into a caticom [sic]” for Dorothea’s husband, that bringer of her mistress’s misery, boredom, and confinement. Dorothea comes to a crisis of boredom in Chapter 46, when her husband has finally acquiesced to the idea of her making herself useful to him, but neither the labor nor the project itself, The Key to All Mythologies, fulfill Dorothea’s expectations of utility. Rather than scaling new peaks of learning and aiding in the dissemination of Truth (or truths), she is asked to slave away on a project in which she no longer has faith. Whereas she had “longed for work which would be directly beneficent, like the sunshine and the rain,” it now “appeared that she was to live more and more in a virtual tomb, where there was the apparatus of a ghastly labour producing what would never see the light” (329). Instead of translating or even cataloguing, she is asked to perform the following task: Mr. Casaubon instructs that “at each point [in the table of contents] where I say ‘mark,’ [you] will make a cross with your pencil” (329). In the face of this perversion of her hopes for utility into useless activity, her solacing fluid boredom wears thin and faint, like a remembered scene too often mentally revisited. As she is buried in drudgery, there is no more negotiating of hope, so the waiting and anticipating are doomed, pointless: Dorothea [was] in her boudoir, where she was wont to occupy herself with some of her favourite books…. But today she opened one after another, and could read none of them. Everything seemed dreary … oh dear! … all alike were as flat as tunes beaten on wood … even the sustaining thoughts which had become habits seemed to have in them the weariness of long future days in which she would still live with them for her sole companions [328–329].

Dorothea has had enough encounters with boredom to realize and articulate, at least to herself, her desires: she longs to do, to do good, to learn, to love, and to be loved. However, “long future days” of “wretchedly benumbing” “helplessness” seem to stretch before her (329). Dorothea’s utter desperation is evinced in her disparaging of two of her very favorite things, when she declares to herself that “Books were of no use…. Thinking was of no use.” She is on the verge of converging her type of boredom into Rosamond’s constructed, defensive, unproductive brand (solid boredom), because, if her life continues in this pattern, she will no longer be able to retain either her child-like perspective or the fluid boredom that accompanies it. The conflict between the false utility which her husband and duty to him encourage and her own hopes of a great and encompassing usefulness

The Complexion of Boredom in Middlemarch

95

plays out most dramatically during one wakeful night. Her ailing husband has requested that, in case of his death, she “will carry out my wishes … avoid doing what I should deprecate, and apply yourself to do what I should desire” (331). Dorothea realizes that what he means to leave her is a legacy of boredom, “days, and months, and years which she must spend in sorting what might be called shattered mummies, and fragments of a tradition which was itself a mosaic wrought from crushed ruins— sorting them as food for a theory which was already withered in the birth like an elfin child” (331). Thus, even Casaubon’s final wish presents Dorothea with merely a parody of utility, for instead of a wife’s traditional function, motherhood, he wishes her to devote her energies to an idea “already withered in the birth like an elfin child.” Her dealings thus far with The Key have shown it to be “questionable riddle-guessing,” not the “fellowship in high knowledge which was to make life worthier” (332). Her overwhelming sensations, when contemplating a life devoted to finishing his opus, are “weariness and impatience,” an intimation of the solid boredom that is to come if she grants his request. Despite her rigorous belief in duty, she wonders if it is “right, even to soothe his grief — would it be possible, even if she promised — to work as in a treadmill fruitlessly?” The distinction between utility and drudgery that Will intimated to her in Rome is becoming all too clear, and Dorothea realizes that agreeing to drudgery is agreeing to permanent, non-productive boredom. After the four hours she “lay in this conflict,” feeling “ill and bewildered, unable to resolve, praying mutely,” she determines that she must “promise to fulfil his wishes,” but she delays, telling herself “that would be later in the day — not yet” (333). Feelings of weariness overwhelm her as she determines that “she was going to say ‘Yes’ to her own doom” by agreeing to his request. To everyone’s relief, Casaubon dies before she can answer and thus removes the threat of both perpetual drudgery and consequent static boredom. Mr. Brooke, often more prescient than he is given credit for, tells Sir James keeping the codicil of the will secret is impossible, for “she is an executrix … and she would like to act— depend upon it, as an executrix Dorothea would want to act” (335; emphasis mine). Lydgate, called in to monitor her recovery from the shock of Casaubon’s death, also cogently recognizes what tonic she most needs— the ability to act with “perfect freedom” (341). He tells Sir James that “Mrs. Casaubon should do what would give her the most repose of mind,” and that “repose will not always come from being forbidden to act.” Freed from The Key, “a toil which her judgment whispered was vain for all uses” (342), Dorothea can once again contemplate worthwhile utility; in fact, she tells Lydgate “why should I sit here idle? I have serious things to do now. I have a living to give away” (340;

96

Beautiful Boredom

emphasis mine). Now, when Dorothea the widow is bored, at Freshitt for instance, she can revert to her usual model of productive, fluid boredom, since there seem to be no pre-set outcomes or obvious limitations on her hope. If it has become “rather oppressive [read boring] to sit like a model for Saint Catherine looking rapturously at Celia’s baby,” Dorothea can simply plan to remove to Lowick (486). “I wish to exert myself,” she announces at Freshitt, and as a propertied widow, she can act on this, at least insomuch as to leave against her family’s advice. Finding her baby-gazing36 “monotonous,” and her interest in this activity “exhaustible,” she faces everyone’s disapproval at her determination to live alone at Lowick: Celia strategically argues “what will you do at Lowick, Dodo? You say yourself there is nothing to be done there,” while Mrs. Cadwallader reasons that “I daresay you are a little bored here with our good dowager, but think what a bore you might become yourself to your fellow creatures if you were always playing tragedy queen and taking things sublimely” (370, 371; emphasis mine). Some sorts of inactivity and boredom are threatening to Dorothea, but what Celia and Mrs. Cadwallader suggest sounds to her more like an antidote than an infectious agent. Dorothea’s particular experience of boredom when she returns to Lowick indicates a complete remission of the drudgery, oppression, and static boredom she had begun to experience there before her husband’s death. In the same boudoir which was the site for most of her explorations of married boredom, Dorothea sits “with her hands folded on her lap, looking out along the avenue of limes to the distant fields,” seeing in the landscape an emblem of her own renewed prospects: “Every leaf was at rest in the sunshine, the familiar scene was changeless, and seemed to represent the prospect of her life, full of motiveless ease — motiveless, if her own energy could not seek out reasons for ardent action” (373). She has recovered a sense of hope through realizing that she must perhaps guide and motivate herself rather than waiting for others to do so. Her “own energy,” so unavailing and unavailed during her marriage, is hereby recognized as a positive, powerful source of interest and activity. The avenue of limes, rather than a winter-white landscape of stifling limitations and static boredom, has become green with new leaves, leaves which seem poised for movement.37 Her “reverie” of fluid boredom is interrupted by Will Ladislaw’s arrival, and Dorothea is able to articulate to him the findings of her self-discovery in the boudoir: “I used to despise women a little for not shaping their lives more, and doing better things. I was very fond of doing as I liked but have almost given it up” (373, 376). Dorothea thus reveals that she had been on the borderlands of this type of useless, aimless existence as a conventional wife, almost giving up seemingly irrevocably her power to act, but she

The Complexion of Boredom in Middlemarch

97

appears to have recovered/renewed her motivation just in time (thanks to Mr. Casaubon’s death). Although Caleb Garth identifies her as having “a head for business quite uncommon in a woman” (and “it must be remembered that by ‘business’ Caleb never meant money transaction but the skillful application of labour”) (381), her plans for creating a model village are shot down by her uncle and Sir James as too expensive and impractical to undertake. However, Dorothea finally encounters a situation where she can be of great and real use to another, acting as a hero, not merely appearing as an apt artist’s model for a saint or a Madonna: in the wake of Bulstrode’s disgrace and intended removal from public life, Dorothea is approached to take over the major funding of the hospital. Even more appealing to her than this opportunity to explore “the prospects of doing good” for the community in a medical sense is the possibility of “rescuing and healing” one man’s (Lydgate’s) tattered reputation and/or character (507). In attempting to convince Chettam, Mr. Brooke, and Mr. Farebrother that this resuscitation should be ventured, she exclaims, “what do we live for if not to make life less difficult for each other? I cannot be indifferent to the troubles of the man who advised me in my trouble, and attended me in my illness” (506). Her masculine advisors vote against such interference in “this Bulstrode business” (524), but, “haunted … like a passion” by the “idea of some active good within her reach,” she is determined to, in this way, demonstrate “bravery” on behalf of at least her nearest neighbors (506). Her own “ease” is distasteful in the face of the suffering she imagines Lydate to be enduring, and she summons him to Lowick, explaining that she would “take any pains” to clear him, because she has “very little to do” and, further, there is “nothing better” she can do (526). Not only does Dorothea finally have a clearcut and meaningful use/purpose, but she is at last able to convince someone else that she can, in fact, achieve it: Dorothea’s voice, as she made this childlike picture of what she would do [to clear Lydgate’s name], might have been almost taken as a proof that she could do it effectively…. Lydgate did not stay to think that she was Quixotic: he gave himself up, for the first time in his life, to the exquisite sense of leaning entirely on a generous sympathy, without any check of proud reserve [526].

Dorothea undertakes this project actively and immediately, metaphorically and quite literally putting her money where her mouth is. Defusing the scandal on two different fronts, she gives Lydate a sum sufficient to repay his much-talked-of debt to Bulstrode and attempts to exonerate him with important members of the community and his wife by telling his side of the story. Although she has been aching for action and meaningful utility, she is

98

Beautiful Boredom

perhaps particularly invested in aiding Lydgate specifically because she recognizes in him something of a kindred spirit. While once she might have thought the unbeautiful but scholarly Casaubon to be what she might be like (or like to be), if born a man, now she identifies (more appropriately) with Lydgate. The stories of both Dorothea and Lydgate are narratives of frustrated potential, and for a somewhat parallel reason — they have fallen prey to the expectations of their genders and both, in their own ways, have succumbed to the beauty trap.38 He speaks her language when, in chapter 44, he tells her of his plans for the fever hospital, saying “with abrupt energy” that “‘there is everything to be done’” (302). Dorothea admires his enthusiasm and commitment, telling him wistfully “how happy you must be, to know things that you feel sure will do great good! I wish I could wake with that knowledge every morning” (304). She thus sympathizes and that all this [trouble and disgrace] should have come to you who was meant to lead a higher life than the common, and to find out better ways— I cannot bear to rest in this as unchangeable. I know you meant that. I remember what you said to me when you first spoke about the hospital. There is no sorrow I have thought about more than that — to love what is great, to try to reach it, and to fail [527].

Her many attempts— most dramatically her marriage to Casaubon — to try to reach what is great have failed, and, also similarly to Lydgate, she has a conviction that she is capable of leading a more productive and important life than her peers.39 Dorothea discerns that she has shared another burden with him, that of disillusion, unhappiness, and quite possibly boredom in marriage. Lydgate mentions that she “know[s] what sort of bond marriage is,” and she believes she can understand his inability to defend himself to Rosamond: “how well she knew that there might be invisible barriers to speech between husband and wife” (528, 529). Hoping to tear down for Lydgate the barrier she never could in her own marriage, Dorothea visits Rosamond. When she surprises Mrs. Lydgate and Will in what appears to be a compromising situation, her immediate reaction, after brief shock, is barely contained energy. Utility, always her most cherished desire, comes to her aid in this emotionally traumatic situation. She leaves the Lydgates’ house with “her most elastic step,” and once in her carriage she appears “paler than usual … [but] never animated by a more self-possessed energy” (535; emphasis mine). Her need for activity is increased by her disappointed hope: she needed something active to turn her excitement out upon. She felt power to walk and work for a day, without meat or drink. And she would carry out the purpose with which she had started in the morning, of going to Freshitt and Tipton…. She had never felt anything like this triumphant power of indignation in the struggle of her married life … and she took it as a sign of new strength [535].

The Complexion of Boredom in Middlemarch

99

At this moment when remarriage and romantic love seem permanently out of the question, when, by the elimination of the one dark-horse candidate she seems capable of rejecting the fine lady/marriage track, she is most empowered and effective, achieving her greatest and most far-reaching utility in the narrative. On the impetus of this energy, she convinces Chettam, Brooke, and Farebrother of Lydgate’s innocence. Furthermore, after a sleepless night in which she finally admits to herself her (now betrayed) love for Will, she dons her lesser mourning clothes, not as an indication of romantic interest, but rather as an “initiation” into a life devoted to utility but devoid of a guide/husband figure (545). Dorothea wishes for an outer symbol of her inner resolve to have “not the less an active life before her because she had buried a private joy [or rather hope].” Unmarried utility, that innovation which rejects both the usual options for women of uselessness (in marriage) or drudgery (in spinsterhood), is but short-lived, however. On her second visit to Rosamond, Dorothea learns that Will is (somewhat) blameless and, more importantly, very much in love with her, not with Lydgate’s wife. The immediate effect of the reintroduction of the romantic possibility is diffuse, undirected energy and, often, the appearance of boredom. She feels “superfluous strength,” but rather than equipping her for the completion of duties, it is “more strength than she could manage to concentrate on any occupation” (555). She is possessed by “childish restlessness,” and she is spending her time in a “fruitless” manner, taking long walks outside the grounds, paying multiple visits to the parsonage, despairing that all in the village have healthy pigs and respectable flannel, and making failed attempts at reading and studying: She sat down in the library before her particular little heap of books on political economy…. Unhappily her mind slipped off it for a whole hour; and at the end she found herself reading sentences twice over, with an intense consciousness of many things, but not of any one thing contained in the text. Should she order the carriage and drive to Tipton? No … her vagrant mind must be reduced to order…. [S] he walked round and round the brown library considering by what sort of manoeuvre she could arrest her wandering thoughts [555].

Will’s reinstatement in her affections has disrupted both her drive for utility and her fairly new-found effectualness. Instead, she is experiencing the most fluid and childlike state of boredom, what Phillips describes as the “state of suspended anticipation in which things are started and nothing begins,” the mood of “diffuse restlessness” where hope (that Ladislaw will pursue her) is being secretly negotiated (68, 69). When Will then satisfies her secret hopes by offering romantic fulfillment and the opportunity to renounce luxury and fine-ladyhood through marriage to him,40 Dorothea seems to lose the need and possibly

100

Beautiful Boredom

the capacity for the fluid boredom which has helped her withstand the trials of her first marriage and her widowhood. Nowhere in the remainder of the novel is she bored, but is this a positive or negative judgment on her choice to marry again? For example, the last time Dorothea is depicted in her boudoir, she is neither solitary nor gazing out the window — she is “busy in her boudoir” when her sister comes to speak to her about her decision to marry Will (565). The nature of her activity is not revealed, and I think that is significant. We are not told that she is drawing plans or determining how to provide good flannel for the estate’s dependants, what she usually considers useful activities. Furthermore, she dismisses the very activities she had formerly aspired to as real utility: Celia exclaims, “And then there are all your plans! You never can have thought of that. James would have taken any trouble for you, and you might have gone on all your life doing what you liked.” “On the contrary, dear,” said Dorothea, “I never could do anything that I liked.41 I have never carried out any plan yet” [566].

We may suspect that Dorothea’s “busyness” in her boudoir is not synonymous with utility as she has defined it, but perhaps closer to drudgery. (She may, perhaps, be packing for her move to London.) She seems to be adjusting her perceptions and classifications to fit with a marriage model, confining her plans to more traditionally feminine subjects. Even though Sir James has demonstrated his willingness to carry out her desires for a larger utility and impact, a manner in which she has a wider scope albeit by proxy, and despite the fact that she vindicated Lydgate and provided him the means to start his professional life anew, she claims she has not accomplished any of her plans or goals. She is thus laying the emotional and logical/intellectual groundwork/foundation for an almost complete capitulation to conventional outlets for women’s energy and efforts— husband, children, and home. The narrator tells us in the “Finale” that, married to Will, Dorothea has “a life filled with beneficent activity which she had not the doubtful pains of discovering and marking out for herself ” (576). Her husband becomes the “ardent” one, a politician who campaigns for reform, while she offers “wifely help” (576). She is “absorbed into the life of another” and is “known in certain circles only as a wife and mother.” Some think it “a pity that so substantive and rare a creature” has no reputation and larger scope of her own, but the narrator interrogates this notion of a higher utility and greater fame, for “no one stated exactly what else that was in her power she ought rather to have done” (576; emphasis mine). These “unhistoric acts” of a “hidden life” do serve a purpose, for, we are told, “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on” them (578), but this is certainly a utility far different from what the ardent and theoretic girl of the early chapters had so longed for. Dorothea cannot be a Theresa, just as she cannot be

The Complexion of Boredom in Middlemarch

101

unbeautiful and consequently cannot remain unmarried.42 In choosing to marry, and to marry the most emphatically attractive Will, she surrenders to the beautiful option in multiple ways. She is able to make his life better, and thus carry out her mission on a very limited (but not completely unimportant) level, but her goals have been modified (and adjusted to fit) by the conventional notions of gender, beauty, and marriage.43 The apparent loss of her fluid boredom is something to be mourned, for it both gave birth to noble sentiments and resolutions and allowed a space of at least psychological freedom and exploration. Dorothea’s absorption into the conventional duties and acts of wife and mother (although of a slightly expanded scope than the fine-lady model because she has lowered her caste and entered the middle class) seems even more narrow because, without the fluid boredom that has defined her, she can no longer negotiate hope of a wider field of action or more epic life. More than any other factor, the loss of her fluid boredom signals that her marriage is, at the least, a misstep in the attempt to reconcile the possible and the dreamed-of, and, at the worst, a terrible but inevitable mistake.

Rosamond and Boredom’s Power While Dorothea’s marital interest in Casaubon is born of the boredom instituted by her unsatisfactory schooling, Rosamond Vincy’s desire for Tertius Lydgate is the result of boredom with Middlemarch that is nurtured by the “success” of her proper education. Unlike Dorothea, whose “notions about marriage took their colour entirely from an exalted enthusiasm about the ends of life, an enthusiasm which was lit chiefly by its own fire, and included neither the niceties of the trousseau, the pattern of plate, nor even the honours and sweet joys of the blooming matron” (17), Rosamond is the “flower of Mrs. Lemon’s school” (65), and as such is supremely educated in the marketplace aspect of marriage. In addition to being a “nymph-like” beauty, Rosamond excels at all the female accomplishments taught at Mrs. Lemon’s school, “even to extras, such as the getting in and out of a carriage” (65). She is unmatched by other young virgins in her “mental acquisition and propriety of speech, while her musical execution was quite exceptional” (65). In other words, Rosamond is a prize commodity on the marriage market, a genuine model of Wollstonecraft’s fine lady, considered desirable in every way, and she is quite aware of it. Her education has reinforced her high valuing of herself, and she considers all Middlemarchian suitors unworthy. Rosamond is not remotely interested in the young swains, and therefore, the first time she appears in the novel, she is bored:

102

Beautiful Boredom

She was tired of the faces and figures she had always been used to— the various irregular profiles and gaits and turns of phrase distinguishing those Middlemarch young men whom she had known as boys. She had been at school with girls of higher position, whose brothers, she felt sure, it would have been possible for her to be more interested in, than in these inevitable Middlemarch companions [66].

Employed appropriately for a flower of proper womanhood, Rosamond sits that morning embroidering “longer than usual, now and then giving herself a little shake, and laying her work on her knee to contemplate it with an air of hesitating weariness” (66). Although she is physically busy, Rosamond’s boredom is manifestly obvious. Rosamond’s experience of boredom is quite different from Dorothea’s: rather than a fluid state of free-floating attention, it is a construction. Rosamond’s bored state, instead of being waiting itself, is actually a defense against waiting which is, according to Phillips’ definition, “at one remove, an acknowledgment of the possibility of desire” (76). She is waiting for a suitable lover, for although she rebuffs all Middlemarchers and thereby seems to have no marital desire, she actually does have quite a definite desire —for someone new (not of Middlemarch) and therefore exciting. Her education tells her, though, that such anticipation would be unwomanly and unseemly, so she masks her desire in boredom. She “silently wished that her father would invite Mr. Lydgate,” but she never voices the desire (66). Instead, she finds her embroidery boring. Phillips associates this type of boredom with adulthood, and despite her projection of child-like innocence and simplicity, Rosamond is adult enough to hide any less-than angelic signs in her “eyes of heavenly blue, deep enough to hold the most exquisite meanings an ingenious beholder could put into them, and deep enough to hide the meanings of the owner if these should happen to be less exquisite” (76). Rosamond’s feelings are often quite different from the feelings attributed to her. For instance, Lydgate believes he is harmlessly flirting with Rosamond,44 never realizing that he is operating within a blueprint she has drafted. Rosamond’s earlier tedium masked her desire of a foreign (to Middlemarch) and higher-class (one with “connections not at all like her own”) suitor as well as her planning of exactly how her aim of being married to him would eventually be accomplished (80). The “mutual impression called falling in love, was just what Rosamond had contemplated beforehand,” and even before she had seen Lydgate she “had woven a little future” (80). Lydgate’s résumé, more than his person, lifts Rosamond from her defensive boredom by possessing the family, connections, talents, and foreignness she is waiting for; therefore, he “[brings] a vivid interest into her life which was better than any fancied ‘might-be’ such as she was in the habit of opposing to the actual” (81; emphasis mine). His person corresponds to

The Complexion of Boredom in Middlemarch

103

her ideal, being altogether foreign to Middlemarch, carrying a certain air of distinction congruous with good family, and possessing connections which offered vistas of that middle-class heaven, rank: a man of talent, also, whom it would be especially delightful to enslave [81].

While Dorothea’s ambition is to do good on a large and public scale, Rosamond’s is to advance socially, gaining admiration and acceptance from her social betters. Whereas marriage to Casaubon portended increased scope of utility to Dorothea, marriage to Lydgate almost guarantees class mobility to Rosamond, and it is this promise of finally becoming a fine lady that alleviates her boredom. Less than an hour after first meeting him, Rosamond “was far on in the costume and introductions of her wedded life, having determined on her house in Middlemarch, and foreseen the visits she would pay to her husband’s high-bred relative at a distance.” Rosamond calculates that she could “appropriate” these well-bred manners “as thoroughly as she had done her school accomplishments, preparing herself thus for vaguer elevations which might ultimately come” (81). That she, whose father is a manufacturer as well as the mayor and whose mother is the daughter of an innkeeper, is worthy of such elevation is an absolute truth in Rosamond’s mind, and she bases this judgment — not unwisely — on the certain knowledge of her perfect beauty. Based on this beauty and her mastery of the system of women’s education Wollstonecraft so abhors, Rosamond feels entitled to the higher rank and the concomitant freedoms from having to do anything she does not want to and/or considers boring. Lydgate’s “inward life” and profession are not pertinent to Rosamond’s plans, for the “piquant fact … was his good birth” (114). Rosamond, with her ability to “discern very subtly the faintest aroma of rank,” sniffs out Lydgate’s potential to enable her to rise “in rank … getting a little nearer to that celestial condition on earth in which she would have nothing to do with vulgar people, and perhaps at last associate with relatives quite equal to the county people who looked down on the Middlemarchers” (114). Lydgate’s obvious appreciation of her looks, manner, and talent encourages her to wholeheartedly pursue the ladylike accomplishments she had found so tiresome when she was waiting to meet him: “now more than ever she was active in sketching her landscapes and market-carts and portraits of friends, in practicing her music, and in being from morning till night her own standard of a perfect lady” (152). Even more, she “had never enjoyed the days so much in her life before” because now she is experiencing the admiration she so desired rather than waiting for it (184). Boredom is banished, at least for the time being, and the industriousness she demonstrates seems more valid and interesting than earlier because she now has a “more variable external audience” and because the promised profit of these attrac-

104

Beautiful Boredom

tive accomplishments— marriage to the man of her choosing — seems to be materializing (115). In Chapter 31, Rosamond again has a brush with boredom, but this time the psychological situation is much more complex. After Lydgate resolves to himself not to call at the Vincys’ except on business, Rosamond became very unhappy. The uneasiness … grew and grew till at the end of ten days that she had not seen Lydgate, it grew into terror at the blank that might possibly come — into foreboding of that ready, fatal sponge which so cheaply wipes out the hopes of mortals. The world would have a new dreariness for her… [207].45

In this case, Rosamond’s waiting seems to deteriorate into fear — a fear of boredom, which was itself, earlier in the novel, a defense against waiting. Rosamond’s antipathy toward waiting is so strong that she must employ somewhat of a double-defense mechanism that is ultimately a circumlocution. Her true fear is of the “blank” of Middlemarch, a town so circumscribed and small that the chances of another foreign, qualified suitor passing through are minute. These ten days of waiting are thus merely a “foreboding” of the infinitely longer wait she might have to endure, with every passing day bringing “new dreariness” as her hopes and charms fade. Of course, Rosamond has little to fear. Lydgate comes back to the fold, and she is once more busily occupied with wedding preparations, but now that he has actually proposed to her, she is able to realize the plans she has been mentally formulating for some time. Lydgate, like Casaubon, thinks he has procured the woman most suited to make him happy as a husband. While Lydgate’s aims are certainly more romantic, they are but a little less self-centered: he “had found perfect womanhood” in an “accomplished creature who venerated his high musings and momentous labours and would never interfere with them; who would create order in the home and accounts with still magic, yet keep her fingers ready to touch the lute and transform life into romance at any moment” (320).46 Lydgate and Casaubon both find that their concepts of their wives are erroneous— Lydgate’s in the notion that he would be the center of Rosamond’s universe, and Casaubon’s in the hope that his wife could be nonjudgmental. Marriage, rather than forever banishing Rosamond’s boredom, instead produces an even more pronounced and certainly more negative strain. The first sign of its return is that Will’s presence becomes “necessary to her entertainment,” because her husband’s talk is often too “grave” and his manners are often “unsatisfactory to her” (321). Rosamond had thought to have the power in this particular relationship, for her recreational plan was to gather limitless “captives from the throne of marriage” (301). Her taste for this type of entertainment is partly to blame for her miscarriage, as she insists on going horseback riding with Lydgate’s cousin against her husband’s

The Complexion of Boredom in Middlemarch

105

wishes and medical advice. This forbidden excursion is also an exercise for Rosamond’s social ambition, for the gratification of riding on a fine horse, with Captain Lydgate, Sir Godwin’s son, on another fine horse by her side, and of being met in this position by anyone but her husband, was something as good as her dreams before marriage; moreover, she was riveting the connection with the family at Quallingham, which must be a wise thing to do [404].

Rosamond’s disappointment in her marriage, which does not seem to be advancing her socially or financially after all (she seems to have just realized that Lydgate’s practicing a profession lowers his caste), fuels her growing habit of boredom. After fantasizing about a platonic romance with Ladislaw, she, for lack of anything better to do, decides to tell him of the conditions of Casaubon’s will, just to see the “effects” of the information on him. His impetuous exit confirms her suspicions that he might prefer Dorothea to herself, and, “looking out of the window wearily”— at nothing — she is “oppressed by ennui” (415). Although the external site of Rosamond’s boredom is, in this instance, beside a window, as Dorothea’s often is (in her boudoir), Rosamond’s boredom is solid and hopeless, as Dorothea’s only threatens to become so toward the end of her marriage to Casaubon. This boredom of Rosamond’s is definitely an acknowledgment of the possibility of desire, for, after saying inwardly “there really is nothing to care for much,” she wonders why the family at Quallingham has not yet written her, and when Lydgate will come home and “tease” her about expenses (415). She desires Ladislaw’s admiration, if only from “the vague exactingness of egoism,” and she wants Lydgate’s family to accept and aid her. All she wants from Lydgate is for him to leave her alone, but she desires that quite fervently. Because of her perception of Lydgate’s anger over her stratagems47 as unwarranted, Rosamond’s boredom finally shifts slightly to become even less productive than before. In relation to the solid, constructed version of boredom, Phillips outlines a boredom of “protest” “that is always a screen for rage” (76). After offending her by both losing his temper and refusing to cede to her wishes, Lydgate is subjected to Rosamond’s boredom of protest. She listens “languidly, and wonder[s] what she had that was worth living for” when he speaks, probably turning her neck in a precise attitude that should communicate her intense projection of lack of interest (519). Watching her serve tea with “no curve in her face disturbed, and yet with an ineffable protest in her air against all people with unpleasant manners,” Lydgate wonders, “would she kill me because I wearied her?” (409). This inflexible and stubborn version of boredom, like the Lydgates’ marriage, seems to produce nothing but abortive creations. She is in fact inwardly

106

Beautiful Boredom

seething that she, the flower of Mrs. Lemon’s school, should be yoked to so unsuitable a husband, one who seemed to promise connections, money, and worship but has delivered nothing but “troubles” and shame. Perhaps the greatest contributor to Rosamond’s boredom of protest and disappointment, though, is the reality of the minutiae of married life: “the Lydgate with whom she had been in love had been a group of airy conditions for her, most of which had disappeared, while their place had been taken by everyday details which must be lived through slowly from hour to hour, not floated through with a rapid selection of favourable aspects” (457). The Lydgates’ mutual boredom and frustration is Eliot’s playing out of the traditional marriage plot beyond the usual “and they lived happily ever after” gloss. Dorothea marries Casaubon because she hopes he will invest the limited everyday with qualities of greatness and Truth, and Rosamond marries Lydgate because she hopes never to deal with unbeautiful, everyday details— in the rarefied social circle she feels qualified to enter, everyday things are surely dealt with by servants. Rosamond’s boredom is powerful, and she wields it mercilessly. Lydgate has grown to dread her weariness and displeasure: “his indisposition to tell her anything in which he was sure beforehand that she would not be interested was growing into an unreflecting habit” (521). She makes it clear to him that discussions of money, debt, his career, and his reputation/honor are less than interesting and perhaps not a little vulgar, and that only if he wishes to bore and oppress her will he broach such subjects. Even in public, she punishes him with her boredom, showing her lack of interest in his conversation and even his presence: “in reality … she was intensely aware of Lydgate’s voice and movements; and her pretty, good-tempered air of unconsciousness was a studied negation by which she satisfied her inward opposition to him without compromise of propriety” (443). Lydgate is so influenced by this “dumb mastery” that he rejects his dreams and plans and, more and more, submits to her desires, ultimately moving to London (at her behest) and exclusively treating the wealthy, something he once considered the pinnacle of professional boredom (511).48 Part of the reason her boredom is such an effective tool for manipulating her husband is that he actually grows to have some sympathy for the “blank” he imagines the life of his childless wife to be: “he told himself that it was ten times harder for her than for him: he had a life away from home and constant appeals to his activity on behalf of others” (461). (Rosamond, of course, has no desire for utility, acting on behalf of others; instead, she doggedly pursues an ideal of pure decorativeness/adornment, with no oppressive everyday tasks to bore her.) Lydate shrinks before her “perpetual silent reproach,” and, “mastered by his keen sensibilities toward this fair fragile creature whose life he seemed

The Complexion of Boredom in Middlemarch

107

somehow to have bruised,” he sometimes startles at her approach, “fear of her and fear for her” mixed in his reaction (531). Unfortunately, her husband is not the only victim of Rosamond’s intense boredom. To divert her married ennui, “she constructed a little romance which was to vary the flatness of her life: Will Ladislaw was always to be a bachelor and live near her, always to be at her command, and have an understood though never fully expressed passion for her” (689; emphasis mine). When Will leaves town, Rosamond’s plans are for a little while disrupted, but when he informs the Lydgates he is to return, she briefly manifests the less destructive (and constructed) boredom of her single days: she arranged all objects around her with as much nicety as ever, only with more slowness— or sat down to the piano, meaning to play, and then desisting, yet lingering on the music stool with her white fingers suspended on the wooden front, and looking before her in dreamy ennui [531].

Once Will arrives, the (spoiled) fruit of Rosamond’s boredom threatens to determine the course of his life. Motivated by increasing — but always screened (as boredom)— rage at Lydgate, Rosamond shares her romantic fantasy with Ladislaw, but the timing is as inopportune as possible, for Dorothea witnesses something that looks very much like an assignation. Rosamond’s solid, negative boredom thus very nearly ruins what we are given to believe is perhaps the only chance at happiness for both Will and Dorothea. Even though Rosamond refers to her own second marriage — to “an elderly and wealthy physician”— as a “reward” for her years spent with Lydgate, her cause for complaint must surely have diminished over time, because using the force of her inflexible boredom she increasingly dictated the shape of her husband’s career and their joint (certainly not shared) life (575). Boredom, then, in its various forms, both initiates and plagues the marriages of Dorothea to Casaubon and Rosamond to Lydgate. While Dorothea’s boredom is fluid, child-like, and at least potentially productive, Rosamond’s is defensive, constructed, and potentially devastating. Marriage itself is not on trial in the novel, but a stereotypical, socially constructed “ideal” of marriage is, as is the satisfactoriness of marriage as true closure in narratives about women. Neither Dorothea, who thinks her marriage can be different, or Rosamond, who wants exactly what the conduct books have been promising, is satisfied with her first marriage, and boredom was both the catalyst and the result of their decisions. In a way, then, each marriage represents a path not taken by Jane Eyre, and the result of both Dorothea’s and Rosamond’s first marriages is an unceasing and, in fact, even more overwhelming boredom and weariness for those characters. In other words, the marriage plots Jane and Brontë contemplate but reject are explored in Eliot’s

108

Beautiful Boredom

narrative, and rather than the progression Jane achieves when she undertakes her newly defined marriage, the product of Dorothea’s and Rosamond’s conventional marriages is stasis.

The Problems of Narrative: Boredom and Closure As I discussed in the introduction, D.A. Miller envisions the end of a traditional novel as a return to the state of quiescence presumed before the beginning of the narrative. In other words, for closure to occur, the nonnarratable must be resumed, and the narratable must necessarily cease. Boredom, however, has proven imminently narratable in Middlemarch, and, as such, it must be expelled or expunged for the narrative to end; it is a prime example of the disequilibrium which traditional closure presumes to eradicate. Although it lacks the tidiness of a Jane Austen plot, Middlemarch does ultimately conform to the general conventions of a marriage-plot novel. Readers are surprised (and, according to a welter of modern criticism, disappointed) by this unavoidable fact, perhaps especially because the main character, Dorothea, struggles so valiantly to make it something else. Despite her ambitions, and despite the failed first marriages of both Dorothea and Rosamond, the final chapter sees an attempt at the neat summary and looseend-tying so familiar in the marriage-plot narrative: we are told Dorothea marries and has a family, Rosamond marries well and apparently achieves her fondest desires, and even Mary Garth marries Fred Vincy and lives at Stone Court. This summarizing is a bit jarring, as it is a far cry from the intimate psychological description/narration we have been given for almost all of the novel, but it seems a formal imperative. Regardless of any fancies or hypotheticals advanced in the narrative, the nature of this conclusion attests that there apparently cannot really be any other ending for a story about a woman (or women). Marriage, at the end of the novel, is supposed to represent the nonnarratable, that which will not generate a narrative, and since the failed first marriages were most certainly narratable, the implication of the non-narrated second marriages is perhaps that they are happy and successful. If Dorothea’s childlike boredom of potential must be eliminated for her to achieve this state of matrimony, though, does this signal contentment and a successful marriage plot, or does it instead indicate a sudden disjunction, Eliot’s unease with marriage as the only possible conclusion to a narrative concerned primarily with women? Dorothea uses fluid boredom

The Complexion of Boredom in Middlemarch

109

throughout the novel to negotiate hope and understand her own feelings, and in this way it both supplies its own narrative of the inward life and functions as a catalyst to traditional narrative action (because it motivates her most notably to marry Casaubon, move to Lowick by herself, and act on behalf of Lydate). Therefore, it must be expelled or muted for the narrative to end, for the nonnarratable to resume. Her boredom is a reaction to the insufficiency of the two conventional options for women, Wollstonecraft’s fine lady or patient drudge, and it acts as an everpresent voice whispering that there must be other possibilities for her, that surely the paradigm of class and gender could shift. A life of struggling without signposts for great utility and achievement (such as Dorothea’s) is perhaps narratable, but a woman’s life encompassing great social usefulness will not generate a narrative because it cannot exist or even be imagined in the world Eliot depicts or the culture in which she herself lives. By the same token, marriage to Will also represents the nonnarratable, because either it truly creates contented quiescence, or it unfolds too much like the same old story of woman subsumed into man, vainly attempting to achieve her fulfillment through devotion to him, and our peeks into Dorothea’s psyche would no longer generate a real narrative. She would be more of a cipher, without as much inward life to relate. The attempt at conventionally inscribed marriage-plot closure fails to be completely convincing, and one reason for this failure is a mention of boredom that occurs, not at the end, but in chapter 20, at the beginning of Book II. The narrator reveals that our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St. Peter’s, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina [135; emphasis mine].

The mention of the “states of dull forlornness” occurring much later in Dorothea’s life destabilizes the idea of her contentment and equilibrium introduced in the last boudoir scene and established by the final chapter. Is boredom not truly purged? Has only fluid/productive boredom been purged? Is this an indication of the forced or uneasy nature of the closure, the return of the nonnarratable? Miller compares Middlemarch to “one of those optical drawings that won’t resolve once and for all into five cubes or six, a vase or two human profiles,” for it “seems to be traditional and to be beyond its limit, to subvert and to reconfirm the value of its traditional status” (109). This “double valency” is perhaps most apparent in the narrative’s relationship to

110

Beautiful Boredom

closure, which is demanded by the traditional novel form but which does not seem finally to govern this novel, but it is also evident in the relationship between the novelistic community’s perception and delimiting of the story and the protagonists’ viewpoints. Miller suggests that the “community’s narrative belongs to the genre of realism, and the protagonists’ [which Miller designates as Dorothea, Lydgate, Ladislaw, and Bulstrode] scripts to Utopian fiction” (130). I find Miller’s theory quite convincing, but I would add that the distance between these two narrative perspectives is registered and negotiated by boredom. Dorothea’s (and Lydgate’s) dissatisfaction, oppression, and bewilderment — in other words, boredom — at the community’s determinations of right and wrong, proper and improper, is the narratable, that which is colored outside the lines and thus can generate interest and narrative. Miller posits that the society of Middlemarch views Dorothea as a threat, and I would argue that it is most particularly her boredom that indicates a disturbing (to the community) difference, one which threatens “not merely traditional female roles and functions, but all the social arrangements that these maintain” (113). If, as Miller suggests, “this community/ novel is apparently constructed to meet the requirements of an important task: to know the narratable in order to avoid it,” and if the narratable, “once designated … needs to be put outside the boundaries of the community,” then Dorothea’s boredom, as the narratable, must be exiled, or, in Miller’s words, “exterminated” (115). I believe Miller’s idea that “narrative closure can double for a social exclusion” makes particular sense in the context of Dorothea’s boredom, which, in its very existence and insistence, is an affront to the community’s cultural and social values, priorities, and core ideas. While Dorothea’s (and Lydgate’s) difference, as manifested in her (their) boredoms, must be wiped out because it is critical of the community and the values the community endorses, Rosamond’s conformity to traditional ideals is also indicated by her boredom. While Miller would not designate her as a protagonist, exactly, she does mesh nicely with his concept of utopian narratives uncomfortably overlying realistic ones. I would suggest that her Utopian vision, however, aligns much more closely with what her culture approves of than does Dorothea’s or Lydgate’s or Will’s, and her boredom results from the frustrations of everyday life with one of these outsiders, not from any disillusion with what the community and her finishing-school education have promised her. Rosamond’s boredom, then, although a reaction against what the community actually offers her, at the same time supports what the community vaunts in theory. All Rosamond needs to stave off boredom, after all, is what she has been led to expect by her upbringing and by the community’s valuing of her beauty — life as a fine

The Complexion of Boredom in Middlemarch

111

lady: married, decorative, admired, and useless.49 The form her boredom assumes is a reflection of her identification with the town, because, like Middlemarch, it is static, self-protective, and self-satisfied. She uses her boredom to rehabilitate (in the community’s terms) and then annihilate her outsider husband, forcing his removal from Middlemarch and smothering his dangerous ambitions of reform. Miller effectively argues that Rosamond unwittingly serves the same interests as the medical men —or rather, though of a different mind, she concurs in action. Her aggressive gentility and her indifference to her husband’s “professional and scientific ambition” wage the community’s battle surreptitiously, on what is supposed to be neutral ground. If the medical men aggravate his financial difficulties, Rosamond aggravates the misery attending them [118].

What Miller terms “aggressive gentility” and “indifference” is actually Rosamond’s solid boredom of protest, and she uses it to achieve her own aims, which just happen to be the same as Middlemarch’s established medical professionals.’ I would suggest that Rosamond can congratulate herself that, thanks to the boredom molded by her inflexible will, she ultimately shrinks the space between the utopian and realistic layers of the narrative, first gaining a metaphorical “cage” “all flowers and gilding, fit for the bird of paradise that she resembled,” and then attaining the “reward” she feels she deserves, marriage to the rich and elderly (i.e., non-interfering and malleable) physician and admiration when she drives out in her carriage with her four daughters, making a “very pretty show” (575). Dorothea’s second marriage is not, like Rosamond’s, her “reward,” the realization of something very like her original utopian desires in repayment for the misery and boredom of her first marriage, because while Rosamond’s wishes included marriage as a top priority, Dorothea’s aspirations did not. This mismatch of problem (how, as a beautiful woman, to achieve knowledge and utility in the public sphere rather than ignorance and mere decorativeness in the private sphere) and solution (marry a handsome man of whom her friends and family disapprove), along with the abrupt cutting off of psychological closeness to the character (as indicated by Dorothea’s sudden and utter lack of boredom), sends up a red flag, warning that the last chapter may offer only the appearance of narrative closure. Miller offers insight into this narrative sleight of hand: In general, the forms of closure managed by the protagonists ratify either a surrender of desire or its reductive rescaling. They are not proper endings in the sense of a neat quid pro quo, a clean solution to the problem that sets events moving. The problem … remains unsolved. In her [Dorothea’s] case, it is deceptively brought to term by being converted into an easier, different problem…. In

112

Beautiful Boredom

Middlemarch, … the specific reason why traditional settlement (marriage, family, career) is not an adequate solution is that the problem has been to find a settlement transcending these conventional arrangements [149].

In the light of Miller’s persuasive analysis, I find the seeming obliteration of Dorothea’s boredom particularly suspicious— is she merely confused and distracted, or are we meant to be? The narrator’s mention in the conclusion of her “feeling [as Mrs. Ladislaw] that there was always something better which she might have done, if she had only been better and known better,” in addition to the much earlier reference to periods of “dull forlornness” felt for the rest of her life, is a hint, I would posit, that boredom is not so much banished as hidden, swept under the narrative rug for the purposes of closure (575–576). Dorothea gains three things from this solution (marrying Will) to her dilemma (how to meaningfully improve others’ lives): first, she gains a life filled with activity; second, she is able to shuck some of the trappings of a fine lady, becoming a member of the middle class; and third, she is able to exit the community which insists on particular patterns for her life. Dorothea does not gain a life outside or beyond the traditional paradigm of marriage or spinsterhood, in the public sphere, epic achievement, or widespread utility; in short, she becomes middle-class rather than great. I would argue that boredom’s sudden submergence in the end of the novel is the result of the collapse of what Miller calls the utopian strand or perspective of the narrative rather than the dovetailing of the hoped-for and the real in the narrative closure traditionally found in marriage plot novels, because such evidence of disquiet, discontent, insufficiency, and potential must be quickly whisked off-stage for this formal closure to have any believability. The undercurrents can still be felt, however, and we are thus allowed to doubt the efficacy of marriage as closure and panacea at the same time that it is offered as the only realistic possibility. Eliot’s formulation of closure, not unlike some forms of boredom, offers an appearance of compliance and conformity to formal (and cultural) expectations that acts as a screen for less acceptable emotions, such as rage at the dearth of options and/or the secret negotiation of hope for new possibilities.

Notes 1. As I will discuss later, Dorothea’s stated ambition is “to make life beautiful — I mean everybody’s life” (152; emphasis mine). 2. Cinderella is the example that comes to the modern mind most readily, but countless other stories revolve around heroines whose faces bloom like roses out of their drab, plain, or poor clothes (the Grimm brothers’ eponymous “Snow-White and Rose-Red,”

The Complexion of Boredom in Middlemarch

113

Eliza in Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Wild Swans,” etc.). An obvious difference, however, is that Dorothea chooses to don poor clothes in an (unsuccessful) attempt to diminish her beauty or at least any tendency toward vanity. 3. Dorothea provides an “agreeable image of serene dignity … in keeping with the entire absence from her manner and expression of all search after mere effect. Sometimes when Dorothea was in company, there appeared to be as complete and air of repose about her as if she had been a picture of Santa Barbara looking out from her tower into the clear air” (59). 4. This diminutive appellation is in keeping with Burkean aesthetics, which value smallness as a key attribute of beauty. 5. Dorothea’s response to the jewelry shows that she is not quite as insensate to beauty as she would like to believe, for though she urges her sister to keep all the “trinkets” for herself, her attention is arrested by an emerald and diamond ring: “how very beautiful these gems are … they look like fragments of heaven.” After admiring the ring and matching bracelet on her arm and doing her best to invest them with religious and spiritual properties, she announces that she “will keep these” (6). 6. The popular statue was, in the 1830s world Eliot depicts, thought to be Cleopatra because of a serpentine bracelet the reclining figure wears on her upper arm. Abigail S. Rischin argues that the statue’s “status as a cultural icon had by the nineteenth century long been established. Drawings and engravings by great Renaissance artists— Leonardo among them — offered enduring visual tributes to the Ariadne-Cleopatra…. [M]oreover, a host of new representations of the statue, one of the most admired in the Vatican collection, made it widely accessible to the late-nineteenth century public: etchings in wellknown guides … and popular handbooks for travelers” (1122). 7. Carol A. Martin notes that Eliot wrote very positive reviews of the works of Mary Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller. She suggests that “One with Wollstonecraft in deriding the idea that women should ‘be ladies, which is simply to have nothing to do, but listlessly to go they scarcely care where, for they cannot tell what’” (Essays 204), Eliot perceives the damage this imperative causes for both sexes (22). 8. The language here is similar to the narrator’s descriptions of Mr. Casaubon’s project, The Key to All Mythologies, and of his intellect, both of which Dorothea imagines as exciting and fulfilling but learns are instead quite boring and tiresome. She characterizes her husband’s mind as full of “anterooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither” (137). 9. Fordyce suggests that the alternative to the boredom of domestic accomplishments is a perception of immorality and an invitation for seduction or rape: “those destroyers [the worst men] will see her [the young woman who chooses to leave the domestic sphere] in a very different point of light. They will consider her as lawful game, to be hunted down without hesitation” (108). 10. The narrator tells us that she “was regarded as an heiress; for not only had the sisters seven hundred a-year each from their parents, but if Dorothea married and had a son, that son would inherit Mr. Brooke’s estate, presumably worth about three thousand a-year” (3). 11. A few of Mr. Brooke’s opinions on women include the following: “young ladies don’t understand political economy, you know” (9), “I can’t let young ladies meddle with my documents … [they] are too flighty” (11), “Your sex are not thinkers, you know” (35), “your sex is capricious, you know” (36), and “deep studies, classics, mathematics, that kind of thing, are too taxing for a woman — too taxing, you know” (43). 12. Popular Victorian texts such as Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House (1854) allowed for women’s spiritual grandeur, but this came at a price: to achieve a higher religious state, a wife must virtually relinquish her physical/corporeal presence and thus any possibility of real action. 13. Being the object of the (particularly male) gaze is both her desire and her utility —

114

Beautiful Boredom

she has been trained for this function, and she also enjoys it immensely, missing it intensely whenever it is denied. 14. Mrs. Vincy describes Miss Morgan, who is “brown, dull, and resigned,” as altogether “just the sort of person for a governess” (111), while Rosamond says “Miss Morgan is so uninteresting, and not young” (77). 15. Rosamond and her mother can’t quite understand Fred Vincy’s romantic attachment to Mary, who is clearly spinster material to them. Rosamond tells her brother, “I should never have thought she was a girl to fall in love with” (82), and Mrs. Vincy comments that she “must say I think Mary Garth a dreadful plain girl — more fit for a governess” (69). Jane Eyre certainly would be relegated (based on her lack of beauty) to teaching duties by the Vincy women, and their words seem an only slightly less offensive version of the Ingram women’s diatribe against governesses in Brontë’s novel. 16. Mary wryly describes her duties as “minding the house — pouring out syrup — pretending to be amiable and contented — learning to have a bad opinion of everybody” (77). 17. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft claims that women’s education trains them to see marriage as the sole means of satisfying (social) ambition: “strength of body and mind are sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty, to the desire of establishing themselves— the only way women can rise in the world — by marriage. And this desire making mere animals of them, when they marry they act as such children may be expected to act — they dress, they paint, and nickname God’s creatures” (83). 18. Mary’s enduring loyalty and attachment to Fred Vincy, even over the admiring and more impressive Mr. Farebrother, stems from her gratitude for his history of treating her as marriageable despite her utility/non-beauty, from the giving of the umbrella ring as children to his smuggling books to her at Stone Court as adults. 19. “Poor Mary,” Rosamond thinks, “she takes the kindest things ill” (77; emphasis mine). 20. The narrator describes Mary as having the “aspect of an ordinary sinner,” not an angel, like Rosamond: Mary “was brown; her curly dark hair was rough and stubborn; her stature was low” (77). 21. Farebrother’s tastes are clearly quite different from Lydgate’s, because the Vicar “had always thought her [Rosamond] rather uninteresting — a little too much the pattern card of the finishing school; and his mother could not forgive Rosamond because she never seemed to see that Henrietta Noble was in the room” (442). Rosamond and Lydgate share values and concepts of women, for her neglect of the elderly spinster echoes his overlooking Mary. 22. Jeanie G. Thomas argues that “Lydgate, no different from any other man in the novel in this regard, never indicates any empathy for Dorothea’s hunger for achievement, even though his own idealism and ambition parallel hers closely” (398). I would suggest that the way he thinks of women cannot undergo so radical a change as to consider them as ambitious politically or vocationally — it takes much harder experience to effect the shift in his concept of what makes a good wife. By the end of the novel, he realizes that a wife can actively aid her husband in achieving his goals, but, even for all his awe of Dorothea’s goodness, he cannot think of her identity or future outside the issue of marital status. 23. Lydgate initially disallows the existence or at least pleasantness of the type of marital union Jane Eyre strives for, but, like Jane, he heartily dislikes being cast as a schoolmaster. Toward the end of his plot line, he begins to realize that a marriage of intellectual equals could be an appealing and helpful proposition. 24. Many characters complain about Casaubon’s looks and manner, from Sir James Chettam, who grieves to Mr. Brooke, “look at Casaubon … look at his legs!” (45), to Mrs. Cadwallader, who says “he looks like a death’s head skinned over for the occasion” (61), to Celia, who “innocently” notes his “two white moles with hairs on them” and pronounces him “very ugly” (10).

The Complexion of Boredom in Middlemarch

115

25. Of course, Casaubon’s project turns out to have no utility whatsoever. 26. He is “over five-and-forty … a good seven-and-twenty years older” than Dorothea (26). 27. Barbara Hardy asserts that all of the references to Casaubon’s dryness (he is described as “a great bladder for dried peas to rattle in”) and Mrs. Cadwallader’s judgment that marriage to him is “as good as going to a nunnery” indicate, as explicitly as possible in a Victorian text, his impotence (38). 28. In “Another Look at Dorothea’s Marriages,” Mildred S. Greene suggests that this vision of marriage screams for Freudian analysis: “we must ask how the blooming Dorothea could have made such a mistake [as accepting Casaubon], why she chose a father-figure as a husband, and what she was repressing in this choice. Here we discover that she fits the Freudian paradigm only too well. First of all, D’s mother and father had both died when she was very young. Her father figure had in a sense been inadequately replaced by her Uncle Brooke, who did nothing to prevent her disastrous marriage to Casaubon. ‘With his smattering of unconnected information, his useless classicism, and his misogynistic belief in the biological inferiority of Dorothea’s brain,’ Gilbert and Gubar remind us, ‘Brooke is a dark parody of Casaubon’” (33). 29. Jane anticipates similar spinsterhood within marriage if she accepts St. John, because she will have to willingly deny her emotions and subsist on only the forms of love. 30. Although the book project itself might require Dorothea’s being useful, on another level, this quest after pure knowledge is also the antithesis of utility. 31. As I will discuss more fully later, limes and light usually factor into what could be called the landscape of Dorothea’s boredom. 32. Dorothea’s illusion becomes more painfully obvious when we remember that Milton taught his daughters only to read Greek and Latin, not to understand them, thus boiling their “education” and “learning” down to pure utility. 33. Dorothea apparently numbers Mary Wollstonecraft among the worthwhile writers outside the limits of ladies’ light literature, for the early feminist’s influence can be seen in Dorothea’s attitude. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft critiques the “false system” of female education founded upon treatises and conduct manuals written by men “who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than affectionate wives and rational mothers” (79). This education, oriented toward the “seraglio” rather than practical marriage, consists primarily of “acquiring a smattering of accomplishments” while strength of mind is “sacrificed” (83). 34. You will recall that Dorothea is standing against a pedestal near the “Reclining Ariadne.” Abigail S. Rischin points out that this statue depicts a sleeping woman, “a figure whose natural condition is stasis” (1126). The artistic discussion between Naumann and Will centers on the different types of beauty the two female figures embody, not on the important parallel of their utter and visible stasis, but I believe Eliot expects her readers to recognize this similarity. Rischin, however, focuses on the Ariadne story as a foreshadowing of Dorothea’s plot development: in the Ariadne myth, the princess awakens to discover she has been abandoned on the island of Naxos by Theseus, who she had aided at the expense of her father, King Minos. As she laments her abandonment, she is rescued by Bacchus, whom she later marries. 35. Perhaps Dorothea’s beauty even prevents her from having learned an unbeautiful language, German. 36. “‘Look, Dodo! Look at him! Did you ever see anything like that?’ said Celia, in her comfortable stacatto. ‘What, Kitty?’ said Dorothea, lifting her eyes rather absently. ‘What? Why, his upper lip; see how he is drawing it down, as if he meant to make a face. Isn’t it wonderful!’” (338). Despite Dorothea’s not inexhaustible interest in him, the baby is clearly a sign of something more productive than Casaubon’s stillborn progeny, The Key.

116

Beautiful Boredom

37. In “The Vista From Dorothea’s Boudoir Window and a Coleridgian Source,” Shifra Hochberg focuses on the landscape of Lowick, not the interior design of the bedroom. She addresses the environs’ relationship to repression and disappointment (but not to boredom). Hochberg argues convincingly that Eliot reinscribes ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’ into Middlemarch, employing it as an “extended subtext to [her] depiction of Dorothea and the pictorial representation of her [Dorothea’s] gradual emotional maturation” (41). Scenes involving the view from the boudoir window incorporate “three central features of Coleridge’s poem: the avenue of lime trees as key landscape feature; the prison metaphor which is central to Eliot’s metaphoric representation of Dorothea’s marriage; and the emotional movement from despair to faith” (41–42). According to Hochberg, the scene I am currently analyzing manifests “a change that echoes “This LimeTree Bower My Prison’s gradual progression from despair to affirmation,” for “the perspective has widened, encompassing the distant fields, and the prison metaphor has disappeared” (44). Hochberg explains the lack of a vista in the next (and final) boudoir scene as an indication that Dorothea is on the verge of active participation in community via a re-productive marriage. 38. The ambitious doctor has had more than one brush with the beauty trap: Lydgate’s first love is the beautiful actress Laure, who kills her husband onstage. He is motivated by her beauty passionately to defend her act as an accident and to propose marriage to her. She confesses to him that she killed her husband intentionally; his crime was that he “wearied” her (105). Fortunately, Laure refuses Lydgate’s proposal, but his marriage to Rosamond is in some ways yet another version of this same dynamic. While they are married, he tells Rosamond, who uses her solid boredom and dissatisfaction to bend him to her will, that she is “his basil plant” (“a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man’s brains”) (575). 39. Lydgate’s colleagues are chagrined by his refusal to supply and sell his own medicines. They surmise —correctly — that he considers himself to be more knowledgeable, progressive, and ethical than they are. 40. Much is made of Will’s background, which is immediately known to be foreign (to Middlemarch) and later revealed to be tainted by perhaps the worst kind of trade — pawnbrokering. He further compounds these errors of class by working for Mr. Brooke’s newspaper, The Pioneer, thus literally getting his hands dirty (or rather inky). Mrs. Cadwallader, usually the voice of the community in matters of rank and matrimony, declares Dorothea “might as well marry an Italian with white mice” as Will (339). Sir James refuses to visit or receive Dorothea once she lowers her caste by marrying Will, at least for a while. 41. I must agree with June Szirotny, who, in “‘No Sorrow I Have Thought More About’: The Tragic Failure of George Eliot’s St. Theresa,” posits that Dorothea has most definitely done what she likes, at least at times. Szirotny notes that “All her major acts after Casaubon’s death show her doing good by following her inner warrant in opposition to society” and reasons that since doing good is “what she likes, she is by no means disregarding her own will” (19). 42. In “Women, Energy, and Middlemarch,” Lee Edwards claims that “Dorothea has only two alternatives: she can marry or she can remain a spinster,” but that even this seeming choice “is more apparent than real” (689). While Edwards blames Dorothea’s own need for submission and lack of sufficient courage (and funds) to build her own cottages for the falsity of the “choice,” I would argue that it is her inescapable beauty and breeding that, in addition to the obvious complication of her gender, enable the members of her society to persist in laughing off her attempts at a new sort of utility outside the scope of marriage. 43. Jeanie G. Thomas, in “An Inconvenient Indefiniteness: George Eliot, Middlemarch, and Feminism,” considers Dorothea’s decision to marry Will both a surrender and a protest. Thomas argues that even in her most productive and effective period of action after Mr. Casaubon’s death, Dorothea merely acts the part of patron, while Mr. Fare-

The Complexion of Boredom in Middlemarch

117

brother and Lydgate actually perform services and earn “tangible” compensations (399). Although Dorothea lacks “the structured opportunities to discover a vocation, which men inherit with their sex, Dorothea’s energy endures, diffuse and unchannelled, but still charged, waiting for the opportunity to release itself, if not in active vocation, then in passionate devotion to a human being, most likely a man, who touches her heart and taps her idealism.” Dorothea reverts to the path offered by conventional wisdom, looking for her purpose in life in the person of a husband, but Thomas theorizes that Eliot’s “careful, detailed narration of Dorothea’s movement toward that choice” is inherently a critique of a society which will not allow ambitions beyond the domestic sphere in women (400). Thomas suggests that by choosing to marry Will, the suitor everyone agrees is most unsuitable, Dorothea makes the “only protest that it is within her power to make against the existing structure of things” (408). 44. “It had not occurred to Lydgate that he had been a subject of eager meditation to Rosamond, who had neither any reason for throwing her marriage into distant perspective, nor any pathological studies to divert her mind from that ruminating habit, that inward repetition of looks, words, and phrases which makes a large part in the lives of most girls. He had not meant to look at her or speak to her with more than the inevitable amount of admiration and compliment which a man must give to a beautiful girl” (114). 45. In another counterpoint to Dorothea, Rosamond is also yoked with Ariadne: in the wake of Lydgate’s apparent desertion, “Poor Rosamond lost her appetite and felt as forlorn as Ariadne — as a charming stage Ariadne left behind with all her boxes full of costumes and no hope of a coach” (207). While Dorothea is absorbed so completely in her fluid boredom at the Hall of Statues that Will and Naumann are able to observe her, undetected, for quite a while, Rosamond, in her state of solid boredom, is, as always, aware of her movements, dress, and beauty and the way they might appear to an audience. 46. Seventeen years before the publication of Middlemarch, in an 1855 essay, Eliot addresses the long-term results of this attitude toward marriage and wives: “Men pay a heavy price for their reluctance to encourage self-help and independent resources in woman. The precious meridian years of many a man of genius have to be spent in the toil of routine, that an ‘establishment’ may be kept up for a woman who can understand none of his secret yearnings, who is fit for nothing but to sit in her drawing-room like a doll-Madonna in her shrine. No matter. Anything is more endurable than to change our established formulae about women, or to run the risk of looking up to our wives instead of looking down on them…. [M]en say of women, let them be idols, useless absorbents of precious things, provided we are not obliged to admit them to be strictly fellow-beings, to be treated, one and all, with justice and sober reverence” (Essays 204–5). 47. Rosamond has flouted her husband’s wishes in several major ways, from her illfated ride to derailing his attempts to find someone to take over the lease on their tooexpensive house to writing to the Quallingham family to ask for help in paying their debts. 48. When Rosamond comments that his practice is spreading to include the landed gentry, Lydgate replies, “I really don’t like attending such people as well as the poor. The cases are more monotonous, and one has to go through more fuss and listen more deferentially to nonsense” (202). Lydgate’s professional concerns shift, partly as a result of Rosamond’s boredom and dissatisfaction, from rural fever hospitals to Continental bathing places, and his greatest work is a treatise on gout, the disease of over-indulgence in rich food. 49. Celia’s plot perhaps offers a middle ground between Dorothea’s and Rosamond’s, for she gains what both of them lack in their marriages in the narrative proper — a baby — and she thus proves herself useful in what is really the only important and real way in a fine-lady marriage: she can produce children. Rosamond seems much less concerned over her miscarriage than her husband, but this is perhaps because merely in being preg-

118

Beautiful Boredom

nant she has proven herself in the only field not covered in finishing school or predicted by the looking glass, and in losing the baby she has relieved herself of potential duties, drudgery, and boredom. There is never any question of a baby in Dorothea’s first marriage, but Celia thinks her sister should be satisfied being a (widowed) maiden aunt, because Celia herself seems to find her marriage and motherhood completely satisfying and fulfilling. Dodo (Celia’s affectionate diminutive for Dorothea) of course, never makes the right choices, in her sister’s opinion.

3

Life on a Grecian Urn: Boredom, Beauty, and Stasis in The Portrait of a Lady If Dorothea Brooke’s habitual boredom must be suppressed and elided at the end of the novel for the marriage-plot conclusion of Middlemarch to hold (however tenuously), for a supposedly happy ending to occur, and for the nonnarratable to be resumed, what happens to boredom (and consequently to marriage) in a novel that chronicles the life of a similarly minded woman character1 for five installments2 and nineteen (out of fifty-six) chapters beyond the supposed fairy-tale wedding? Henry James explores these issues in The Portrait of a Lady (1882), and in his text there can be no doubt that his heroine’s marriage is unhappy, that her boredom — in many manifestations—continues beyond the nuptials, and that marriage, while in and of itself no longer comfortably equivalent to narrative closure, may possibly remain the only real option for a beautiful woman of the upper classes. While Jane Eyre’s marriage to Mr. Rochester in the last chapter of Brontë’s novel seems to promise our heroine blissful equality, happy unconventionality, and a nonnarratable state of infinite progression née boredom, Dorothea’s (second) marriage (to Will Ladislaw) at the end of Middlemarch only gestures toward an unconventional and satisfying union, and the narrative seems to achieve its closure only when conceived as a closing down of possibilities for the epic-minded protagonist, most noticeably through the expulsion of her boredom. The Portrait offers even greater indeterminacy in terms of closure, for James mutates the traditional freeze-frame marriage plot ending into something both open-ended and static. James’s narrative continues in the vein of Brontë’s in Jane Eyre and Eliot’s in Middlemarch, often eliding the major events (weddings, honeymoons, trips abroad, the birth and death of a child, etc.) on which conventional (physical) action relies and turning the attention instead to the plane of mental or psychological action. Whereas traditional narrative action cedes its dominance to an internalized, mental narrative action by the end of Jane 119

120

Beautiful Boredom

Eyre, in The Portrait, as in Middlemarch, it is the minute machinations of the psyche which spur the narrative throughout the novel. In other words, in Eliot and James, the narratable is consistently that which is thought and felt, rather than that which is acted and done. With his heightened interest in the inner life and selection of a more conspicuously leisured society than even Eliot depicts, James consequently puts boredom on the lips and in the minds of almost all his important characters, and thus boredom becomes more solidly linked to the narratable in The Portrait than in Middlemarch. Boredom functions (and is manifested) differently for different characters in The Portrait, but for Isabel it operates in a manner quite similar to Jane Eyre’s and Dorothea Brooke’s by presaging important decisions and discoveries, while for Gilbert Osmond it is a powerful and destructive weapon, much as it was for Rosamond Vincy. These are only the two most extreme examples, but boredom is so widespread in the community James constructs as to be almost the most common occupation.

Productive Boredom and the Path of Beauty In his preface to The Portrait, James explicitly professes an intention to “place the centre of the subject in the young woman’s [Isabel’s] own consciousness,” and this focus on interiority3 and psychology is further sharpened in the opening scene of the novel, which is tea-time on the lawn of Gardencourt, where the novel’s preoccupation with boredom is first introduced and emphasized (50). The landscape itself is evocative of stretched time, with light, as in Middlemarch, intimately related to experiences of boredom: real dusk would not arrive for many hours; but the flood of summer light had begun to ebb, the air had grown mellow, the shadows were long upon the smooth, dense turf. They lengthened slowly, however, and the scene expressed that sense of leisure still to come which is perhaps the chief source of one’s enjoyment of such a scene at such an hour. From five o’clock to eight is on certain occasions a little eternity; but on such an occasion as this the interval could be only an eternity of pleasure [59].

The surroundings are beautiful and privileged, with the well-maintained grass, the soft, “mellow” air, and the strange but welcome sense of suspended, neither-day-nor-night time. Interestingly, this “eternity of pleasure” is experienced not by an important female character, as we might by now expect, but rather by a trio of men. Everything about these men suggests purposelessness and leisure, with the old man, Mr. Touchett, sitting in a luxuriously deep chair and draining his tea cup’s contents with “much

Life on a Grecian Urn

121

circumspection, holding it for a long time close to his chin, with his face turned to the house,” while the younger men, Mr. Touchett’s son Ralph and his friend Lord Warburton, are to be found “strolling to and fro” and engaging in “desultory” conversation (59). A discussion unfolds on the “perfect lawn,” and it centers on boredom, with the chronically ill Ralph revealing that the handsome, healthy, and wealthy (and wise?) Lord Warburton has been “going on fearfully” that he is “sick of life,” but Ralph accuses his neighbor of only pretending to be bored (64). Ralph, on the other hand, designates himself as “not in the least bored” and “only too” interested in life.4 Lord Warburton politely avers that he is “never bored” when visiting Gardencourt, thanks to the “uncommonly good talk” provided by Mr. Touchett and his son. The elder Touchett gently criticizes both younger men, asserting that they have “no excuse for being bored anywhere” and explaining that he was never bored at their age, probably because he was “working tooth and nail.” He diagnoses leisure and wealth and the cause of their boredoms: “You wouldn’t be bored if you had something to do; but all you young men are too idle … too fastidious, and too indolent, and too rich” (64–65). Boredom and happiness are not necessarily mutually exclusive, for despite this talk of being “sick of life,” the narrator has made an especial point that the gentlemen are experiencing the tea time quite pleasurably. It is into this scene of beautiful, upper-class stasis, where people walk without exertion or geographical gain and talk without great purpose, that Isabel Archer first appears. Not only does she enter on Mr. Touchett’s cue — for he has just advised marrying a good woman to make the young men’s lives “much more interesting”— but also she injects something of novelty and the mysterious into the scene of comfortable complacency (66). Her aunt, Mr. Touchett’s estranged wife, has sent a cryptic telegram to her family announcing her intention to bring Isabel to England and describing her orphaned American niece as “quite independent” (67). All the men enjoy speculating as to the meaning of that phrase, wondering if it indicates a financial state, a moral attitude, or merely her being fond of her “own way.” While Mr. Touchett assures the younger men that it always means at least the last interpretation,5 Ralph and Lord Warburton are intrigued by the difference she, as an American girl, may embody, and they wonder whether she is engaged to be married. Isabel’s independence and marriageability are thus set up from the beginning as key concepts that must be somehow be reconciled. Just as Jane Eyre’s indeterminacy of social class enables her greater freedom in rejecting conventional models of feminine behavior and in crafting her own hybrid model, Isabel’s combination of good looks, intelligence, pennilessness, parentlessness, and American ambiguity of class6 perhaps

122

Beautiful Boredom

seems to offer her more potential to find an option outside marriage or drudgery. While Dorothea Brooke, desirous of great utility and perhaps even fame, but in possession of both a fortune and beauty, discovers that the only acts she can realistically effect are choosing her husbands, Isabel, on the other hand, hampered at this point by no great inheritance but blessed with notable beauty, can perhaps see options outside the patient drudge/spinster or fine lady/matron paradigm. Ralph and Mr. Touchett describe Isabel as tall, pale, “slim and charming” (71), “unexpectedly pretty” (70), and “very beautiful” (72), but they read signs of her “independence” everywhere, from her coming out onto the lawn unaccompanied by her aunt, to her easy handling of Bunchie, the little terrier, to her confidence in conversation. The professedly bored Lord Warburton immediately classes her as “interesting,” but her identification as an object of interest and excitement does not indicate that as a subject she is free of boredom.7 Patricia Meyer Spacks perceptively notes the prominence of boredom and interest in the opening pages of the novel, arguing that Isabel is the embodiment of active interest and that boredom is necessarily quite alien to that character’s experiences. However, Spacks’s assertion that boredom is “a form of unhappiness from which Isabel never suffers” fails to take into account the definitions I have articulated earlier in this project (231): whereas Spacks classifies the state of boredom as an unhappy void, I posit that boredom is exclusive neither of mental activity nor physical inactivity, unhappiness nor happiness. Being bored does not preclude Isabel from being either a positive character or an extremely interesting one. Isabel possesses8 a very fluid, child-like form of boredom. She is fond of introspection,9 considering it “an exercise in the open air,” and she believes that “a visit to the recesses of one’s spirit” is not only harmless but refreshing and beautiful (107). It is this well-developed habit of in-looking that helps make her boredoms so productive. When Mrs. Touchett, fairygodmother-like, “takes up her niece,” Isabel had been seated alone with a book. To say she was so occupied is to say that her solitude did not press upon her: for her love of knowledge had a fertilizing quality and her imagination was strong. There was at this time, however, a want of fresh taste in her situation which the arrival of an unexpected visitor did much to correct [76].

Isabel is doing something (reading), and it is something she enjoys doing, but she is a bit dissatisfied without knowing exactly what would be better, almost certainly because her class and gender offer so few other options. This impression of a positive, or at least unobjectionable, boredom is reinforced a few pages later. She is sitting in the office,10 a room with a “silent, motionless portal” that could open to the outside, if it were not bolted shut

Life on a Grecian Urn

123

(78). The door’s sidelights are shaded over with green paper, and Isabel has “never assured herself that the vulgar street lay beyond” the blind, locked door (79). Like boredom, this image conjures the contradictory notion of un-thought-of possibility. The “crude, cold rain” seems a “cynical, insincere appeal” to “patience,” and patience is but unvocalized boredom (how many children have been urged to “just be patient” when they have complained of boredom?). Isabel is unable to focus just on reading, giving “as little heed as possible” to cosmic treacheries and attempting to keep her “eyes on her book” and “fix her mind.” Rallying against her wish for a desire, Isabel gives her mind “marching orders,” but the mission seems doomed to failure, because her mind is “trudging over the sandy plains of a history of German Thought” (79; emphasis mine). The history of German thought is hardly the oasis needed to encourage her slow, wearisome trip through this desert. Isabel’s free-floating attention is quickly diverted from philosophy when “suddenly she became aware of a step very different from her own intellectual pace.” Her boredom is further illustrated by her mental envisioning of actually physically plodding through the book, and the brief convergence of those imagined footsteps with the sound of real footsteps. The “inquisitive, experimental quality” of the newcomer’s footsteps embodies Isabel’s psychological state. That Isabel is experiencing boredom is verified by her aunt (the personification of Isabel’s inarticulate desire) later on: I found her in an old house at Albany, sitting in a dreary room on a rainy day, reading a heavy book and boring herself to death. She didn’t know she was bored, but when I left her in no doubt of it she seemed very grateful for the service [96].

Although Mrs. Touchett identifies her psychological state, Isabel herself does not openly admit to boredom. As her aunt says, “she has no idea of being bored” (96). To call herself bored would conjure, for Isabel, the word’s negative implications, with the most damaging being that her own intellect was insufficient to keep her entertained. Such a paucity would be inconceivable to the local prodigy.11 James fully appreciates the positive potential of Isabel’s boredom, however. Isabel’s learning is the product of fluid boredom, for “the foundation of her knowledge was really laid in the idleness of her grandmother’s house,” where, “uncontrolled,” she chooses any tome whose frontispiece strikes her fancy and carries it off to the office to peruse (78). While this self-education is superior to the more formal training she occasionally receives, it is a far cry from the type of learning (and learning environment) Mary Wollstonecraft advocated as crucial to the development of any other model of woman than the merely decorative fine lady and the thankless patient drudge. Isabel’s reading thus seems to both initially fuel

124

Beautiful Boredom

her desire for some other option and perhaps ultimately limit her ability to choose any but the fine-lady role. Her boredom’s fruit, in this case, might ultimately be more (long-term and unproductive) boredom. Not only is boredom responsible for what education she has,12 but also it is in this receptive state that she makes all of her major decisions, such as accepting her aunt’s invitation and completely changing the course of a life apparently doomed to be spent living in a sister’s house: left to herself for the evening she sat a while under the lamp, her hands empty, her usual avocations unheeded. Then she rose and moved about the room, and from one room to another, preferring the places where the vague lamplight expired. She was restless and even agitated; at moments she trembled a little [86].

It is during this state of restless unease that Isabel is able to crystallize her desire to “leave the past behind her and … begin afresh” (86). She sits in the “dusky” corner of the quiet parlor for a “long time” with her eyes closed, listening to the “ticking of the big bronze clock,” allowing her wide-ranging imagination and free-floating attention to determine her course of action, which will be to accompany her aunt overseas. Like Jane Eyre, Isabel fixes on the value of “change” above all else: a future with her aunt is “as yet extremely indefinite” in form, but, most importantly, it will be different from her current situation (86). Part of her current boredom stems, she believes, from her never having known “anything particularly unpleasant” up to this point in her life, and she resents this “too absent” unpleasantness because she has gathered from her “acquaintance with literature that it [unpleasantness] was often a source of interest and even of instruction” (87). Her craving for this type of experience continues after her transplantation to England; when she asks her cousin Ralph to produce Gardencourt’s ghost, he explains that “it has never been seen by a young, happy, innocent person like you. You must have suffered first, have suffered greatly, have gained some miserable knowledge” in order to see it (101). “I’m very fond of knowledge,” Isabel replies, indicating her desire for even “miserable” experience. That this taste for theoretical misery is born out of her rather pleasant boredom makes perfect sense, for nothing else seems quite so exotic, unusual, different; Isabel is somewhat glutted on pleasantness. Unpleasantness can perhaps only accompany a life less ordinary or less conventionally ordained for a beautiful young maiden, and her experiences in Albany have proffered “everything a girl could have” and everything that conduct books had long instructed was necessary to female happiness and satisfaction: she is given “kindness, admiration, bonbons, bouquets … abundant opportunity for dancing, plenty of new dresses, the London Spectator, the latest publications, the music of Gounod, the poetry of Browning, the prose of George Eliot” (89; emphasis mine). She finds these trappings of

Life on a Grecian Urn

125

feminine success much less exciting and interesting than the pursuit of knowledge and the observation of life on a broader plane, and her weariness with her limited sphere may well have found its genesis in her reading of Middlemarch. The usual conduct book philosophies of female behavior, education, and life options (all two of them) had, by the end of the nineteenth century, been absorbed into popular thought and culture — the images of woman vaunted in mid-century conduct books like Sarah Stickney Ellis’s The Wives of England (1843) and The Daughters of England (1842) had been, by Isabel Archer’s time, celebrated in literature proper, most notably in Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House. Ellis’s earlier claim that it cannot be “subject of regret to any kind and feeling woman, that her sphere of action is one adapted to the exercise of the affections, where she may love, and trust, and hope, and serve, to the utmost of her wishes,” removed from the need to “calculate, to compete, to struggle,” as men do, and consigned instead to a place where “beauty and order are expected to denote her presence” (Daughters 11), is echoed some twenty years later by John Ruskin in “Of Queens’ Gardens” from Sesame and Lilies (1865). Ruskin brings his famous aesthetic sensibilities to bear on the ideas of young women’s conduct and education, explaining that unlike a boy, who may be chiseled or hammered like a sculpture in marble or bronze, a girl grows “as a flower does, — she will wither without sun; she will decay in her sheath … she may fall, and defile her head in the dust” if exposed to the wrong, too-public influence and experience (114), and delineating that “the woman’s duty, as a member of the commonwealth, is to assist in the ordering, in the comforting, and in the beautiful adornment of the state” (123; emphasis mine). A woman’s beauty, Ruskin believes, “cannot be too powerful, nor shed its sacred light too far” (105), and Patmore (whom Ruskin admires and cites) would agree. For both Ruskin and Patmore, marriage and the home represent the logical, natural, and heaven-ordained sphere of action for lovely young women: Ruskin, in fact, interrogates those ambitious females who would ask for more, claiming that it is only through these traditional, selfabnegating channels that they can achieve the titles of “queen” and “lady” and achieve true power (which is, of course, that old chestnut “the power of influence”). Like Dorothea, Isabel initially hopes for another option than married fine lady, but Isabel ultimately surrenders much more completely to that very conventional role than does her old acquaintance from her grandmother’s library. Almost everyone who knows Isabel seems to wonder what to “do” with her, and the usual conditioned response is to marry her off. Her sister Lillian13 wants to “see her safely married” (84; emphasis mine), even though

126

Beautiful Boredom

she holds her sister’s intellect, latent talent, and potential in awe, and Ralph Touchett, on the very day of meeting Isabel, asks his mother if she doesn’t have a plan get her beautiful niece married off. Ralph’s assessment that his cousin is not only “very pretty”14 but moreover a “rare [and thus collectible15] creature” seems to be the impetus behind his assumption that her destiny must be to make a brilliant match (96). Mrs. Touchett stresses Isabel’s cleverness and refuses to “play her such a trick” as facilitating a marriage. Isabel’s aunt clarifies that she “will do absolutely nothing with her” because Isabel “herself will do everything she chooses … she gave me notice of that “ (98). Isabel’s “independence of character” (as Ralph calls it) stems at least partly from her perception of her own intellect. Like Dorothea, she is “a young person of many theories,” and she has a “finer mind” than most of those around her. Also similarly to Middlemarch’s heroine, Isabel desires “knowledge that was tinged with the unfamiliar” (103). While Dorothea tries to justify her thirst for male-coded knowledge in terms of utility and service to others, Isabel makes no apology for her quest for knowledge and firsthand observation. Isabel spends much of her time “thinking of beauty and bravery and magnanimity,” but while for Dorothea these concepts are related to improving a larger society, for James’s heroine they relate more to art, personal appearance, and personal heroism.16 Dorothea resists marriage because she hungers after a greater utility, but Isabel resists marriage — which she calls a “ruinous expenditure” (106)— more because it seems to limit the scope of her “free expansion” and intellectual development. Isabel considers utility a “good thing” in the abstract, thinking that she “was very fortunate in being independent, and that she ought to make some very enlightened use of that state,” but the models she sees of feminine utility smack a little too much of drudgery and ugliness to be truly palatable to her (105). Her predilection for beauty not only hinders her from pursuing less conventional options but also actually seems to predispose her to be attracted by an uber-aesthete such as Gilbert Osmond. Henrietta17 Stackpole, the icon of female utility in The Portrait, embodies the aesthetic and intellectual pros and the cons of this alternate, unmarried path. Whereas Eliza Reed, the exemplar of utility in Jane Eyre, had to create a function for herself, engaged in plodding busywork only she invested with any higher purpose and meaning, Henrietta is a woman journalist of some success and acclaim, as her published letters are “universally quoted,” even if Isabel finds them rather “ephemeral.” Isabel thinks of her as the highest example of “useful activity” (105), for Henrietta’s literary labors are extremely productive — of profit if not of art —financing the educations of three of her sister’s children. Although Isabel considers her friend somewhat “obvious” and overly progressive/modern, she also values her as proof

Life on a Grecian Urn

127

against marriage as the defining element of a woman’s life. Through Henrietta, the utility/spinster option is transformed from Eliza Reed’s blank of meaningless drudgery to a positive career, something fulfilling and essentially approaching Wollstonecraft’s ideal of independence. Of course, the translatability of Henrietta’s model for Isabel is complicated by one important factor: even though (when viewed objectively) Henrietta’s person is fair and possibly even pretty, she is perceived socially as unattractive and even grotesque because of her career and her related (unnatural) behavior. Henrietta possesses many of Burke’s most important characteristics of beauty, for she is “quite delicately … fair,” with a rounded “neat, plump person,” a “small” mouth, a “delicate” complexion, and light brown ringlets that shade gradually from the fairness of her skin (137; emphasis mine). However, Ralph declares that a “female interviewer — a reporter in petticoats” must be a “kind of monster,” and he imagines her as a freakish spectacle, something to “see,” not someone to admire. Isabel is reluctant to take Henrietta to Lockleigh, Lord Warburton’s estate; the Misses Molyneux are at a loss to comprehend her; and Mr. Bantling’s sister, Lady Pensil, never seems to get around to inviting Henrietta for a visit. Gilbert Osmond tells his wife that “he really must object to that newspaper-woman,” whom he calls the “most vulgar of women” (440, 441). While Isabel finds her friend’s freedom as a single literary woman18 invigorating, Henrietta’s non-lady (and even unladylike) status is alternately humorous, embarrassing, and distressing for her beautiful friend. Unlike Dorothea, who often tries to downplay or distance herself from her good looks, Isabel enjoys the attention and approbation she is granted for both them and her fine mind, and she recoils on a very basic level from sacrificing this approval and adulation, which she certainly would have to do, were she to follow a path of liberated utility such as Henrietta’s.19 If Henrietta is the model of independent utility (an impatient drudge) in The Portrait, the Misses Molyneux, Lord Warburton’s sisters, offer a striking counter-example of the English-variety fine lady, for, as Ralph says, there are “fifty thousand young women in England who exactly resembled them, “ and, although unmarried themselves, they seem to represent accurately the lifestyle of a lord’s wife (129). Edward Sackville West offers a very useful definition of being a lady in the late nineteenth century: it meant to possess a high degree of social responsibility and a sensitiveness to taste in behavior. It was primarily an aesthetic, only secondarily a moral position: the lady did certain good things because to do them was implied by her condition, and she avoided certain others because they were (to her) obviously ugly [25].

This aesthetically coded morality is much more in line with Isabel’s pattern of thought and judgment than Henrietta’s rejection of custom and appear-

128

Beautiful Boredom

ance to embrace gritty reality and engage in remunerative activities. The Misses Molyneux themselves are singularly attractive to Isabel, with their fine but unostentatious clothes, their evocative eyes, their smooth and rounded figures, their unwavering good breeding, and their “extreme sweetness” and “shyness of demeanour” (129). It is their appealing eyes that offer the greatest point of physical contrast with Henrietta: the Misses Molyneux’s eyes are “like the balanced basins, the circles of ornamental water, set, in parterres, among the geraniums”20 (129), while Henrietta’s are “peculiarly open” and “surprised-looking,” like “large polished buttons” (137, 138). Isabel thinks she sees in their eyes “the peace, the kindness, the honor, the possessions, a deep security, and a great exclusion” inherent to their class and position (188; emphasis mine), and this assessment corresponds to Martha Vicinus’s definition of Victorian ladyhood: “In her most perfect form, the lady combined total sexual innocence, conspicuous consumption and the worship of the family hearth” (60). Everything about Lord Warburton’s sisters’ eyes bespeaks domesticity, enclosure, and complacent stasis, while Henrietta’s are active and curious yet disconcertingly unfeminine (or even non-human). Unlike Henrietta, the ladies “never do anything” (188; emphasis mine), but they are “quiet and reasonable and satisfied” (130). Henrietta, who is as mystified by them as they are perplexed by her, is struck by their treating their brother “as if he had been Royalty” (187), while Isabel doubts he ever confides in them as equals, behaving instead with consistent but likely condescending kindness. Although Isabel claims to want to “try and imitate” the ladies, expressing an appreciation for the picturesqueness of their black-velveteen clad figures set amidst a wilderness of faded chintz, in rejecting Lord Warburton’s proposal she clearly imagines for herself a composition of more original and striking order. Lord Warburton proposes marriage after spending only 26 hours in the beautiful Isabel’s company, and he fully realizes that she is not what society would consider a compellingly good match for him, as her antecedents are “vague” and “generic,” her fortune nonexistent, and her beauty, while undeniable, is perhaps not of the sort that “justifies a man to the multitude” (157). Despite all this, he intends to make an offer, and when Isabel divines something in his air that alerts her to this possibility, her immediate response is that she should resist being drawn into a “territorial, a political, a social magnate’s paradigm for women and wives when she has “a system and an orbit of her own” (156). It is not the class elevation that disturbs her so much as the solid, nonproductive boredom she senses would be inherent in the fine-married-lady role: “in the whole [of his system] there was something stiff and stupid which would make it a burden” (156; emphasis mine). Even

Life on a Grecian Urn

129

though he promises “I wouldn’t bore you for the world!” (162), Isabel cannot help but regard marriage as a “vast cage,” a place where her “free exploration of life” (and fluid boredom) would be limited (164). She begs to put off responding until she can compose her thoughts, but that she will reject him is a certainty: she couldn’t marry Lord Warburton…. But what disturbed her, in the sense that it struck her with wonderment, was this very fact that it cost her so little to refuse a magnificent “chance.” With whatever qualifications one would, Lord Warburton had offered her a great opportunity; the situation might have discomforts, might contain oppressive, might contain narrowing elements, might really prove but a stupefying anodyne; but she did her sex no injustice in believing that nineteen women out of twenty would have accommodated themselves to it without a pang [164; emphasis mine].

She asks herself why she cannot be content with luxurious boredom, as the majority of her sex are, and the answer lies in that very formulation. Isabel considers herself superior to nineteen out of twenty women, or, more accurately, ninety-nine out of one hundred women, and the fact that most of them would unblinkingly accept Lord Warburton makes it the obviously wrong choice for her. She has believed the popular assessment of herself as original, singularly beautiful, and brilliant, and as a result the expected and conventional paths seem particularly wearisome and unattractive. Just as Dorothea rejects Sir James as a suitor (despite his intentions to forward her social work) because marriage to him would seem too complete a capitulation to the average and the expected, Isabel blindly declines Lord Warburton’s offer because doing so implies that she is capable of even greater and more unexpected acts21: “if she wouldn’t do such a thing as that then she must do great things,” she rationalizes (164). Isabel tries to convince herself that in her rejection of Lord Warburton she is concerned with “the natural and reasonable emotions of life and [is not] not altogether a victim to intellectual eagerness and vague ambitions,” such as poor Dorothea was in Middlemarch. At the same time, though, she terms his pleasing person and great wealth merely “a big bribe” to diminish her liberty and circumscribe her mental and physical independence, and this certainly sounds as though she does have Dorothea-like tendencies toward greatness and unusual (for women) accomplishment. Isabel even tells Lord Warburton that, for her, to marry is to “give up” other chances and other possibilities (186). Like Dorothea, Isabel does not want to be exempted purely on the basis of her beauty and her gender “from life,” and though Lord Warburton guarantees her “the chance of taking the common lot” if she marries him, he makes the mistake of qualifying that it will be in “a comfortable sort of way.” To Isabel, this brand of comfort is synonymous with restric-

130

Beautiful Boredom

tion and static boredom — like the Misses Molyneux, rather than “do” she would merely “exist” (188). Isabel has also rejected Caspar Goodwood, her most intent suitor, largely because he seems to “deprive her of the sense of freedom” (168). Caspar’s defining characteristics seem to be his stiff, unbending height and his equally unbending will and concept of justice. A cotton-mill proprietor and patented inventor, he, like Isabel, has a legion of friends convinced that he will one day be something great and famous. Although Caspar is intelligent, creative, and productive, as much the model of a prime American male as Lord Warburton is of an excellent British nobleman, Isabel never can find his company “delightful”: “when one was alone with him he talked too much about the same subject, and when other people were present he talked too little about anything” (171). Caspar is something of a bore, not a little because he always gives her the impression of knowing better than she what she should do with her life. He denies her impression that he wants to cage her or clip her wings, arguing instead that nothing could give him “greater pleasure” than to see her independence, and that the only way for her to gain true independence is to marry (214). When he explains that, as an unmarried young woman (who happens to be lovely), she is “hampered at every step” from doing as she likes, Isabel attempts to reassign herself to a different category, that of the unmarriageable spinster: I’m not in my first youth — I can do what I choose — I belong quite to the independent class. I’ve neither father nor mother; I’m poor and of a serious disposition; I’m not pretty. I therefore am not bound to be timid and conventional; indeed I can’t afford such luxuries…. I don‘t wish to be a mere sheep in the flock; I wish to choose my fate and know something of human affairs beyond what other people think it compatible with propriety to tell me [214].

Despite Isabel’s efforts to persuade herself as well as Caspar that she is not beautiful (and therefore marriageable), that she does not need a “clever man” to teach her how to live, and that she “almost certainly” will never marry, she apparently does and will. Caspar Goodwood’s visits are intimately connected with Isabel’s experiences of boredom. Her boredom seems influenced by impatience in Albany, when she is “vaguely expecting” him to come calling, but she has a much more developed and extended period in England, at Gardencourt, when she has heard from Henrietta Stackpole that he might come visit at any time, and “for the next forty-eight hours … she stood prepared to hear the young man’s name announced” (153). The sense of anticipation or dread presses on her for the first day, but on the second day she strolls “about for some time, in a manner at once listless and restless” in the park with Bunchie. She entertains herself for “some moments” talking to Bunchie, but she is

Life on a Grecian Urn

131

“notified for the first time, on this occasion, of the finite character of Bunchie’s intellect.” She considers occupying herself with a work from her uncle’s well-stocked library, but “of late … literature had seemed a fading light,” so instead she sits “motionless and empty-handed, her eyes bent on the cool green turf of the lawn.” Isabel hovers on the verge of the more adult, solid boredom, a state constructed at times as a defense against waiting. However, James prevents this interpretation with two details: first, he states “her suspense indeed was dissipated the second day,” and, second, the final manifestation of her boredom is again the highly focused, attentive state, where she is absorbed in gazing at the grass. Caspar does not appear that day — instead she receives a letter from him, but she does hear Lord Warburton’s proposal after this period of focused abstraction. Her brush with but ultimate deflection of the constructed, adult, defensive boredom parallels the status of her relationship with Caspar; she is obviously affected by the continuing attentions of this uncompromisingly masculine and powerful man, but she almost always manages to extract herself with little more than a flirtation with adult/sexual subtext.22 Caspar’s imminent arrival at Mrs. Touchett’s Palazzo Crescentini in Florence has the power to trigger another episode of fluid boredom for Isabel. She gazes, sightless, out a tall window with the “vagueness of unrest,” but “too troubled for attention” she moves in circles. This disordered physical activity reflects her mental processes, which skip seamlessly from recollections of her greatest moment of “freedom,” “boldness,” and “liberty” (which is walking alone down a foggy London street), to a reminiscence of her transcontinental travel, to speculations about what Caspar will say on learning she is engaged to Gilbert Osmond, to the sudden conviction that she is newly “worth more” since her travels and engagement (377). Even before her last, dramatic meeting with Caspar near the end of the novel, Isabel has every appearance of boredom. She sits on the bench in the Gardencourt grounds where Lord Warburton once proposed to her, the “image of a victim of idleness” (631). Everything about her posture and attitude seems to indicate a “singular absence of purpose,” for her hands hang at her sides and her eyes are fixed vaguely before her while tea-time deepens into thick twilight. Conjured almost as surely as Jane’s Gytrash or the cry across the moors, Caspar Goodwood suddenly appears nearby. The power of her boredom frequently to summon his presence suggests that he is more than a mere narrative stick figure, as some critics have suggested. Instead, he, like Rochester, may have a special connection to the heroine: the association of his entrances with her fluid boredoms suggests that he can perhaps provide the long-term environment in which she can actually sustain the sense of freedom her productive boredoms supply. The product of

132

Beautiful Boredom

this particular episode of boredom is Isabel’s heightened sense of awareness, both physically and emotionally; in fact, she feels startlingly free, as if floating in “fathomless waters” (635). The one suitor who succeeds,23 Gilbert Osmond, is dramatically different24 from Caspar Goodwood and Lord Warburton, but he too sometimes follows on the heels of her fluid boredom. After ridding herself of Lord Warburton in Rome, Isabel lingers in the gallery of the Capitol, alone in the “glorious room, among the shining antique marbles” (353). In a scene perhaps indebted to Dorothea’s visit to the Hall of Statues in Middlemarch, she sits down in the center of the circle of these almost tangible presences, “regarding them vaguely, resting her eyes on their beautiful blank faces; listening, as it were, to their eternal silence.” She fully embodies the childlike, fluid state of boredom, infected by the statues’ “noble quietude” and the “solemn spell” of the “golden sunshine.” Her creative flux, “under the charm of their motionless grace,” leads her to wonder “to what, of their experience, their absent eyes were open, and how, to our ears, their alien lips would sound.” Reveling in her solitude and mental freedom, at one long moment she enjoys the new familiarity of their beauty, and at the next her attention shifts or “lapse[s], drawn off by a deeper tide of life” (354). Her state of great potentiality is broken, significantly, by Gilbert Osmond. In a transposition of Eliot’s great bored-in-Rome scene, James’s heroine uses her fluid boredom to determine on an ill-advised and misinformed course of action (marriage to Osmond), while Dorothea uses her state of mental flux to determine that she may have made an irreparable error (marriage to Casaubon). Isabel mistakenly surmises that Osmond wants her to “know everything,” and that he is a superior being actually able to guide her in a way her own drifting and aimless liberty cannot, where Dorothea realizes that her husband, who she had thought so superior, is both exclusionary and rather a dimmer light than she had imagined. The choice Isabel makes, then, is to marry a Casaubon figure, one who seems to promise elevation but insists on diminution, and unfortunately there will be no convenient heart condition to free her from her bad choice.

Emptying the Urn: Solid Boredoms and Static Beauty As the narrative progresses, Isabel’s boredoms become inextricably intertwined and overlaid with the palpable but never positively valenced boredoms of two other characters— Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle. These characters convince Isabel of their attractiveness, their propriety as

Life on a Grecian Urn

133

models of perfect gentleman25 and fine lady,26 and the polished beauty of the lifestyles/class and attitudes they seem to represent. Osmond, who looks like a “demoralized prince in exile” (295), has an “indefinable beauty” and seems to be the “finest … manly organism she had ever known” (476, 477). His manners and taste suggest that he is of the finest quality and subtlest grain — a gentleman to the fingertips, sensitive to the slightest nuance of behavior and appearance. Madame Merle, though she modestly denies her looks, is strikingly attractive and exudes perfect breeding and propriety at all times. Her accomplishments seem to manifest even more beauty and perfection, for her execution at the piano is both technically flawless and emotionally powerful, her drawing and needlework exhibit taste and talent, and her prolific letter-writing/correspondence indicates the prowess of her mind and the high esteem in which she is held by her acquaintance. The longer Isabel is exposed to Serena Merle, the more this siren appears to exert a circumscribing influence,27 and Osmond and she together lure Isabel (once she is an heiress) into an aesthetically pleasing but morally suspect marriage of their contrivance. Osmond and Madame Merle’s motives for enmeshing Isabel are much more involved and complex than mere fortune hunting. Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) offers sociological insight into their plan, as one of his most convincing arguments in this critique of the most privileged class details the function of women — or wives, to use the practical synonym — in leisure-class society. “Women and other slaves,” Veblen writes, “are highly valued, both as an evidence of wealth and as a means of accumulating wealth” (99). Sometimes the infusion of funds a wife brings can enable the husband’s continuing in the leisure class, since “the characteristic feature of leisure-class life is a conspicuous exemption from all useful employment” (87), and “abstention from labour is the conventional evidence of wealth and is therefore the conventional mark of social standing” (88). Marrying a rich woman becomes necessary, Veblen explains, because wherever the canon of conspicuous leisure has a chance to work out its tendency, there will therefore emerge a secondary, and in a sense, spurious, leisure class— abjectly poor and living a precarious life of want and discomfort, but morally unable to stoop to gainful pursuits. The decayed gentleman and the lady who has seen better days are by no means unfamiliar phenomena [89].

In addition to supplying a man with the means to live life in an unemployed (and therefore morally unobjectionable) manner, a wife can furnish “(1) a propensity for dominance and coercion; (2) the utility of these persons as evidence of the prowess of their owner; (3) the utility of their services” (99). Woman’s economic function in the leisure class is to marry and be married, providing funds and subservience, Veblen sympathetically concludes.

134

Beautiful Boredom

The implications of this theory are clear for James’s novel, which centers on three questions: first, if Isabel will marry; then, who she will marry; and, finally, how marriage will affect her. For both Veblen and James, then, Isabel’s marriage is a defining moment: for Veblen, it is because she really has no economic or class purpose prior to the marriage, and for James, it is because through it she is attempting to become ladylike and truly refined, both artistically and culturally. Isabel could only be married for her fortune and (op)pressed into a dominated role, Veblen might observe. Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond’s machinations fulfill her inescapable destiny of being sacrificed to the “lady who has seen better days” and the “decayed gentleman,” apt representatives of Veblen’s “spurious” leisure class (89). Not only do Osmond’s plans for Isabel’s fortune and duties conform to Veblen’s hypothesis, in that her money will enable his continued abstention from labor and fortify his social standing, but he is intent that she would, like any “good servant,” “conspicuously know [her] place” (105). Veblen posits that “deviations from the code of decorum have become intrinsically odious … [and] there are few things that so touch us with instinctive revulsion as a breach of decorum” (94). Osmond, even when at his most hateful towards Isabel, will never let a breach of decorum appear to originate with him. Marriage to Osmond affects subtle but deep change in Isabel. She is still beautiful; in fact, she becomes even “lovelier than before,” because her beauty has been cultivated at the express expense of any potential utility, but she seems somehow to process and move through time differently, more slowly (444). Under Osmond’s tutelage, she is encased in “a mass of drapery” and her fine head “sustained a majesty of ornament.” Pansy’s suitor Ned Rosier declares her “the picture of a gracious lady” (418). Ralph is dismayed by her transformation, realizing that as a “fine lady” she is now reduced to a mirror or reflection, meant first and foremost to “represent” Gilbert Osmond (444). Caspar Goodwood is perplexed by the success of Osmond’s efforts to turn Isabel into a fine collectible as well as his own narrow definition of a fine lady: Caspar notices that she is “somehow so still, so smooth, so hard … completely changed,” closer to a varnished and shellacked object d’art than the theoretic and original girl he courted in New York (558). Instead of a conglomeration of notable and original characteristics, Isabel has been reduced to expressing only one — her beauty — and this is by Gilbert Osmond’s design. Ralph notes that “of old she had been curious, and now she was indifferent, and yet in spite of her indifference her activity was greater than ever” (444). The narrator concurs, reminding the reader that “her old habit had been to live by enthusiasm, to fall in love with suddenly-perceived possibilities, with the idea of some new adventure” (451).

Life on a Grecian Urn

135

She used to be guided by her fluid boredom, leaving herself open and accessible to any new ideas. Isabel admits to herself that when she is “unhappy she always looked about her — partly from impulse and partly by theory — for some form of positive exertion…. She could never rid herself of the sense that unhappiness was a state of disease — of suffering as opposed to doing…. To ‘do’— it hardly matter what — would therefore be an escape” (464). The impulse is the vestige of her neglected and suppressed capacity for active boredom. She subconsciously realizes that her husband dislikes the fruits of her active boredom, her own thoughts (“too many ideas”). It is in an almost horrific mutation of her old fluid boredom that Isabel finally has an epiphany about her relationship with her husband. James takes us more deeply into her psyche than in any of the previous boredoms, almost to stream of consciousness. As before, her mind is “in a state of extraordinary activity” when she is bored, but this time, rather than creating images herself, her mind is “assailed by visions” (484). Her “vigil” takes place in the drawing room, where she sits without movement or hardly a sound until four o’clock in the morning. This marathon boredom session is spurred and sanctioned by her husband, who “had told her to think of what he had said [about its being her duty to attempt to lead Lord Warburton to propose to her step-daughter]; and she did so indeed, and of many other things” (472). Unlike the primarily pleasant experiences of boredom in her past, this time she feels trapped in a “labyrinth” of “ugly possibilities;” her “soul was haunted by terrors which crowded to the foreground of thought as quickly as a place was made for them” (473). Paradoxically, she has found profound and twisted ugliness amidst all of the carefully crafted beauty of her husband’s home28 and persona. The metaphors of entrapment and snuffed beauty continue, as she feels entombed in “the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation,” tricked into by an illusion of “the infinite vista of multiplied life” into pursuing “a dark, narrow alley with a dead wall at the end” (474). She grasps his malignancy, his hatred for her, and his “faculty for making everything wither that he touched, spoiling everything for her that he looked at” (473). In case the reader needs more signposts that Osmond is bad and Isabel is good, James has her discover the nature of Osmond’s (solid) boredom through the vehicle of her own active, fluid, and childlike boredom. His egotism lies “hidden like a serpent” behind his constructed boredom, and his “sovereign contempt for every one but some three or four very exalted people whom he envied” is masked by diffidence and ennui (479). His “renunciation, his indifference”— barely disguised synonyms for boredom — are false, because he is very engaged and very interested in what others think about him. Solid, static boredom is the facade from behind which he can

136

Beautiful Boredom

keep the “base, ignoble world” “forever in one’s eye, in order … to extract from it some recognition of one’s own superiority” (479). Osmond’s deliberate boredom is twinned with his aestheticism: together, he intends them to attest to his exquisite taste and super-refinement. Ralph detects the negative nature of Osmond’s boredom before Isabel does, and he recoils from its malignancy and near-nihilism. Osmond’s solid boredom, artfully constructed and far from productive, is but a “pose—pose so subtly considered that if one were not on the lookout one mistook it for impulse” (444). For Osmond, boredom functions as a protest and a screen for other emotions and desires, including rage. He protests his interest in “the world,” but “far from being its master as he pretended to be, he was its very humble servant, and the degree of its attention was his only measure of success” (444). Not only does the pose of boredom allow him to live “with his eye on it from morning till night, [with] the world … so stupid it never suspected the trick,” but his supreme “disinterest” screens his indecorous bitterness and rage at not being rich, and a duke, and pope, etc. No one is safe from the “manipulative power” of his boredom (Spacks 233), not even Madame Merle, to whom he speaks “absentmindedly” (424) and with “conscious indifference” (569). He tells Rosier he doesn’t “care a fig for Capo di Monte [porcelain]” and is “losing [his] interest” in collecting it (418), and he is often found sighing, calling people tiresome, and refusing to commit himself by strong expressions. The coup de grace in his relationship with Madame Merle comes when he has complained of the weariness of aggravation and she has chimed in that she, too, is bored and tired. He insultingly identifies her as the cause of the boredom in each case, telling her “you fatigue yourself. With me it’s not my own fault,” but rather the result of her tiresome devotion to appearances and her scheme to bind him to Isabel (567; emphasis mine). Isabel is a sacrifice to his and Madame Merle’s “boredom” just as much as to their financial ambitions. When she convinces him to first meet Isabel, Madame Merle tells him the acquaintance “will amuse you” (290). This is a “thoroughly well considered” rejoinder, couched in the most persuasive terms by the woman who probably knows him best. She must further convince him that it is “worth an effort” to pursue the beautiful young woman by detailing Isabel’s attributes,29 not the least of which is her inheritance.30 She perpetuates his myth of boredom, explaining to Mrs. Touchett his visits to Isabel as “he was boring himself to death on his hill-top and he came merely for amusement” (442). Unlike Osmond, who carries the idea of leisure to the extreme, Madame Merle, in her quest of maintaining a life of beauty while never having to work/labor, creates the appearance of activity and occupation at all times: she writes letters, paints, plays piano, embroiders, and “was never idle, for

Life on a Grecian Urn

137

when engaged in none of the ways I have mentioned she was either reading (she appeared to Isabel to read ‘everything important’), or walking out, or playing patience with the cards, or talking with her fellow inmates” (243; emphasis mine). Madame Merle is not a bore; in fact, Isabel believes that, of anyone she has ever met, Madame Merle has “less of that fault which is the principal obstacle to friendship” of “reproducing the more tiresome, the stale, the too-familiar parts of one’s own character” (239). However, Madame Merle finds the act of not being a bore, of always cultivating interest, extremely boring. Despite her carefully crafted appearance of the fine lady, it seems, Madame Merle considers herself but a drudge, having neither “husband, nor child, nor fortune, nor position, nor the traces of … beauty,” and having to turn her graceful accomplishments into stark utility. Madame Merle, as a member of the spurious leisure class, one of Veblen’s “ladies who have seen better days,” is a seeming paradox of the beauty/utility paradigm: her beauty must be useful and her leisure must be hardworking. Hers is a different path than the fine lady or the patient drudge, but it seems to combine the negative rather than positive aspects of each. In a way, she could be read as a warning not to deviate from the status quo of women’s options. She reveals her bitter boredom to Isabel, exclaiming What have my talents brought me? Nothing but the need of using them still, to get through the hours, the years, to cheat myself with some pretense of movement, of unconsciousness [251].

Although she must, to preserve her amazing, superficially beautiful lifestyle, suppress her solid, destructive boredom, which is perversely only alleviated by finding a new wife for her old lover and a new mother for her own child, she has masked it with too perfect a veneer: “her nature had been too much overlaid by custom and her angles too much rubbed away” (244). “No one knows,” the Countess Gemini tells Isabel, “no one has ever known, what she lives on, or how she has got all those beautiful things” (591).31 Boredom is an inescapable consequence of the repetitive motions, gestures, and conversations Madame Merle must employ to remain surrounded by beauty and luxury, a “mere parasite” (248), crawling32 outside and on the top of the leisure-class marriage system, but it is never productive, fluid boredom, for Madame Merle is a shell33 of a person, lacking the inner life to manifest such a positive formulation of boredom. Osmond’s sister Amy, the birdlike and unlovely Countess Gemini, is bartered away in marriage to a minor Italian nobleman, and she is “often extremely bored — bored, in her own phrase, to extinction” (496). With no dependent family and a very undemanding husband/lord and master/pur-

138

Beautiful Boredom

chaser, she has only had to fulfill the financial aspect of Veblen’s formulation of marriage in the leisure class, allowing her to freely experience the consequent boredom. Her husband is “a very dull Florentine,” who is so dull, in fact, that he must stay home because in other towns “his dullness needed more explanation than was convenient.” Interestingly, she is the only character who is honest about boredom, calling herself “rather an idiot and a bore” (309), and letting all know she likes new amusements, from clothing, to acquaintances, to lovers. Amy consoles “herself outrageously” for her loveless, childless marriage, and is “by no means a blank sheet” (329). Her boredom is childlike, in that it seems spontaneous rather than constructed, but she does not have the potential for great ideas, as Isabel does. Countess Gemini’s is less fluid, as well as less benevolent, since even if she does not lie (for can we really take Osmond’s and Madame Merle’s word for that?) she does enjoy gossiping and speculating about love affairs. Like a less attractive and more uninhibited Rosamond Vincy, she attempts to mitigate her boredom and unhappiness by stirring up trouble in other relationships. The bored and unladylike (she is not received in the most polite society) Countess Gemini reveals the essence of Madame Merle and Osmond’s relationship to Isabel after declaring all available amusements/occupations at Palazzo Roccanero “of a dreariness” (585), and after she drops her bombshell of Pansy’s true parentage, she explains she has done so merely because she has been “so bored” with Isabel’s not knowing (589). Isabel’s immediate response is to head toward England and her cousin Ralph, who is near death, but once she is ensconced on the train, she gives herself up to fluid boredom. She looks out the window with “sightless eyes,” journeying in her mind through “strange-looking, dimly-lighted, pathless lands, in which there was no change of seasons, but only as it seemed, a perpetual dreariness of winter” (606). Much as the bleak winter landscape of Lowick symbolizes for Dorothea an inescapable and oppressive stasis, Isabel’s “disconnected visions” and “dull gleams” suggest the hopelessness, futility, and suspense of her situation. She cannot appreciate the glowing beauty of spring, because her aesthetic sensitivity is interrupted by the magnitude of her confusion and despair and the intensity of her inward focus. The only desire that crystallizes is the very dark one that she envies Ralph “his dying … to cease utterly, to give it all up and not know anything more — this idea was as sweet as the vision of a cool bath in a marble tank, in a darkened chamber, in a hot land” (607). That Isabel wants to mute and dampen her mental and intellectual activity is a reversal indicative of how distraught and despairing she is. Whereas once the beautiful and brilliant girl desired knowing, seeing, and doing for herself above all else, the stately and impressive woman now craves

Life on a Grecian Urn

139

nothing so much as the ignorance, blindness, and passivity found most permanently in death, that long boredom. Now seeming almost irretrievably an artifact rather than an artist or aesthete, Isabel, with her fetishized beauty and Osmond-cultivated fragility, apparently prefers donning a protective wrapping rather than confronting emotional and intellectual challenges. Osmond and Madame Merle, with their spurious leisure-class agenda and malignantly static boredoms, seem at this point to have triumphed over Isabel and her free-ranging intellect, reducing her to a beautiful fine lady in, as Madame Merle perceives it, a “very simple, almost … stupid state of mind” (568).

Narrative Closure and the Anxiety of the Marriage Plot By hurling Isabel into a slough of despair and depicting her as teetering on the verge of complete transformation into a beautiful shell, a purely decorative urn never again to hold any vital fluid, James thus sets the scene brilliantly for the reintroduction of a suitor, someone coded by the conventions of the marriage plot (as illustrated in Jane Eyre and Middlemarch) as the “true love” or the second chance at happiness. Jane is in the throes of a spiritual and emotional crisis at St. John Rivers’s hands when she hears Mr. Rochester call her name across the moors, and she and her intellectual and emotional equal marry, blissfully happy, basically end of story. Likewise, Dorothea is in the depths of despair when suddenly Will’s name is cleared and they marry, supposedly happily and certainly nonnarratably. Caspar Goodwood, the American cotton magnate; Ralph Touchett, the sensitive and well-intentioned cousin; and Lord Warburton, the truly gentlemanly gentleman, all make appearances at the end of The Portrait when Isabel has returned to Gardencourt, suggesting a neat narrative circle and offering a tantalizing possibility of much tying of loose ends. With Isabel’s self-guided attempt at forging a new path having failed so miserably, not a little like Dorothea’s first marital endeavor, everything is in place for the long-postponed happy ending. Ralph’s tear-jerking death removes him as a possibility, Lord Warburton’s engagement (which Mrs. Touchett is pleased to announce), which Isabel seems more mindful of than the prospective groom, effectively eliminates him, and that leaves only Caspar Goodwood. He argues that Isabel should save what she can of her life (and her characteristic fluid boredom) by leaving her husband, casting off the “ghastly form” of their marriage, and entrusting herself to him (634). He offers her freedom, a picture of the world

140

Beautiful Boredom

that seems “to open out all around her, to take the form of a mighty sea, where she floated in fathomless waters” (635). Caspar even kisses her lips— an intimacy we have never witnessed between Isabel and her husband — and the imagery of his kiss spreading like a flash of “white lightning” recalls the splitting of the horse-chestnut tree after Jane and Mr. Rochester first declare their love and kiss as well as the dramatic lightning flash that finally draws Dorothea and Will together despite their crossed signals. Despite their other tweakings of the marriage-plot form, Brontë and Eliot both supply at least marginally convincing happy endings, where marriage leads to the nonnarratable and thus the conclusion of the novel. James so places Isabel’s marriage to Osmond in the narrative as to suggest that, in the tradition of Dorothea’s story, it will be but the first marriage, not the nonnarratable final marriage that satisfies all (or at least some) of the heroine’s desires. In defiance of expectations, though, Caspar and Isabel’s kiss does not appear to lead to illicit (but reciprocal) love on the other side of the world. Instead, Isabel flees toward the house, struck with the certainty that there is only one, “very straight path” she can follow, and that path apparently leads back to Italy and to her marriage (636). I say “apparently” because James’s ending is somewhat ambiguous and certainly open-ended. We learn of Isabel’s return trip from Henrietta and Caspar, in a more abrupt distancing from the heroine’s story than in either of the other two novels. While Jane Eyre provided summary in the last chapter but keeps narrating her tale until the end, and Dorothea remains the exclusive focus of the summary at the close of Middlemarch, Isabel drops out of sight and her unclear intentions (is she just returning for a short while because she promised Pansy or is she submitting completely to the yoke, becoming an inmate of Palazzo Roccanero for life?) are neither explained nor is her later, nonnarratable life summarized. Given Isabel’s heightened sensitivity to the appearance of things and strong consciousness of the solemnity of her marriage vows,34 I consider it most plausible that she returns permanently to her husband, but James denies certainty. By most likely immuring Isabel in her first, clearly unhappy and painfully narratable marriage, James explodes the formal convention of (happy final) marriage as nonnarratable and a decisive conclusion. Marriage remains inviolate, both as a social institution and a novelistic convention, the only plausible course for a beautiful young lady. Static or solid boredom and the status quo prove too powerful and institutionalized for female freedom of any sort, whether the physical freedom of permanently escaping Osmond or the mental freedom of fluid boredom. James’s extended treatment of what is to be Isabel’s only marriage reveals, however, that it is clearly a troubled and troubling state. The collapse of the utopian narrative

Life on a Grecian Urn

141

thread that seems to happen only at the end of Middlemarch occurs much sooner in James’s novel, and, in fact, any great happiness very early on in Isabel and Osmond’s marriage is elided, merely mentioned in passing as a contrast to the horrible majority of the marriage that is directly narrated. Like Jane and Rochester, Isabel and Osmond will be always together in the closest of society/association, but rather than the hopeful and progressive flesh-of-my-flesh, soul-of-my-soul intimacy 35 of the Rochesters, the Osmonds attain only a superficially attractive stasis, indicative of hopelessness, fruitlessness, and weariness of their relation. Contemporary reviewers voiced disappointment with the nature of James’s closure, and modern critics are often at odds to explain its function, meaning, and efficacy. Margaret Oliphant complained in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine that it seemed “inevitable” that all of James’s books “should break off with a sharp cut of arbitrary conclusion leaving all the questions they so skillfully raise unsolved” (12), but she was truly incensed by his novel’s “most equivocal if not debasing conclusion” (15). Oliphant applauded what she perceived as Isabel’s decision to return to her marriage, thus honoring the institution (in terms of novelistic and societal form) at the expense of her own feelings for the main character, but she read Henrietta’s “significant” words of “look here, Mr. Goodwood … just you wait” as a promise of Isabel’s future relenting and future surrender to “unlawful passion” (14). Horace Scudder, in Atlantic Monthly, believed that the “somewhat ambiguous” passage between Isabel and Caspar could possibly admit of a “generous construction,” but he could not escape the feeling that the story did not end well, that “the creation lacks the final, triumphant touch which gives life; the sixth swan in the story got a stitch-weed shirt, like the rest, but in the hurry of the last moment it lacked a few stitches, and so in the transformation the youngest brother was forced to put up with one arm and to show a wing for the other” (9). Twentieth-century responses also fail to reach consensus on any point other than that the ending most certainly is important to how the novel as a whole is read. Edward Sackville West disapproves heartily of Isabel’s ignoring the advice of friends, family, and male protectors defiantly to marry Osmond, but he is relieved that, at the end, she refuses Goodwood’s advances, “preferring to lie on the bed she has made for herself ” (26). The final “ambiguity” of The Portrait must surely be understood, Graham Greene asserts, as the impossibility of a “happy ending” (30). On the other hand, Tony Tanner terms the indeterminacy “wonderful suggestivity,” claiming that though Isabel returns to Rome, she has actually attained “the most important kind of freedom,” the freedom from “twisted vision” and “confused values” (103). Perhaps most compellingly for my study, Annette

142

Beautiful Boredom

Niemtzow sees the open ending as the vehicle through which James moves “from the marriage novel to the verge of the divorce novel” (115). She credits The Portrait for thus “explod[ing] the domestic novel” and paving the way for the modern novel. I posit, however, that James’s inconclusive conclusion represents an important turning point, a resistance to the demands of the marriage-plot forms, where Gilbert Osmond is neither killed off, as Casaubon is in Middlemarch or Grandcourt is in Daniel Deronda, nor reformed, as in some much earlier marriage-plot novels, such as Mr. B in Pamela. The way is not cleared for Isabel’s happiness, and marriage is not granted its usual apocalyptic status. The narration ends, but we are given none of the usual reasons for nonnarratability: there is no sense of a return to a quiescence, an effective straightening of what was crooked, a harking back to the happiness and contentment of the nonnarratable state before the beginning of the novel. Instead, that which will and will not generate narrative seems suddenly arbitrary, with the godlike will of the novelist looming large, casting a visible shadow over the structure of the text. What is perhaps most intriguing to me about this much-discussed ending to The Portrait of a Lady is something I touched on above: the lady herself is absent, even if the novelist is all too present. Only Caspar and Henrietta remain to inform the reader that Isabel has left, days ago even, for Rome and her marital responsibilities and duties. Jane Eyre ends, much to my chagrin, with Jane’s discussion of St. John Rivers, and I argued earlier that this placement is due at least partly to a desire to emphasize his function as a road not taken, a rejected option. Isabel’s fellow Americans, whose interaction comprises the last lines of the novel, represent two happier but obviously untaken paths/options for her. Both Caspar’s demanding masculinity and offer of (quasi-) marriage and Henrietta’s unladylike career and non-married state36 promise more physical and mental freedom than her life of beauty and stultifying stasis with the malignantly bored Gilbert Osmond. Unlike in Jane Eyre, where the harshness of St. John’s toil and death cast an even more positive light on the fairly groundbreaking option Jane has forged, in The Portrait, the other possibilities highlight the very sterility and oppressiveness of the path to which Isabel apparently feels she must consign herself. She has, of her own free will, “stood at the altar” and uttered “tremendous vows” to “cleave” to her husband, committing herself to a marriage unusual and original only in its levels of subterfuge and particular forms of psychological and emotional torture. In acting for herself (or so she thought), she committed herself to the most restrictive version of the same old fine-lady model she thought she avoided in rejecting Lord Warburton. Caspar and Henrietta represent better, happier options, especially if Isabel could have taken them before her sensibilities and tastes

Life on a Grecian Urn

143

were so finely tuned (or warped) by Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond as to make these characters or the paths they symbolize seem distasteful and unbeautiful. Instead of the life of activity and (re-)productivity either the Caspar or Henrietta option could quite possibly offer her, we surmise that Isabel returns to the antique city of Rome and resumes her space inside the gilded frame she and Osmond have constructed, forever static, lovely, and ladylike. Away from Caspar’s insistent sexuality and Henrietta’s fast-paced, modern utility, she can remain the “still unravished bride of quietness” and the “foster-child of silence and slow time,” experiencing freedom and movement only through the powers of her fluid boredom, now that she has learned that, in the world outside fairy tales, beauty and truth are not necessarily equivalent.

Notes 1. That Isabel Archer is a literary descendant of Eliot’s female protagonists has long been established in modern critical circles, although there is some debate as to whether she owes more to Daniel Deronda’s Gwendolyn Harleth or to Middlemarch’s Dorothea Brooke and/or Rosamond Vincy. F.R. Leavis suggests that Gwendolyn and Henleigh Grandcourt are models for Isabel and Gilbert Osmond, and Sarah B. Daugherty likewise argues that it is “not Middlemarch, Eliot’s masterpiece, but Daniel Deronda, which James considered ‘a great failure compared with her other books’” that functions as the later author’s primary source for The Portrait, claiming that James borrows “extensively” from Eliot’s Gwendolyn/Grandcourt plot for his Isabel/Osmond storyline (157). Joseph Wiesenfarth marshals quite a bit of evidence for Middlemarch as James’s inspiration but especially points to Eliot’s ability in that work to transform the novel of manners into a sort of gothic fiction that illustrates the “horror of respectability” (18). George Levine posits The Portrait as James’s “conflation of the Dorothea sections of Middlemarch and the Gwendolen [sic] sections of Daniel Deronda in a novel of his own creation which would avoid the defects of both” (244). I would argue for Dorothea as Isabel’s clear-cut literary progenitor, most strikingly because of the nature of their boredoms, which, unlike Gwendolyn’s, are largely fluid, productive, and child-like. 2. James first published The Portrait of a Lady serially, in The Atlantic Monthly (November 1880-December 1881) and in Macmillan’s Magazine (October 1880-November 1881). 3. Henry James’s discussion in the preface of the (figurative) architecture of the “house of fiction” and of the human mind lends further credence to this interpretation. 4. Despite Ralph’s claim to the other men that he’s not bored, he is both currently bored and fearful of permanent boredom when Isabel arrives. He is afraid that his father will die first, leaving Ralph “alone with the remnant of a tasteless life on his hands” (115; emphasis mine). The prospect of “intolerable ennui” at surviving his father is lifted by the beautiful and intriguing figure of Isabel: Ralph reflects that “I had never been more blue, more bored, than for the week before she came; I had never expected that anything pleasant would happen…. Suddenly I receive a Titian, by the post, to hang on my wall — a beautiful Greek bas-relief to stick over my chimney piece” (116). 5. Mr. Touchett’s prediction is accurate, for Isabel most certainly likes having things her own way (“I’m very fond of my liberty,” she tells him), but she comes by this naturally, as her father’s most distinguishing characteristic was his fondness for doing what

144

Beautiful Boredom

he liked, whether it be frequent trips to Europe, unexplained absences, or the running up of massive debts (74, 88). 6. When Isabel exclaims over all the class distinctions made in England (“Gracious … how many classes have they? About fifty, I suppose”), Henrietta explains that the “advantage” of being an American in England is not belonging to any specific class (110). 7. Isabel Archer and her psychology, particularly in her “extraordinary meditative vigil” of Chapter 42, have received extensive critical treatment, but no especially convincing or satisfactory arguments have been advanced (James 54). In fact, critics often seem to offer strongly opposing interpretations: for instance, Jonathan Warren describes her as “an icon of imminence confounded by stasis” (1), while Sandra K. Fischer reads her as “a repressed and rather mundane person” (48), and Richard Chase calls her “cold, amoral” and aloof ” (39), while Patricia Meyer Spacks writes that Isabel has a “sense of life’s infinite interest” (230). I offer a reading that reconciles at least some of these differences. 8. I use the verb “possesses” intentionally, because it is most certainly a positive attribute to have the free-floating attention that allows her to both wait for something and look for something. 9. Isabel has always a “great fondness for intervals of solitude” (205). 10. Jonathan Warren, who analyzes the nature of time in The Portrait, calls the Albany office “hermetic (and hermitic) and timeless” (3). It and Isabel’s grandmother’s library are suggestive of the eternal, he argues— they are “a storehouse of books, [and] an archive of preservation.” He rejects any interpretations of Isabel’s reading or the books themselves as indicative of “dynamic” time, noting that private libraries do not circulate and unread books are static. Quite interestingly, he observes that Isabel selects texts based on their frontispieces, which are “frozen imitations of life.” 11. Isabel is always considered the “intellectual superior” of the three Archer sisters (86), and her potential suitors are often frightened away by their belief that “some special preparation was required for talking with her. Her reputation of reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic; it was supposed to engender difficult questions and to keep the conversation at a low temperature” (88). Another of Isabel’s aunts spread a rumor that she was writing a book, and all of Isabel’s contemporaries have the impression that she is rather brilliant (103). 12. The Archer sisters have had no “regular education,” always living with nursemaids and governesses (“usually very bad ones”) or being sent to “superficial schools” for merely a month or two at a time (87). 13. Lillian Ludlow nee Archer is clearly a minor character in James’s novel, but she functions as a powerful if brief illustration of just how much strength the beauty/utility opposition still has. She is denominated the “practical [i.e., unattractive] one” of the Archer sisters and is “spoken of as a young woman who might be thankful to marry at all — she was so much plainer than her sisters” (84). Lillian, the narrator tells us, “exult[s] in her [married] condition as in a bold escape”; this suggests that she realizes her looks and finances had destined her for a patient-drudge/spinster role. 14. Caspar Goodwood is not alone in avowing her “the most beautiful young woman of her time” (89), but the most detailed description we are given of Isabel’s looks is that she is “undeniably spare, and ponderably light, and proveably tall,” not to mention “willowy,” dark- (almost black-) haired, and light-grey eyed (99–100). Contemporary reviewer Margaret Oliphant faulted James for providing so insufficient an image of a woman supposedly beautiful enough to reduce “the gentlemen who meet her into instant subjection in the course of half an hour” (10). 15. Gilbert Osmond, like Ralph, appreciates Isabel’s rarity, and it is this, along with her originality, superiority, and exquisiteness that give “a new attraction” to the idea of marrying a young lady who thus qualifies herself “to figure in his collection of choice objects” (355). Her value and appeal are only enhanced for Osmond by her having declined the proposal of a duke.

Life on a Grecian Urn

145

16. Unlike Dorothea, who dismisses art and aestheticism as too removed from the mostly unbeautiful lives of average people, Isabel is finely tuned to appreciate these less accessible forms of beauty. She revels in Gardencourt’s quiet but luxurious beauty, its “rich perfection” (108), and she responds to all things lovely and precious. 17. Elsie Miller argues that this character’s name, the feminine form of Henry, suggests that James uses her to transcend sexual distinctions and to effect a compromise between “self and society, and between male and female models of identity.” Henrietta allows James to escape a logic that equates a narrative of a girl with an ultimate marriage, Miller suggests, and Henrietta “can transcend the categories and conventions that restrict Isabel because Henrietta discovers a kind of compromise between self and society, and between male and female models of identity” (21). 18. Isabel’s impression that “the great advantage of being a literary woman was that you could go everywhere and do everything” is tempered by her cousin Ralph’s reaction to her plan to accompany Henrietta on an ambitious and independent sight-seeing tour of London (179). Laughing, he suggests that they visit his club while in town, implying that such would be in keeping with their unfeminine/masculine itinerary, and Isabel realizes such freedom and independence in any unchaperoned single woman is considered freakish and “improper.” 19. Florence Nightingale offers another such (unacceptable to Isabel) latter-day-Wollstonecraftian model of womanhood. In Cassandra (written in 1860–61 but only published in the twentieth century), Nightingale scoffs at women’s “Mission with a great M” as defined by Ellis and her ilk and draws attention to the subsequent discounting of her entire gender. By being denied the opportunity to work or have any utility/occupation meaningful enough not to be interrupted, Nightingale posits, women remain second-class citizens and are barred from any potential greatness. While an argument like Nightingale’s would (had it been available to her) have resonated with a self-confident woman like Isabel, the dirt, grime, and blood of her chosen profession of nursing, as well as the social ostracism and moral disapprobation heaped on Nightingale’s head, would have dissuaded Isabel from attempting a similar new path, with so little in the way of beauty to recommend it. Henrietta’s career, at least, involves intellectual labor rather than physical work, but it still requires involvement in more sordid, less abstractly appealing duties. 20. In Middlemarch, Celia Brooke’s appreciation of geraniums was a decided point in her favor as Sir James Chettam’s mother tried to determine which Miss Brooke would make a more suitable wife for her son. 21. Isabel is not alone in this perception: Ralph is intrigued to see “what a young lady does who won’t marry Lord Warburton” (203), and Mrs. Touchett opines that “after a girl has refused an English lord [Mrs. Touchett supposes] she may do anything” (191). 22. Sandra K. Fischer posits that what Isabel finds so objectionable about Caspar is “his need for penetration; she wants neither to give nor to receive from him” (55). Isabel finds his insistence on “disclosure” and intimacy “painful,” and since he will not grant her buffer of “social decorum … she prefers solitude.” 23. Carole Vopat argues that Isabel is susceptible to Osmond because he reminds her of her father, who, though dismissed as “weak and immoral, little more than a petty crook” by the world at large, was always to his daughter “‘too generous, too good-natured, too indifferent to sordid considerations.’ His very faults are transformed [by Isabel] into virtues so fine the common crowd cannot discern them” (39). Osmond is the closest of her suitors to her idealized image of her father, and in marrying him and transferring her fortune to his care, she is making restitution to her impoverished father (54). 24. Goodwood and Warburton are both unmistakably men of substance, while Gilbert Osmond is most often described in terms of negation. When Mrs. Touchett complains that there is “nothing of him,” Isabel responds happily that he then “can’t hurt” her (385). He has “no money,” “no name,” “no importance,” and, Isabel erroneously thinks, no social ambition or mercenary designs on her. This nothingness makes Isabel believe that she

146

Beautiful Boredom

(and her money) can “launch” him: she muses on his “indefinable beauty,” helplessness, and ineffectualness, and tenderly plans to aid and provide for him (476). Isabel almost seems to hope that she is marrying a non-man, a wife-type rather than a husband. 25. Madame Merle first mentions Osmond to Isabel as an indolent person and a wonderful father, and Isabel comes to believe that he “makes no mistakes! He knows everything, he understands everything, he has the kindest, gentlest, spirit” (398). His talent for arranging and cultivating beauty and appearances also recommends him to her as someone of flawless taste. 26. Isabel considers Madame Merle a “very attractive person” with a “charming” expression (226). She is “a great lady,” Isabel decides, because she is cultivated, civilized, profoundly accomplished, never idle, and never too self-serious (243). Ralph calls her “the cleverest woman” he knows, not excepting Isabel, pronouncing that she does everything beautifully and seems “complete” (230). Mrs. Touchett, perhaps not the greatest judge of character, declares Madame Merle faultless and “incapable of a mistake” (246). 27. Under the sway of Osmond and Madame Merle, Isabel begins the critical (to their plan) process of conflating what she has, up to this point, considered exciting with the boring: somewhat reluctant to leave for her travels, Isabel complains to Osmond that “doing all the vain things one likes is often very tiresome” (359). 28. Isabel’s first impression of the house is accurate, for she divines its overwhelming stasis/inertia, the sense that once you were in it, “you would need an act of energy to get out” (304). Osmond tells her he has consciously chosen to live in the country “which contained the greatest sum of beauty,” and he clearly has attempted to make his own domicile a microcosm of this, with its pictures, medallions, tapestries, old plates and drawings, and rambling, intentionally unstructured garden. The overall effect of this “seat of ease, indeed of luxury” is of an “accumulation of beauty” that is somehow oppressive and fatiguing to Isabel (313). 29. Madame Merle tells him that Isabel is not “dingy,” and, furthermore that she is “beautiful, accomplished, generous,” “for an American, well-born,” “very clever,” and “very amiable” (291). 30. Elliot M. Schrero estimates Isabel’s annual income at between 196,000 and 294,000 in 1993 dollars. As even the lower of these figures is roughly two hundred times greater than the per-capita income in Italy, she “could indeed have lived in Rome, as Ralph Touchett observes, ‘with a certain magnificence’” (84). Schrero speculates that, although the Married Women’s Property Act (1882) had not passed at the time of her marriage, Isabel’s income would likely have been protected from her husband by Mr. Touchett’s establishing it as her “separate estate.” 31. Her apartment is a collector’s delight, filled with antique furniture, elegant, faded damasks, fine Venetian lace, fragile statuettes, and rare porcelain (409, 570). 32. Madame Merle tells Isabel that she believes a woman has “no natural place anywhere; wherever she finds herself she has to remain on the surface and, more or less, to crawl. You protest, my dear? You’re horrified? You declare you’ll never crawl?” (248). 33. “Every human being has his shell,” Madame Merle explains to Isabel, and “you must take the shell into account” (253). Isabel speculates that Madame Merle has so focused her efforts on outward appearances as to lose or diminish her inner life: “Isabel found it difficult to think of her in any detachment or privacy, she existed only in her relations, direct or indirect, with her fellow mortals. One might wonder what commerce she could possibly hold with her own spirit” (244). 34. Isabel feels that “almost anything seemed preferable to repudiating the most serious act — the single sacred act — of her life. That appeared to make the whole future hideous” (511). 35. As Osmond describes it, “we’re indissolubly united. You are nearer to me than any human creature, and I’m nearer to you. It may be a disagreeable proximity; it’s one, at any rate, of our own deliberate making” (583).

Life on a Grecian Urn

147

36. Henrietta, whose utility might once have suggested perpetual spinsterhood, is only engaged at the end of the novel, not married, and though the reader has hopes that her marriage to Mr. Bantling will be one of equals (considering their unconventional, transcontinental, semi-cohabitational courtship), it is projected into the nonnarratable space beyond the conclusion. Ralph and Lord Warburton described American girls in England as usually engaged, and Henrietta is thus a little more normal, a little less freakish, in the eyes of society by the end of the novel.

4

“The Proper Stuff of Fiction”— A Look Forward In her essay “Modern Fiction” (1925), Virginia Woolf rejects the hyperrealism and lifelessness she discerns as the primary characteristics of the novels then in vogue. Woolf argues that the so-called “materialists,” namely Wells, Galsworthy, and Bennett, concern themselves with prescriptive narrative form and extensive description at the expense of creating “worthwhile” fiction (153): if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it [154; emphasis mine].

By devoting their talents to making certain that their characters are “dressed down to the last button of their coats in the fashion of the hour” and to obeying the “tyrant” expectations of plot, comedy, tragedy, interest, love, and probability, these writers seem, to Woolf, to build a carefully crafted structure around a vast emptiness, a house of fiction that is yet not a home to any truths about life (153), for life, she posits, “is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged1; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end” (154). Of the modern writers, she asserts that only James Joyce seems to acknowledge the need for or make gestures toward a renovation of novelistic forms and formulas, and Woolf approves of his courage in saying “what interests him is no longer ‘this’ but ‘that’: out of ‘that’ alone must he construct his work” (156). Joyce’s “that” finds its basis in psychology, not traditional narrative action or traditional scene-setting and physical description, and Woolf ’s own approach to the “luminous halo” in her later work, To the Lighthouse (1927), relies largely on the psychological state of boredom. I posit that this shift to interiority, this attention to boredom and the inner life to almost the complete exclusion of physical action and tradi148

“The Proper Stuff of Fiction”

149

tional narrative, began not with James Joyce, as Woolf suggests, but with the nineteenth-century novelists Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Henry James. These Victorian novelists were perhaps the first to struggle against narrative convention and recognize that “everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit,” as Woolf would later articulate (“Modern Fiction” 158; emphasis mine). The modern novel, then, so often perceived as a complete rebellion against the Victorian novel, is instead an outgrowth of its experiments and innovations. To the Lighthouse is but the logical conclusion of what has come before, because boredom is not merely a noteworthy feature of the Victorian novel — a product of capacious triple-deckers with time and space to spare — but a preview of the very essence of the modern novel.

Boredom/Narrative: The Genesis of the Modern Novel Though Woolf is often critical2 of nineteenth century writers such as Brontë,3 Eliot,4 and James, the plan of (in-)action she drafts in “Modern Fiction” is strikingly like what these authors have already put into practice: they blaze a trail for Woolf, setting precedents for her focus on the inner life, the importance she grants seemingly small things, and her creation of a text permeated with boredom. In other words, Woolf does not, as her criticisms might imply, reject out of hand the experiments and innovations of these literary predecessors; instead, she builds on their representations of boredom and beauty, as well as their approaches to narrative. Furthermore, Woolf ’s sometimes pointed critiques cannot camouflage that her own women characters and the internal conflicts they face in To the Lighthouse are in many ways outgrowths and somewhat reinterpreted echoes of Brontë’s and Eliot’s (and therefore James’s5) heroines. While To the Lighthouse is notable for its almost total reversal of conventional narrative,6 the first inklings of this turnaround can be found in Jane Eyre. Despite detailing acts and actions some contemporary reviewers denounced as too violent, Jane Eyre ultimately moves toward a state in which nothing (in terms of traditional narrative action) happens, where what might once have appeared boring is, in fact, of the greatest interest: Jane and Mr. Rochester achieve a happiness that is progressive, not static, because it is based on their great compatibility of intellect, emotion, and soul. This trend of privileging the inner life continues in Middlemarch, where boredom is closely narrated, very little happens (in the sense of great “incidents”), and truly no single plot of its many is as eventful as the early parts of Jane Eyre.

150

Beautiful Boredom

Eliot’s great proliferation of characters necessitates an inward focus, in order to establish all of those characters’ motives, and a different type of plotting that is not as linear as in traditional narrative results. Whereas in Middlemarch the traditional narrative action is minimal, in The Portrait of a Lady it creaks to virtual nonexistence: the very nominal traditional plot movement results in almost absolute stasis, and the only real tensions or suspense is between warring factions of solid (such as Osmond’s) and fluid (such as Isabel’s) boredom. The Portrait does have a more conventionally linear plot than Middlemarch, but it has been pared down, stripped of exciting external incident. For example, when Isabel and Caspar Goodwood kiss, the reader sees virtually the only glimmer in James’s text of the kind physical action and suspense that characterize much of Jane Eyre. Instead of building on this conventional-narrative excitement, however, James abruptly plucks Isabel out of the narrative, leaving the reader to learn of her return to Rome from second-hand sources. I have argued that the relationship between narrative and psychology is a strong one in Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, and The Portrait, and that, in fact, their connection grows progressively stronger with each novel. In Jane Eyre, boredom acts as a catalyst to the narrative, with Jane’s psychological state spurring traditional narrative action on the physical plane for much of the novel but ultimately leading to a reconfiguring of narrative, where satisfying mental activity replaces conventional physical action. Eliot’s Middlemarch tightens the direct link between boredom and narrative by making Dorothea’s and Rosamond’s boredoms not only narrative catalysts but sites of extensive narration. Boredom’s narratability only increases in The Portrait, where traditionally narratable events are elided and it is most often conversations and boredoms that generate the narrative “action.” Woolf expands upon Brontë’s, Eliot’s, and James’s approaches to plot and mental action, and therefore by To the Lighthouse, narrative and psychological exploration are indissolubly linked: they are, in effect, one structural strand rather than two. It is fluid boredom, then, the time between (and sometimes during) physical acts, that is most important to Woolf. In other words, by so consciously avoiding action, Woolf naturally becomes attracted to fluid boredoms, those moments that reflect on past or future acts but do not perform them. In To the Lighthouse, narrative completely ceases to be narrative-as-conventionally-conceived and becomes, by the end, internal monologue and psychodrama. For Woolf, it is never the ground that is traversed in this novel, but rather the significance with which it is invested, psychologically, that generates the story. Consider briefly the trip to the lighthouse, which acts as a frame for the text: it provides the single greatest incident of traditional phys-

“The Proper Stuff of Fiction”

151

ical action that actually occurs inside the narrative, but it is a day-trip that somehow requires over a decade to accomplish. On the boat, Mr. Ramsay turns pages of his book, James watches the sail fill and empty, Cam trails her fingers in the water, and the crew fish in a nondescript kind of way. That is the sum-total of the physical action — of which James’s keeping the sail steady is the greatest achievement — but the mental action, under the guise of the unseeing stare which is by now a reliable signal for boredom, is intense and taut. Mr. Ramsay, understanding his children’s boredoms even less than he did his wife’s, muses over the “vagueness of their minds” (167). He determines that, though his inability to comprehend his wife’s and daughter’s spells of boredom is frustrating, at the same time it may account for much of their feminine charm and mystique. James’s feelings run the gamut from hope and “exaltation” at the thought of imminent escape to a desire to plunge a knife into his father’s heart (165, 184), while Cam is tormented by the conflict between the “silent compact” she has made with her brother to resist7 her father’s “tyranny” “to the death” (in other words, his demands for attention) and admiration for her father’s bravery and spirit of adventure (163). When the sails slacken and the boat is virtually immobile in the sea, when external action is emphatically nonexistent, Woolf leaves the reader in no question as to the ascendancy of boredom over more conventionally narratable things: Then the eddy slackened…. The rush of the water ceased; the world became full of little creaking and squeaking sounds. One heard the waves breaking and flapping against the side of the boat as if they were anchored in harbour. Everything became very close to one…. [T]here they came to a stop, flapping about waiting for a breeze, in the hot sun, miles from shore, miles from the Lighthouse. Everything in the whole world seemed to stand still. The Lighthouse became immovable, and the line of the distant shore became fixed [183].

The external, physical world is in stasis, and the minute, usually barely discernable noises the boat and its rigging make could almost be the noises produced by the workings of the cogs and wheels of the characters’ minds. This complete subordination of forward movement/traditional narrative progression allows for an apt, externalized image of boredom: the shore and the Lighthouse appear equally fixed points in the distance; the sun beats down, bringing intense, soul-/mind-searching illumination; there is the odd paradox of feeling anchored in the open sea; and James and Cam, in a state both physically and psychologically suspended, are able to navigate mentally the distance from shore to lighthouse, from filial love to consuming hatred, and from past to future, all in the space of a brief yet “horrid calm” (183).

152

Beautiful Boredom

It is during these moments of physical stasis that James processes the difference between the lighthouse of his childhood dreams, “a silvery, mistylooking tower with a yellow eye” that opened softly on summer evenings, and the utilitarian structure he can see in the distance, a stark, straight, black-and-white barred tower with washing hanging outside (186). James also remembers his father’s damning of his mother over ten years earlier and uses the power of his boredom to analyze her reaction and determine what quality or attribute it was that made her so powerfully attractive to her son. Cam’s boredom leads her away from her brother’s “obstinacy,” her father’s pressures, and her own anguish to a “fountain of joy” (189). The drops from this “sudden and unthinking” fountain fall on the “dark, the slumberous shapes in her mind; shapes not realized but turning in their darkness, catching here and there, a spark of light.” Cam’s boredom, so closely akin to Dorothea’s and Isabel’s, allows her to escape the confines of the emotionally charged but physically stagnant boat to an imagined environment where she and her intellect could expand “like a leaf in water” (189). The time suspended on the waves, midway between the shore and the lighthouse, is the climax of the Ramsays’ story, not their actually reaching the rocks surrounding the light. Finally visiting the long-awaited lighthouse would be the focal point in a traditional quest narrative, but in To the Lighthouse the text does not follow the characters into the house or detail their meeting the keeper or his son with the tubercular hip. Instead, Woolf grants the sole point of non-action and physical stasis in the boat journey the most dramatic and detailed description, a final illustration that, in her novel, it is boredom and the psychological which are immanently narratable rather than traditional narrative action and the externally eventful. Woolf ’s privileging of the “that” of boredom and mental action rather than the “this” of conventional narrative action and form shapes “The Window” and “Time Passes,” the first two parts of the novel, as well. In setting To the Lighthouse at a beach house, Woolf invests the novel from the outset with a sense of atemporality and virtual physical stasis. Beach vacations are noted and even desired for their uneventfulness, and the beating of the waves, the strobing of the lighthouse’s beam, and the rising and falling of the tide generate, in their predictability, a rhythm suggestive of eternity — never beginning, never ending, and never varying. The Ramsay family returns to the same house in the Hebrides every summer, year after year, and thus they seem to court sameness and boredom: somehow these states constitute respites from their daily, work-year lives (which are not detailed in the text). The time at the beach house is devoted to reading, painting, strolling, knitting, cutting illustrations out of catalogs, and leisurely exploring tide pools— all activities which are rather notably inactive.

“The Proper Stuff of Fiction”

153

Into this loom of stasis and physical inactivity, Woolf weaves the tapestry of a decidedly unconventional and non-traditional novel, where the warp of boredom and introspection and the weft of non-linear narrative and distorted chronos form a fabric both familiar and new. Woolf ’s nineteenthcentury literary predecessors have set the stage for her departure from traditional narrative, and while her venture is therefore not as unprecedented as usually perceived, it is no less breathtaking. The entire novel is devoted to two days, a decade apart, and this stretching of time is readily apparent in “The Window,” where the only exterior action consists of Mr. Ramsay and Charles Tansley, his current acolyte, telling James that a trip the next day to the lighthouse will be impossible, weather-wise; Mrs. Ramsay reading, knitting, and posing for Lily’s painting; Paul Rayley, Minta Doyle, and Andrew Ramsay looking for her lost brooch; Lily struggling with the composition of her painting; William Bankes using his penknife as a pointer to discuss Lily’s art; Mr. Carmichael sleeping in a chair and asking for a second bowl of soup; and all the characters dining together. The reader’s sense of chronology is complicated by Woolf ’s shifts from one character’s internal/mental activity to another’s and by the consequent unsignalled flashbacks. Like Eliot, James, and, to some extent, Brontë before her, Woolf makes the inner life of her characters, as expressed through their boredoms, more narratable (in other words, generative of narrative) than these (fairly inconsequential) physical acts. How James feels about his father’s proclamation that there shall be rain is vastly more important and interesting than the fact that he is cutting out catalog pictures of refrigerators, and Mrs. Ramsay’s fluid boredom of chapter 11, in which she judges the path she has chosen for her life, is infinitely more compelling than the activity her hands engage in while she is in this suspended state, knitting.8 Mrs. Ramsay, the mother of eight children and wife of a rather needy but brilliant husband, treasures her time alone. Being herself, by herself, is a great relief, and she treasures this opportunity to engage in fluid boredom: now she did not need to think about anybody … and that was what now she often felt the need of — to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures [63].

Mrs. Ramsay retreats gladly into introspection and directionless thought behind the shield of her usefulness. Irreproachably armed with appropriately domestic knitting needles, she is able to explore a horizon that sud-

154

Beautiful Boredom

denly and magically seems “limitless,” venturing in her imagination to Indian plains and ancient Roman churches and “exulting” in the thought that her invisible inner life grants her freedom, peace, and a restful loss of personality (62). By means of her fluid boredom, she is able to throw off the physical so completely that she sometimes feels at one with what she gazes at, such as the beam of light from the lighthouse. The stroke of the beam also steers the direction of her thoughts, pointing them toward her marriage, for she associates the light with her experience of waking at night to see it cross her marital bed. With its hypnotic rhythm, the beam induces the crystallizing of her judgment, which is that, though the world is base, treacherous, and without justice, she has “known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness” (65), and that her marriage and the life she has chosen is therefore “enough! It is enough!” Mrs. Ramsay’s triumphal fluid boredom, reminiscent of Dorothea’s state of suspended anticipation before marrying Mr. Casaubon and Isabel’s before marrying Gilbert Osmond, constitutes the first section’s most dramatic and engrossing (mental) action. Woolf ’s rejection of traditional narrative action and form does not end there, however, for in the middle section, “Time Passes,” narrative is so pared down as to be almost a parody of storytelling. Here, conventional narrative action is relegated to parentheses and brackets, at an even greater remove from the text. What is narratable is the passage of time, and the effects of unchecked elements on the house: the peeling wallpaper, the loosening shawl originally meant to disguise the skull mounted on the wall, and the invading plants and animals— in short, non-events which by traditional standards would seem to epitomize the uninteresting. What is nonnarratable is the stuff of traditional narrative: marriage, death, and war, those incidents which are usually thought to make a novel interesting. Woolf employs two levels of distancing in “Time Passes” so that conventional narrative action, the supposedly big events of life which would seem most reliably to generate plot, stand outside the so-called narrative, at a great remove from the text. Parenthetical sentences indicate intra-narrative physical action, while bracketed sentences identify extra-narrative events. Woolf uses parentheses to communicate the behavior of those actually present at the beach house during “Time Passes,” thus informing us of the cleaning lady’s thoughts and actions during her attempts to reclaim the house from encroaching nature and of Lily’s arrival “late one evening in September” (141), and she utilizes brackets to gloss the lives and deaths of those characters not at the beach. In a teasing, almost perverse gesture of independence from the expectations of the audience and the form, an overt denial of the “accepted style,” Woolf relates that “[Prue Ramsay, leaning on

“The Proper Stuff of Fiction”

155

her father’s arm, was given in marriage. What, people said, could have been more fitting? And, they added, how beautiful she looked!]” (131), only to mention a page later that “[Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness connected with childbirth…]” (132). Woolf thus raises the specter of conventional marriage plot and then whisks that possibility away with no explanation and no satisfaction. The information conveyed in the brackets seems much bigger than that of the parentheses, which is why it is even more disconcerting that it is presented almost as editorial inserts, a publisher’s attempt to fill in gaps and holes. Within brackets, Andrew Ramsay is blown up in France, Mr. Carmichael successfully publishes a book of poetry, and Mrs. Ramsay dies. Mrs. Ramsay’s death, in fact, is at an additional remove: “[Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay, having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty]” (128; emphasis mine). The fate of the character most central to the first section is thus relegated to an extra-narrative space outside even the brackets in the second part and thereby designated as emphatically nonnarratable.

Beauty Transformed and the Last Gasps of the Marriage Plot Woolf ’s rejection of traditional plot in favor of boredom-fed stream of consciousness is not the only evidence of her desire to make a pronounced break with narrative convention. Just as she develops and exaggerates the shift to mental action found in Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, and The Portrait of a Lady, Woolf, as part of her attempt to move away from conventional plotting, takes Brontë, Eliot, and James’s increasing unease with beauty and marriage as the most coveted characteristics for women and the most satisfactory resolution for novels about women to the next level in To the Lighthouse. Jane Eyre rejects potentially boring marriage options that would cast her in the unsatisfying and conventional roles of fine lady or patient, loveless drudge and only accedes to matrimony when it promises the Wollstonecraftian ideal of equality, friendship, and sustained interest. Woolf writes that in “seeking wisdom” Dorothea finds “one scarcely knows what in marriage with Ladislaw,” and Eliot truly does not invest the second marriage of Middlemarch’s heroine with a believable level of happiness and fulfillment for an ambitious woman who originally perceived of marriage as limiting and productive only of solid boredom (“George Eliot” 173). Isabel Archer Osmond is granted only one chance at marriage and a happy ending in The Portrait, and, regardless of interpretation of his inconclusive con-

156

Beautiful Boredom

clusion, James’s narrative leaves the reader in no doubt as to the unhappiness and disappointment of that union: boredom becomes both Isabel’s fate and her only form of freedom. While in To the Lighthouse submission to the marriage plot seems to bring Woolf ’s women characters solid boredom and unhappiness at the least and death at the worst, her most adamant spinster, Lily Briscoe, emerges victorious as perhaps the first instance of a successful old-maid plot. Since it is beauty, most often, that destines women for marriage, it is important to look at how the by-now-familiar paradigm plays out in To the Lighthouse. Jane Eyre has to circumvent this standard requirement of the marriageable beauty/unmarriageable utility paradigm to achieve her satisfying and soulful marriage, but Dorothea and Isabel face the opposite side of the coin, trying to find another option than marriage when one is markedly beautiful. The wages of beauty, Eliot’s and James’s texts would seem to suggest, are less emotionally remunerative than one might suppose, and their virtual guarantee of matrimony is not so much a bonus as a penalty. To the Lighthouse amplifies this concern with beauty’s power and price. Clearly a descendent of Dorothea’s9 and Isabel’s, Mrs. Ramsay is rather astoundingly lovely, and even at the ripe age of fifty she is able to reduce men to blushing and stammering admirers. (One of Mrs. Ramsay’s only important differences from Eliot’s and James’s heroines is the form her boredom most often takes: with the exception of her fluid boredom of chapter 11, her reverie of light, Mrs. Ramsay most often experiences solid, unproductive boredom,10 while Dorothea and Isabel usually enjoy fluid boredom.) Beauty is Mrs. Ramsay’s essence in part one, and it is through the strange gravitational pull this preternatural11 attractiveness grants her that she is able to exert her conduct-book-approved power of influence over not just the men but, to some extent, the women of her circle. Lily finds Mrs. Ramsay’s beauty both hypnotic and troubling, and she wonders what motivations or ideas or impulses are behind the older woman’s imperturbable loveliness: She was astonishingly beautiful…. But beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life —froze it. One forgot the little agitations; the flush, the pallor, some queer distortion, some light or shadow, which made the face unrecognizable for a moment and yet added a quality one saw forever after. It was simpler to smooth all that out under the cover of beauty [177].

Mrs. Ramsay’s smooth impenetrability and indecipherability arise just as much from her boredom as her looks; she becomes, in effect, the pretty face of solid boredom. Mrs. Ramsay’s beauty makes her “irresistible” and almost “frightening,” for through it she casts a spell on all of her houseguests (101).

“The Proper Stuff of Fiction”

157

She has been accused by mothers of “robbing” them of their daughters’ affections, and she considers the level of intent this implies “unjust,” because she cannot help “being ‘like that’ to look at” (57). There is something of the eternal about her loveliness, and its ability to “freeze” life or create stasis is akin to a form of artistic production. Her beauty, which she carries with her like a “torch,” effects onlookers powerfully, seeming to present, in its burning simplicity, some sort of solution or truth (41). What is simple about her beauty is that it is seemingly not open to interpretation — all can agree that she is singularly lovely — and Mrs. Ramsay usually appears to accept and welcome all it represents and entails in traditional formulations of womanhood. We are never told her first name,12 and her married title thus moves to the forefront of our perception of her. Not only did Mrs. Ramsay herself marry and ascribe to the self-sacrificing13 model of the angel in the house,14 but she avidly promotes marriage for all other single adult characters. At least part of Mrs. Ramsay’s marriage mania, her desire to pair off others of her acquaintance, stems from a need to thereby justify her own choices and sacrifices. She insists aloud that “they all must marry,” because an “unmarried woman has missed the best of life” (49), but she feels a bit “sinister” for making Minta Doyle and Paul Rayley marry, because whatever she might feel about her own transaction, she had had experiences which need not happen to every one (she did not name them to herself ); she was driven on, too quickly she knew, almost as if it were an escape for her too, to say that people must marry; people must have children [60].

Despite any momentary checks or hesitations about this match-making impulse, any qualms about perhaps fating other women to the marriageinduced solid boredom she so often experiences, Mrs. Ramsay realizes that when others join her ranks it validates her circumscribed sphere. Thus, she pushes a match between Lily Briscoe and William Bankes just as she forwards the romance of Paul and Minta, based on no stronger connection than mutual singlehood and that they both enjoy flowers. Prue, the only young woman approaching her mother in beauty, succumbs to the marriage option, as does Minta Doyle, who is attractive and therefore marriageable if a little unusual and progressive in some of her notions. The only female holdout is Lily Briscoe. Mrs. Ramsay’s determination that Lily must marry William Bankes flies a bit in the face of the traditionally constructed paradigm. Lily is not beautiful, and Mrs. Ramsay initially ranks her among the useful spinsters on the basis of her looks: “with her little Chinese eyes and her puckered-up face, she would never marry” (17). Rather than being permanently exempted from Mrs. Ramsay’s marital efforts, however, Lily falls prey to them once her hostess begins to detect “charm” in her “Chinese eyes” (26). Mr. Bankes,

158

Beautiful Boredom

the other intended victim of this scheme, views Lily favorably but unquestionably as the conventional spinster. He notices her “excellent” and sensible shoes, her orderly habits, and her hard work ethic and realizes that her being “poor, presumably, and without the complexion or the allurement of Miss Doyle” destines her for a single life (18). If Mrs. Ramsay is in many ways (except in her type of boredom) the literary descendant of Dorothea and Isabel, Lily can trace her roots to Jane Eyre and Henrietta Stackpole. Like Jane she is plain, and also like Jane she is an original and self-motivated artist, intent on trying to translate her inner vision to the canvas. Like Henrietta, Lily is aggressively independent, always trying to prove that her life can be defined outside the marriage relation, and both Henrietta and Lily attempt careers beyond the traditional governess and companion categories. Lily does not possess beauty, but she is capable of fluid boredom, which enables her to create her own vision of beauty with her art. In other words, Lily’s goal is to be a creator of beauty, not an object of it. In the final section of the novel, “The Lighthouse,” Lily revels in her defeat of Mrs. Ramsay’s attempts to compel a match between the artist and William Bankes, who is pleasant but also old enough to be her father. By the end of To the Lighthouse, we learn the results of Mrs. Ramsay’s marriage mania: Prue has died after less than a year of marriage, Minta’s marriage to Paul has fallen apart, and Mrs. Ramsay herself is dead. Marriage seems fatal for the lovely Ramsay women (Cam had best beware), and beauty, Prue’s only distinguishing characteristic and her mother’s most notable one, is of little use once its object has been extinguished. The Rayleys’ courtship and union functions most significantly as a debunking of the marriage plot. We learn from Lily that “things had worked loose after the first year or so” and that the marriage “had turned out rather badly” (173). By the date of “The Lighthouse,” they have gotten through the “dangerous stage,” and treat each other as business-like friends. Paul has taken a lover, for whom Minta is grateful. The Rayleys’ marriage, rather than a model of the marriage plot, generates much speculation by Lily, who imagines a whole superstructure of scenes and vignettes based on very few observations and comments. In this way, what first promised to be traditional narrative is actively undermined and more aptly categorized as psychologized action. Lily’s complete resistance to the marriage plot frees her for a narrative that operates almost exclusively on the planes of the mental and psychological. Her free-ranging, fluid boredom is ultimately productive, unlike the marriages that Mrs. Ramsay, driven by her solid boredom, has approved of and engineered. Neither of Lily’s marriage possibilities is very compelling, and in each case her lack of conventional beauty and self-classification as spinster material prohibit/protect her. Mrs. Ramsay, in fixing upon William

“The Proper Stuff of Fiction”

159

Bankes as the appropriate suitor for Lily, overlooks Lily’s own romantic preferences.15 Only Lily knows of the passion she cherishes for Paul Rayley, with his “exquisite” and gem-like profile. This, the only non-spinster option Lily might truly consider, is a love plot that goes nowhere, because he returns her only tentative expression of love — her request to accompany him to the beach to look for the lovely Minta’s lost brooch — with an “odd chuckle” that communicates “throw yourself over the cliff if you like, I don’t care” (102). Lily greets the “horror” and “cruelty” of his response with something of a sense of relief, because she “need not marry,” undergoing what she calls a “degradation”16 and a “dilution.” The Rayleys’ resurfacing in the final part of the book is a bit of a red herring, suggesting for a moment that out of the unhappiness of his marriage and the solitariness of her spinsterhood, Paul and Lily might find each other and live happily ever after. We even learn that the phrase “in love” conjures images of Paul for her, that a reddish light rises like a fire from her mental picture of him, and that she can still feel her “headlong desire to throw herself off the cliff and be drowned looking for a pearl brooch on a beach” (175). Lily quickly squashes that intimation, however, “laughing” at her image of Paul and luxuriating in escaping the repellent greediness of marriage “by the skin of her teeth” (176). What Lily gains in rejecting marriage, and what Woolf gains in rejecting the conventions and expectations of the marriage plot, is the possibility of a female beauty freed from stasis and independently created. Mrs. Ramsay, as the model Victorian wife, literally embodies the beautiful and the static: her physical beauty is inherent (i.e., already produced) and seemingly eternal, but it vanishes once its source perishes, becoming something “dusty and out of date” in Lily’s memory (175). The married woman’s frequent experience of solid, static boredom is almost indissolubly linked to her beauty, making her truly a formidable figure and presence, but only while she is physically present. Mrs. Ramsay’s type of beauty seemingly cannot transmit to the next generation, and what she has is supplanted by something else — what Lily has. Lily, as one who can produce beauty rather than just function as its object, represents a new option for women: beauty as a profession, not an essence, a career, not an endowment or inheritance. It is through the vehicle of her fluid boredom that the unbeautiful Lily is able to be productive, creative, and somewhat at liberty, unlike Mrs. Ramsay, whose boredom, like her beauty, is most often solid, restrictive, and unchanging. Lily’s art, her ability to create beauty, substitutes for marriage as a satisfactory conclusion to her story. In To the Lighthouse, the spinsterplot narrative gets its legs, proving it has true possibilities, for Lily’s art and contemplation of her art generate just as much narrative as do the mental and verbal ruminations on Mrs. Ramsay’s beauty. While Mrs. Ramsay’s

160

Beautiful Boredom

beauty and (most often solid) boredom take center stage in the first section of the novel (and Lily’s art is considered), it is Lily’s fluid boredom and her painting which dominate the third and final section (while Mrs. Ramsay and her loveliness are dead). Mrs. Ramsay’s attempts to create permanent beauty through her matchmaking are all foiled, whereas Lily produces a completed work of art. Woolf qualifies this accomplishment, because Lily fears her canvas will be rolled up and stored under a bed or prominently displayed in servants’ quarters. (How permanent is unperceived art?) Despite this qualification, though, it is Lily, not any of the Ramsays, who remains in the final scene of the novel, and it is she who, through her free-floating boredom,17 completes her vision and achieves her goal. The final touch of her painting is a line18 in the center of the canvas, but its most symbolic and progressive feature is, perhaps, transforming Mrs. Ramsay’s antique beauty into something modern and differently coded: the portrait of this lady is a purple triangle, an image completely divorced from conventional characteristics of female beauty. In the three Victorian novels with which this study is concerned, traditional female beauty (or its lack) has been a major preoccupation of the characters as well as the novelists. Its very prevalence intimates that a midto late-nineteenth-century novel about a woman or women could not exist without engaging with cultural ideas of beauty, its entitlements and limitations. In Jane Eyre, the options for women dictated by the having or not having of beauty are equally boring and unappealing for the eponymous character, and her quest for something different interrogates the validity of both the fine-lady and patient-drudge models. For Dorothea Brooke, in Middlemarch, beauty and its clear-cut path to the altar are boring and unfulfilling, and though she capitulates (in a slightly qualified way) to her marriage-plot fate, Eliot refuses to allow her character’s beauty-ordained marriage to signify cleanly non-boredom and unruffled happiness. In The Portrait, the beautiful Isabel, after some denials, identifies marriage as her only real option, but in thus conforming completely to the fine-lady role for which her looks and fortune qualify her, she finds life as merely an object d’art stultifying. When Jane Eyre is threatened, in her first engagement to Mr. Rochester, with similarly being turned into a beautiful object (although certainly with less justification than Isabel) rather than an artistic and creative subject, Brontë supplies the means for her to flee the potential marriage; conversely, Brontë also prevents Jane’s marriage to St. John, which would turn Jane into a pure drudge, the part of the paradigm to which the un-beautiful are fated. Jane’s happy ending is achieved only by creating her own, idealized form of marriage and by thus rejecting the traditional options for women.

“The Proper Stuff of Fiction”

161

The Portrait and Middlemarch detail much more conventional unions than Jane and Rochester’s, and James’s consequent rejection of a happy ending, much like Eliot’s, problematizes the beauty=marriage=happiness/end-ofstory formula. Woolf ’s out-and-out overturning of the marriage plot in favor of the unlovely-spinster plot is but the logical next step, and Lily and Mrs. Ramsay are to some degree but reincarnations of various Brontë, Eliot, and James characters, lovely and unlovely alike. Thus, far from being the black sheep of the novelistic family, Victorian women characters and the narratives they generate are, then, the not-so-distant forebears of the women and plots of the modern novel. In other words, the plain but intelligent Jane Eyre, the statuesque Dorothea Brooke, the gilt-framed Isabel Archer, and the plain Lily Briscoe whose portrait of a beautiful woman is a purple triangle are all interrogations of just how true beauty is, and just how much sway and influence it should exert over narrative. Woolf concludes, as Brontë, Eliot, and James suggest with increasing force, that the life of the mind, the vagaries of fluid boredom, are both more important and more narratable than the life conventionally dictated by the beautiful body, the traditional fine-lady option of marriage and eventual motherhood.

A Last Look Nothing happens in modern novels; boredom is their very essence. Rather than the rebellion against post–Austenian novels Woolf implies, twentieth-century ideas about fiction are outgrowths of the Victorian novel. The formal vision of narrative and plot Virginia Woolf announces in “Modern Fiction” is strikingly similar to the experiments Brontë, Eliot, and James perform decades earlier: although Woolf perhaps carries the project off with greater éclat, in making the seemingly nonnarratable narratable she is most certainly drawing on the tradition established by those earlier novelists. To the Lighthouse, unquestionably a modern novel, takes the pockets of boredom found in the earlier novels I have discussed and makes those the substance of her entire novel and its plot. Woolf ’s relegation of traditional narrative action to parenthetical asides in “Time Passes” is therefore but the natural progression of the shift to boredom (rather than physical action and external events) as narratable seen in Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, and The Portrait of a Lady. Woolf ’s world of the novel is almost entirely psychologized and internalized, and it is thus boredom that spurs and supplies the narrative, not the accoutrements of the marriage plot. To the Lighthouse is the anti-marriage-plot novel: Lily is an old maid, and it is she who closes the narrative; the beautiful Mrs. Ramsey is killed off quietly; and her daugh-

162

Beautiful Boredom

ter Prue dies soon after marriage in childbirth. In Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, and The Portrait of a Lady, the marriage-plot traditions are questioned and tampered with while being ultimately upheld, but the boredom (in its various strains) leading to and resulting from marriage also begins to be explored. Woolf ’s text also continues the earlier novelists’ analysis of boredom’s relation to beauty’s possession and production, for Lily, like Jane, is an unbeautiful artist, thus a subject rather than an object, whose creations spring from a powerful and fluid boredom. Those who possess beauty in their persons— Eliot’s Dorothea, James’s Isabel, and Woolf ’s Mrs. Ramsay, ultimately fine ladies all —fail in any attempts to produce art as a subject: Dorothea marries an artist and thus becomes an object, despite her desire to be a social artist, making life beautiful for everyone; Isabel obviously becomes an object after her marriage, and this is why she is absent and mute at end of The Portrait —she has returned to her display case of Gilbert Osmond’s making; and Mrs. Ramsay’s efforts to produce permanent beauty through matchmaking/marriages are thwarted or undermined. All three beautiful women characters are considered at their loveliest and viewed as most collectible or picturesque when engaged in boredom, and for Dorothea, Isabel, and Mrs. Ramsay, this same boredom enables their moments of greatest (psychological) freedom and only real opportunities for any sort of creation or productiveness, especially after marriage. Woolf ’s innovative stream of consciousness technique and liberating reversal of the marriage-plot cannot be underestimated, but the shift in the “proper stuff of fiction” began many years before her articulation of it. Woolf claims that Brontë and Eliot never could get their genius expressed “whole and entire,” but in underestimating or discounting their (and James’s) contribution to the shape and priorities of the modern novel, she either undermines her own powers of discrimination or attempts to disguise cleverly a clear path of influence and inspiration (A Room of One’s Own 70). Part of the three earlier writers’ undeniable genius is their recognition that boredom, rather than something to be conscientiously avoided by their female characters as a gateway to disobedience, laziness, and ultimately evil, something for which they should be punished by the machinations of the plot, and something which immobilizes the narrative, is, instead, the means through which those characters become most life-like and endearing, the narrative becomes most engrossing, and the shape of the novel is least arbitrary. Brontë, Eliot, and James, in their various approaches, ordained boredom as the most powerful impetus behind what would become the modern novel.

“The Proper Stuff of Fiction”

163

Notes 1. Daniel Mark Fogel interprets Woolf ’s dismissal of life as a series of symmetrical gig lamps as a veiled attack on Henry James (rather than on the previously named “materialists”). 2. While “Modern Fiction” takes issue overtly with Woolf ’s more immediate literary predecessors and hints at her displeasure with Henry James, in other works she both praises and criticizes two of the nineteenth-century novelists with whom this study is concerned, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot. 3. In A Room of One’s Own, she credits Brontë as a greater genius than Jane Austen (high praise indeed), but ultimately sees Jane Eyre as flawed and imperfect, because of its jerks and “indignation” (73). Brontë’s books are “deformed and twisted” because of Brontë’s personal anger; her integrity as a novelist is questionable because she “left her story, to which her entire devotion was due, to attend to some personal grievance.” 4. George Eliot, though a powerful intellect and undoubted genius of sorts, is an imperfect and sometimes disappointing novelist, Woolf maintains. She wonders how Eliot would have been different if she had had access to wars and real physical action/real life (as did Tolstoy, for instance), and she explains women writers’ gravitation toward the novel genre as a natural result of enforced observation of human character and emotions within the confines of respectable drawing rooms. (While Woolf seems to think this circumscribed sphere has limited the scope or range of Eliot and Brontë—for she asserts that Eliot cannot imagine greater doings outside the drawing room for her heroines and that Brontë cannot fully imagine Rochester, the man who is to be her alter-ego’s ideal mate, because of the paucity of models at Haworth — it is interesting to note that in her own attempts to create a more perfect text, she focuses on “events” marked by their non-excitement, domestic nature, and interiority.) Woolf theorizes that “those who fall foul of Eliot do so, we incline to think, on account of her heroines; and with good reason; for there is no doubt they bring out the worst of her, lead her into difficult places, make her self-conscious, didactic, and occasionally vulgar” (The Common Reader 173). 5. I argued in the previous chapter that James’s Isabel Archer is a direct literary descendant of Dorothea Brooke, and Woolf ’s familiarity with James’s novels is well documented. Therefore, it seems logical that his reinterpretation of Dorothea would be part of Woolf ’s field of vision as she created her own version of the beautiful and socially minded woman, Mrs. Ramsay. 6. Erich Auerbach notes in “The Brown Stocking” that Virginia Woolf “holds to minor, unimpressive, random events: measuring the stocking, a fragment of a conversation with the maid, a telephone call” (29). He observes that, particularly in the first part, “The Window,” “great changes, exterior turning points, let alone catastrophes, do not occur; and though elsewhere in To the Lighthouse such things are mentioned, it is hastily, without preparation or context, incidentally, and as if it were only for the sake of information.” 7. James and Cam’s united front of silence and denied attention is an interesting mix of solid-seeming and fluid-functioning boredoms. While James’s purposefully blank attitude is initially conceived as a punishment of or fortification against his father, his boredom’s nature changes from that of a constructed, defensive screen for anger to a more fluid state of discovery and analysis. Cam’s boredom is never as solid as James’s: she preserves a less-convincing façade of intentional disinterest born more of a sense of sisterly solidarity than deep-seated anger. Her mind glides fluidly and more randomly, her hand cutting “a trail in the sea, as her mind made the green swirls and streaks into patterns and, numbed and shrouded, wandered in imagination in that underworld of waters where the pearls stuck in clusters to white sprays, where in the green light a change came over one’s entire mind and one’s body shone, half-transparent enveloped in a green cloak” (183). Her fluid boredom provides her with a sense of freedom, escape, and magical transformation, while also allowing her to evaluate the justice of James’s plaints against their father.

164

Beautiful Boredom

8. Mrs. Ramsay knits throughout much of “The Window,” perhaps in an effort to be useful. Her utility is ultimately false, however, because neither does she finish the brown stocking nor does it get taken to the lighthouse keeper’s son. Mrs. Ramsay’s knitting could at times be a response to the bleakness of her more common solid boredom, an attempted antidote to the weariness and pessimism she often feels about her marriage. 9. Mrs. Ramsay shares common physical traits as well as hobbies and points of character with Dorothea and Isabel. Like Dorothea, she is often referred to as “short-sighted,” and she is quite concerned with the inequalities between rich and poor: she keeps a notebook in which “she wrote down in columns carefully ruled for the purpose wages and spendings, employment and unemployment, in the hope that thus she would cease to be a private woman … and become what with her untrained mind she greatly admired, an investigator, elucidating the social problem” (9). (Instead of estate housing, however, Mrs. Ramsay’s pet concern is the unsanitary condition of milk.) In a probable allusion to Isabel Archer, Lily Briscoe describes Mrs. Ramsay as “an arrow” (49). Like Isabel, Mrs. Ramsay refuses to regret her marital decision, “evade difficulties, or slur over duties” (6). More minutely, Mrs. Ramsay is grey-eyed, like the other two heroines (Jane’s eyes, by the way, are green). 10. For instance, Mrs. Ramsay wonders why she is “so bored” during the dinner party (95). She “wearily” directs the seating arrangements while inwardly regretting her marriage and the ugliness of the dining room. Her husband frustrates her by growing enraged at Mr. Carmichael, whose great misdeed is asking for a second bowl of soup when Mr. Ramsay is ready to move on to the next course. Mrs. Ramsay’s boredom functions here as a screen for her rage, regret, and disappointment. 11. Her beauty is undiminished by time, age, motherhood, or care, for despite her white hair and hollow cheeks, Charles Tansley is as convinced that she is the “most beautiful person he had ever seen” (14) as is William Bankes, who saw her in her youth as an Aphrodite. 12. Ruth Vanita notes that “we are never told the first name of either Mr. or Mrs. Ramsay — their personal identity is swallowed up by their conjugal identity” (175; emphasis mine). 13. Her son James is angered by his father’s demands for Mrs. Ramsay’s sympathy and attention, and by the great, exhausting effort it takes for her to “pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray, looking at the same time animated and alive as if all her energies were being fused into force, burning and illuminating” (37). 14. Joan Lidoff argues that “while Woolf portrays Mrs. Ramsay as the Angel in the House, she also reveals her peculiar manipulative use of power as she tries to fashion human beings into art to create the moment that will endure” (47). Glenn Pedersen and Mitchell Leaska offer even more critical interpretations of Mrs. Ramsay: rather than the angel in the house they find that “Mrs. Ramsay —feather-brained self-satisfied manipulator — is actually the reason for her husband’s unhappiness and her son’s failure to reach the lighthouse” (Lilienfeld 148–149). 15. It is a widely held critical view that Mrs. Ramsay is in fact the object of Lily’s romantic and sexual feeling; many others, however, posit that Mrs. Ramsay is a standin for Woolf ’s own mother and that Lily is a proxy for the author herself. 16. Lily is not alone in classifying marriage as something of a “ruinous expenditure” (to borrow Isabel’s phrase). Mr. Ramsay, in reflecting on his inability to get beyond the letter R in the alphabet index of brilliance or to publish any philosophy that is really new or innovative rather than a retread of his first work, excuses himself by remembering that he has a wife and eight children, as if they are the inhibiting factor. Mr. Bankes also attributes Mr. Ramsay’s lack of later genius to his marriage, feeling that marriage “destroyed something” in his friend (22). Ruth Vanita suggests that part of Mr. Bankes’ disappointment stems from a latent homoeroticism in his relationship with Mr. Ramsay.

“The Proper Stuff of Fiction”

165

17. Lily is in a state of high receptivity, of almost suspended anticipation, and though she has her paintbrush in hand, she is fairly directionless as to how to complete her painting when a sudden, brief epiphany guides her to draw the line. Jane, Dorothea, and Isabel have similar experiences of fluid boredom, although what crystallizes or becomes clear for them is more often a course of action to be followed after some delay. Lily’s more immediate response to her fluid boredom’s influence is perhaps a logical corollary to Woolf ’s greater investment in boredom and the psychological throughout the text. 18. Marianne Hirsch questions what the line looks like and what it signifies/represents. She cites critics who have assumed it is “the textual equivalent of the lighthouse which connects the two disparate parts of the painting,” but she argues the line could just as well be horizontal as vertical, separating as easily as connecting, and she suggests that the novel “chooses not to interpret this crucial moment, but rather supports contradictory readings of it” (207).

Postscript

Boredom’s Beauty: Victorian Visual Representations of a Pervasive Mental State Painter Lily Briscoe’s choosing Mrs. Ramsay as a subject whose beauty she will attempt to capture and convey in an unexpected way seems an outgrowth of the Victorian artistic upswelling of interest in subjects whose appeal sprang as much from their psyches as their physiques. Boredom, and particularly women’s boredom, was a cultural preoccupation in the Victorian period not only for the writers highlighted in this study but for practitioners of the visual arts as well. From Pre-Raphaelites to classical portraitists to impressionists, European artists of the mid-to late-nineteenth century depicted women subjects whose most unifying and notable characteristic is their ennui.

Idle Hands, Beautiful Subjects Though I have argued that it is only through narrative that the experience of boredom — especially its potential for creativity, malignancy, action, and personal revelation —can be most thoroughly explored, visual representations from the Victorian period, much like the age’s lyric poetry, reveal the prevalence and growing cultural interest in and acceptance of this psychological state. The Pre-Raphaelites, avant-garde Victorian artists who rejected the classicism and soft-focus, polished perfection popular since the age of Raphael, were at the forefront of depicting women subjects whose surroundings and expressions had near-photographic detail and realism; as a result, portraying subjects’ emotions and states of mind seems to have been part of the artists’ devotion to reproducing nature accurately. In Pre– Raphaelite Art of the Victorian Novel: Narrative Challenges to Visual Gendered Boundaries, Sophia Andres tracks the Pre-Raphaelites’ ability to investigate women subjects’ psyches and emotions beyond the bounds of more 166

Postscript

167

conventional art and likens it to the power of Victorian narrative: she lauds “the Pre-Raphaelites’ ability to express in pictorial form gender issues that continue to preoccupy us” and notes that many “Pre-Raphaelite paintings [depict] the coalescence of the verbal and the visual and the extension of temporal and spatial boundaries. The convergence of the verbal and the visual was not limited to Pre-Raphaelite painting or poetry but also transpired in yet another important genre — the Victorian novel” (xi-xii). Perhaps further testifying to boredom as cultural zeitgeist, Susan P. Casteras, in Images of Victorian Women in English Art, hints toward a confluence of the emerging aesthetic movement and culturally-enforced — as well as societally valued — boredom for English women, arguing that mid-to late-nineteenth-century artists (including but not limited to the Pre-Raphaelites) began to use aestheticism “as a pretext for placing women in beautiful surroundings instead of shrilly criticizing their ‘idiotic mien’ and dangerous languor as Punch and others did. Such creatures amid expensive and exotic objects ultimately constitute a statement about the position of the middleclass woman as both consumer and the one consumed by the enforced leisure dictated by her superior social standing” (162–63; emphasis mine). As subjects of paintings, Victorian women experienced and symbolize this enforced leisure of ladies of the mid-to late-nineteenth century. In general, models must sustain a particular pose or expression for what can be extremely lengthy periods of time — a task that even the most superficial examination would reveal as monotonous and likely to produce boredom. The models featured in this postscript, however, were not all professionals; some of them were acceptable members of polite society, the daughters or wives of important men. Interestingly, though, it was perhaps through their modeling that the professionals, subjects selected by artists for their looks or posing skills, could most approximate their more-economically-privileged counterparts’ daily experience of time. Their lack of anything necessary or productive to do is a badge of social status for ladies, and, by extension, their families, just as portraits themselves were emblems of having achieved a certain level of financial and/or social importance. As previously discussed in this study, approved activities for middle- or upper-class young women could include embroidering, practicing musical instruments, drawing and painting, reading (or reading aloud), and other hobbies that could fill time and potentially show the woman to her best advantage, whether by producing performances or aesthetic products or by showcasing her grace or beauty as she participated in these pursuits. Whereas depictions of ladies of previous eras often feature their active or at least suggested involvement with one or more of these feminine accomplishments, the portraits of the Victorian period I will discuss here seem only to invoke accom-

168

Postscript

plishments in order to reject or interrogate them and their effectiveness as literal pass-times. Frank Huddlestone Potter’s Girl Resting at a Piano (painted in the 1880s) epitomizes the hollowness many young Victorian women found in the traditional accomplishments meant to keep their hands busy and their minds virtuously — or at least harmlessly — occupied. The subject, wearing a strangely moody shade of golden dress, sits before a piano. Instead of focusing on her music or, possibly more importantly, practicing the feminine and graceful posture meant to be appreciated as much as her future performances, she sits angled away from the keyboard, with a firmly shut music book on the stand. Though the dust cover is lifted from the keys, her choosing what is (for the time) a voluptuously curved, low-slung, reclining leather-upholstered chair with prominent arms suggests no serious attempt will be made at practicing, as the chair’s height and construction are actually prohibitive to hand placement and arm movement. From a finger of her propped left arm, she dangles an elaborately embroidered fan or purse, a nod to aestheticism that is perhaps the fruit of earlier (and appropriately feminine) labors. Her other hand, empty and motiveless, rests loosely on the edge of the seat’s upholstery. Rather than perching, ladylike and proper, on the edge of this seemingly ill-chosen seat, the subject flops into the curve of its back, achieving an even more extreme posture of relaxation by angling into its furthest corner. Her face may be turned almost flush toward the audience, but her eyes look beyond us, focusing on nothing, and her facial muscles are loose. Her dark hair, simply but correctly gathered into a top-knot, blends with the dark brown of the chair’s upholstery as well as the deep wood tones of the piano, helping draw the eye to her face and its unmistakable expression of boredom. The carved wood fireplace surround, oil-rubbed finish on the richly decorated dark piano, layered patterned carpets, and subtle sheen of her high-necked silk dress suggest her parents’ household is well-maintained, at least moderately fashionable, and comfortably financed. The subject’s atleast-middle-class status is further reinforced by her being surrounded by acceptable female pursuits, such as the piano— her not working or being active is an important status symbol. However, her boredom is potentially dangerous, for through it she can escape the confines of a comfortably appointed but ultimately rather claustrophobic-feeling drawing room. By depicting her from the lower calves up in a fairly tight cropping and foregrounding her before a background of the too-nearly-placed piano and fireplace, Potter generates a sense of her being too large, too expansive for this attractive but restrictive setting. Although her expression is non-threat-

Postscript

169

ening, and no malignancy of the Rosamund Vincy type can be detected in her lax posture and almost slack face, Potter’s unapologetic and, seemingly, nonjudgmental depiction of the insufficiency of typical feminine pursuits to engage her attention and occupy her thoughts and hands suggests he has a sympathy for the stasis expected of Victorian women (and, perhaps, artists’ models) that extends from childhood to the grave. For example, another of his works, Nothing to Do, depicts a dissatisfied-looking little girl in a short pink frock and black stockings who peers out from the shadows of her canvas with compressed lips and huffing cheeks— a barely expectant expression, as if hoping, however slightly, that the painter or viewer can supply an activity to dissipate her boredom. If conduct literature of the Victorian period is any indication, the young subject will soon have to learn ways to accept this state of mind, which age and maturity will almost certainly not dissipate, but, as a continuing survey of art of the age will reveal, she luckily enough will not have to learn to conceal her ennui in order to be considered attractive or worth attaining. Pre-Raphaelite-Brotherhood–founding member Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Veronica Veronese, despite its costuming indicative of an earlier age, simultaneously addresses the culturally enforced inactivity and stasis of the Victorian woman. The subject, whose slumping posture violates tenets of mid-to late-nineteenth-century physical propriety for women, idly laces the fingers of one hand through the strings of a violin hanging on her chamber wall while her other hand holds a bow. Much like Potter’s uninspired pianist, though, this would-be musician concurrently indicates ability and disinclination to play, as her bow is incorrectly oriented and awkwardly held if one wished to produce sound. Veronica’s sumptuous, velvety green robes, finely crafted necklace, and carefully (if romantically) styled hair indicate material comfort and wealth, as do the rich festoons of green damask adorning her chamber walls. That nineteenth-century symbol of women’s decorous captivity, the caged bird, attracts the viewer’s notice with his vivid yellow plumage and a silhouette echoing Veronica’s own. His un-gilded cage has been decorated with a few fresh branches of greenery, most likely by Veronica’s hand, and it seems her fondness for green in her clothing and interior décor might evidence a desire to be free to inhabit the natural, public world rather than the dark, domestic, close-feeling chamber to which she is, for all practical purposes, confined. The accoutrements of her chamber are unable to keep Veronica productively (or, rather, conspicuously non-productively) busy, and, through half-closed lids, she gazes unblinkingly to the viewer’s right, lost in her own mental processes and psychically divorced from her luxurious yet confining setting and prescribed duties. Her abstracted expression alone indicates

170

Postscript

nothing beyond boredom, but the inclusion of the bird and the violin, two “harmless amusements” for proper young ladies, suggests a context for her lassitude. She, like the caged bird, is kept in polite confinement and restricted from moving freely in what should be her natural environment. The connection to the violin suggests that she might be talented but, deprived of an audience or the possibility of ever being seen as an artist (rather than a fiddling hobbyist, as she is only a woman), even music loses its appeal and ability to sate her less superficial needs. (Perhaps, also like the bird, her song loses some of its beauty and genius when performed behind figurative or literal bars.) Veronica, unlike Potter’s erstwhile pianist, does have an open score before her, and she seems to have been previously engaged in not merely playing music but also in composing it. Inspiration perhaps was to come from the daffodils and greenery she has imported into her domestic space, but her creative processes seem stymied. In her hand she holds not the pen with which to inscribe melodies but a bow positioned for … nothing. Boredom, as I have asserted previously, has the potential to lead to that which is destructive (whether to self or others) or that which is creative, inspired, and, most importantly, self-aware. Though the frozen moments depicted in these paintings cannot lead viewers through this paradoxical process that is both static and imbued with possibility as narrative can, in many works of Victorian art the germ of this positive or negative potential is visible. Susan Casteras, in her analysis of women in late-Victorian art, singles out Dante Gabriel Rossetti as a pioneer in the depiction of the aesthetic female: the melancholy and ennui of these figures allies them with several pictorial traditions, including that of Rossetti’s own dream of beauty in his indolent and mesmerized femmes fatales of the 1860s and 1870s. The aesthetic female in her setting and attributes also bore some kinship to the hothouse “flowers of femininity” imprisoned in their lush gardens or parlor as well as to the alleged narcissism of the far more rebellious New Woman. An embodiment especially of aesthetic notions of feminine refinement, beauty, and fragility, the female aesthete in many ways personified the different, even superior, emotional and spiritual powers— and even the creative introspection or imagination — that women were often alleged to have. As a captive in the drawing room, the aesthetic female was a perfect candidate for the role of dreamer and vessel of intuition and decorative appeal [163].

Though the New Woman of the late nineteenth century was often stigmatized for her rejection of supposedly ladylike and gender-appropriate stasis and indolence and her embracing of physical pursuits (such as bicycling, golf, and tennis) or intellectual activities (reading political pamphlets, attending lectures, editing literary magazines), there is a perhaps surpris-

Postscript

171

ing common root concern contemporary social critics shared over her and her more conventionally feminine peers, and Casteras puts her finger on it with her mention of narcissism. Although boredom begins to have financial and social cachet in the Victorian period and thus is unblinkingly accepted when not actually cultivated, the fear that these periods of stasis and having-nothing-to-do might result in indelicate, unseemly, or unchaste behavior is clear from the age’s great preoccupation with the image of the fallen woman. The self-knowledge or desperation for action or change — selffocused desires that fly in the face of the institutionalized selflessness ingrained in Victorian women from childhood on — that can crystallize via episodes of boredom is potentially as socially dangerous and destructive as living in a flat and learning to type. In Rossetti’s famous Fazio’s Mistress (1863/1873), or, as he later wanted it to be renamed to sever any explicit ties to a character in fourteenth-century Italian poet Fazio degli Uberti’s “Canzone,” Aurelia, the artist depicts an appropriately occupied (if provocatively dishabille’d) woman, who is investing her time in the rites of beauty, plaiting her hair and improving her appearance for the visual delectation of her suitor/husband. She sits in near-profile, ostensibly gazing into a mirror as she braids. However, the angle of her chin and direction of her fixed look make clear that she is not contemplating her own reflection. While her fingers are moving, her mind is elsewhere — after all, braiding requires no concentration for a practiced hand. As is Rossetti’s wont, Aurelia is surrounded by rich tones and ornately worked surfaces, from the embossed metal sconce to the embroidered dressing-table cover and the carved jade hairbrush. In the midst of this beauty, she is bored. Most contemporary and modern critical response has focused on the sensuality of her only partially restrained hair, her pale yet glowing skin, and her bared shoulder, but more compelling to the student of boredom is the relationship between this intense and insistent physical presence and eroticism and her engaging in a mental state with great potential — both positive and negative. For Rossetti, her boredom is in itself an added attraction, an aesthetic draw that does not require an analysis of cause or effect. For a psychoanalytically inclined viewer, however, questions arise about the potency and totality of Aurelia’s physical presence, Rossetti’s emphasis on her grooming and presentation in this most private environment, and her mental disengagement from her overtly sensual, aesthetic, and material surroundings. As the subject of a love poem, a wife in a romantically charged marriage, or even the star of a delightfully flattering painting, has Aurelia found the adoration, fulfillment, and contentment nineteenth-century women are promised if they look pretty and play by the conduct-book rules, or has she learned this existence, though imbued

172

Postscript

with beautiful objects and high-flown sentiments, is hollow and purposeless? William Blake Richmond’s Portrait of Mrs. Ernest Moon (1888) was commissioned upon the marriage of the subject, Emma, to Ernest Moon, an English barrister. With marriage, as our novels’ characters learn, boredom perhaps only intensified for the Victorian woman, and Mrs. Moon’s portrait seems to reflect that. Her upright yet loose posture, seated with graceful, prop-free hands that seem to flow from her full, transparent white sleeves, introduces a level of intimacy at odds with the formal and stylized background of gray-veined marble walls and greenish-gold silk swag. (In an impressive show of either innate artistry or being accomplished to an excessive degree, she herself had embroidered the striking gold-lined robe worn in the sitting, and the dramatic contrast of the black and gold with her filmy white undergown creates an effect the Tate Gallery labels “distinctly aesthetic.”) Her expression further underscores the notion that the viewers are being allowed an insight into her mental and emotional state: the dark robe brings out the dark tones of her eyes, brows and hair, emphasizing her facial expression more so than merely her features. Her gaze of boredom seems to extend beyond the occupational hazard of sitting for a portrait, and Richmond, an accomplished academic painter as well as portraitist, need not have left a look of boredom if it did not in some way represent his subject. To be bored had become a marker of socioeconomic achievement for Victorians, especially those who hoped to move up the class hierarchy. As a testament to her husband’s social status, the portrait succeeds admirably: the gold lining of her robe and quietly luxurious background suggest richness and wealth, and Mrs. Moon’s idle hands and bored expression attest to the conspicuous leisure of her lifestyle. The dominance, or, at the minimum, balance, of black and dark tones with white and light shades suggests Mrs. Moon’s introspection and seriousness. She appears to gaze almost through the audience — despite her nearly head-on facial angle, there is no real sense of eye contact or engagement. Just as in Victorian novels, the boredoms represented in Victorian visual arts can assume many forms and types. If Mrs. Moon’s boredom seems intense and remarkable, inviting viewers to question its cause, the boredom depicted in Frederick, Lord Leighton’s famous Lieder ohne Worte (1861) enthralls viewers and induces a more relaxed and contented contemplation. In Leighton’s work, the central figure is a study in motiveless suspension. Her costuming, striking for its cool blue shades against a largely gold-tone background, is a relaxed masterpiece of folds, creases, and wrinkles emphasizing a few surprising (for the times) but unselfconsciously displayed swatches of bare skin: a shoulder, a sternum, hands, and feet. Her

Postscript

173

“eastern” attire (perhaps Turkish or Greek) is voluminous yet revealing, shocking yet strangely decorous, and its artfully haphazard arrangement echoes the graceful yet truly natural-looking posture of her body, as she sits comfortably with one leg crossed under the other, her back and head supported by the marble door frame behind her, with one arm slung across the top of a decoratively housed water pipe and the other hand gently fingering the toes of her cushioning leg. Although her setting and costuming might at first glance make her seem an exotic object, divorced from Leighton’s audience and his contemporary British female counterpart, she does in fact seem another iteration of Victorian artists’ interrogation — or at least acknowledgement — of cultural and social reality for the ladies of their day. Like a British Victorian lady, the subject is swathed in yards and yards of fabric, clothing focused on visual appeal and fetishization of certain body parts rather than utility or practicality (after all, gathering water in those sleeves seems ill-advised). The subject’s waist is cinched by a cummerbundlike length of the midnight blue fabric, creating an exaggerated hourglass not so dissimilar to that generated by the corseted waist and voluminous (whether hooped, bustled, or multi-petticoated) skirts of the mid-and latenineteenth-century British woman. Art historian Susan Casteras points to the Victorian lady’s wardrobe as agent of confinement, refinement, and sexual objectification: enforced ladylike idleness in the drawing room was literally reinforced by certain garments—for example, the mid-century tight sleeves, full, bell-shaped skirts, bulky petticoats, huge crinolines that impeded locomotion, and, of course, stays and the corset. The bodily curves of the hourglass figure were mostly artificially induced, a very symbol of womanly weakness (as well as an unconscious sadomasochistic one); accordingly, many men expressed the opinion that corsets were a contrivance that inflamed the passions of one sex while curtailing those of the other. The invisible challenge beneath voluminous dresses was enticing in itself, and the exaggerations of bust, hips, tiny waist, and derriere at different times during the century signaled a new sexiness for that particular body area [69].

Leighton’s painting’s subject reveals less flesh than the typical Victorian woman in evening dress, but the exposed areas— a cleavage-free breastbone and upper abdomen, bare feet and ankles, and one shoulder glimpsed through the slip in an under-constructed bodice —could cause consternation because they are in violation of (arbitrary) English Victorian constructs of modesty or propriety. The parallels with English women do not end with wardrobe: Leighton’s painting seems to explore domestic ideals and duties and the concept of a feminized space, familiar tropes to a British Victorian audience. The statuesque female figure in the back left of the painting, beautifully framed by the arched doorway through which she retreats, juxtaposes the modest and

174

Postscript

the sensuous. Draped in a golden head covering that reaches nearly to the ankles invisible beneath her puddling tangerine dress, she is completely covered; however, the sinuously fluid movement of her body as she carries one elaborate vessel of water atop her head and another on her gracefully plattered right hand is evident from the pulls and creases in the fabric. Though she is in the background, her attractive industriousness is a cue to the viewer of what the central young woman should be doing. Further clues are offered by the three polished, highly decorative vessels surrounding the central figure. In fact, she has positioned one of the narrow-necked urns below the gently streaming water pipe. This appears to be her only gesture toward industry and purpose, though. In addition to her drooping drapery and careless joints, her expression reveals a supreme lack of interest in the task at hand. Her semi-downcast eyes, dark and prominent in a pale narrow face capped by warmly blond hair, along with her limp left hand and absently stroking right hand, suggest outer blankness and an inward-turning of her thoughts. Though she ostensibly had a task to fulfill, she has abandoned all but the most superficial gestures toward completing it, and her only real connection to the duty seems to be the fluid mental state perhaps suggested by the sounds of running water from the pipe and an adjacent wall fountain. In “Rococo as the Dissipation of Boredom,” F. R. Ankersmit argues that boredom “is the feeling that brings one closest to the nature of things. In boredom the interactions between ourselves and the world are temporarily suspended, and this suspension invites reality to manifest its true nature, untainted and undistorted by our interests and preoccupations” (132). Ankersmit’s classification of what I would diagnose as fluid boredom helps elucidate Leighton’s subject’s experience and mental state. Unlike for a contemporary British woman, in many ways moored to the domestic sphere in her daily life, Leighton’s subject’s surroundings might initially seem more open, given that natural light fills the space and a cloudy sky and tree are included in the composition. However, the openness Leighton creates with sunny hues is, upon closer inspection, rather restricted, with multiple open doorways and window frames limited by high, enclosing walls that allow inmates to see only the tops of trees. At best, this is a courtyard, the foreign equivalent of some very-English domestic spaces, such as walled gardens, polite parlors, and drawing rooms. This not-so-exotic subject seems suddenly much less alien, with more cause for her languor than merely a warm climate. She, too, seems susceptible to culturally induced boredom, and, though she may be failing to complete her job as efficiently as possible, Leighton does not seem to indict her. By tying her fluid mood to the movement of the water and, further, naming the work “Song without Words,” he seems to treat her physical stasis and mental

Postscript

175

abstraction positively. After all, how critical or important is her water-gathering if she’s using such narrow, elegant vessels for its collection? This would seem to be along the lines of an appropriate, decorous, womanly, time-consuming, and mildly productive task such as embroidering, china painting, stocking-darning, or paying calls. Though Leighton’s subject is clearly cast as not-English, she is closely akin to English Victorian women: critic Casteras argues that the identification of the Victorian lady with the home was almost total [in Victorian art]. The apotheosis, if not the parthenogenesis, of fair womanhood, made this the almost exclusively feminine sphere of activity, making the parlor (or another room) and the environs of home (including the garden) a metaphor of the female and her functions. Paintings of the Victorian era thus serve as visual correlatives of the fact that politically, legally, culturally, and even sexually the Victorian wife and her daughters were quite housebound, enclosed by those same wainscoted walls that simultaneously formed her glorious temple [55].

If Leighton’s subject initially seems unconventional, a closer look reveals the scene is more domestic than foreign and more familiar than not. Moving into a more typical setting for a European woman, Realist/ impressionist Edgar Degas’s Helene Rouart in her Father’s Study (1886) depicts the daughter of industrialist and art collector Henri Rouart in a room filled with parts of her father’s collection. Surrounded by the exotic and priceless, Helene nevertheless appears dispirited and bored. As the piece’s title makes clear, she is not in a traditionally feminine or feminized Victorian space, such as a boudoir, parlor, music room, or (walled) garden, but she is still enclosed in an interior without even the suggestion of natural light or windows. Helene’s father’s study is gendered masculine in quite Victorian ways— three Egyptian statues or sarcophagi and a Chinese wall hanging attest to the far-ranging (and all-conquering) scope of the European male; warm, strong tones of pinkish-red and orange-red comprise the palette of the room; and Helene is dwarfed by the outsized brownish-orange chair, presumably her father’s, behind which she stands. On the left side of the canvas, the Egyptian statues, with their strongly vertical shape and phallic headpieces, provide a powerfully masculine balance to Helene’s figure, depicted clearly from the hips up to the right of the center of the canvas. A strip of darker molding bisects the wall behind Helene just above the height of her head, creating a sense that she is pressed down or boxed in by the room. Only a seaside scene and a sketch of a young peasant girl help to relieve the masculinity of the space Helene inhabits. The landscape painting, JeanBaptiste-Camille Corot’s depiction of Castel Dell’Oro in Naples, identifies with Helene and the feminine primarily through its coloring, grey skies and

176

Postscript

blue sea water that echo the tones of her figure rather than the warm oranges, reds, and browns of the rest of the composition. Degas places Corot’s canvas just behind Helene’s head and left shoulder, further aligning it with her space as opposed to the more masculine rest of the study. Also adding a slight touch of the feminine is Jean-Francois Millet’s drawing of a peasant girl, which appears propped against the wall behind Helene’s left hip and leg. Degas places significant attention on Helene’s hands, which are at the center of the vertically oriented rectangular canvas, by highlighting them in contrasting tones of white and blue and outlining them rather more distinctly than most of the rest of the painting. Her idle hands, resting on the back of her father’s chair, are further accentuated by the three-quarter sleeves of her cadet-blue dress. Degas’s attention to her face seems almost secondary to his focus on her motiveless, empty hands, but Helene looks out from the canvas, to the left of the viewer, exhibiting an expression of boredom and vacancy generated by her heavy-lidded eyes and the slack expression of her lips, cheeks, and forehead. Helene’s high-necked dress, though ornamented with touches of white lace at the neck and bottoms of the sleeves and a few darker-blue touches, seems almost severe, and this plain costuming, when paired with pronounced bags under her eyes, could suggest either a more realistic/less idealizing type of portraiture or a concerted desire to depict a sadness or disillusionment at the core of her inaction. Since no ring is visible on her prominently featured hands, it seems clear the ungirlish Helene is unmarried at the time the portrait is painted and thus is considered a financial drain on her family according to conventional Victorian wisdom. Beside her father’s empty chair are stacks of envelopes and paper, perhaps correspondence Helene is responsible for maintaining. Despite this apparent purpose in his study, Helene seems not to fit, in terms of scale or tone. If she is meant to appear as another one of his accumulated treasures, this is only accomplished via Degas’s composition of the piece, with her seeming confined and contained, kept quietly in this airless room until desired for display. Her somewhat gloomy boredom and idleness bespeak a failure — whether the failure is Helene’s (in not attracting a husband and marrying, in neglecting her daughterly secretarial duties) or her absent father’s (in relegating her to these tasks, in not considering her hopes or aspirations).

Eighteenth-Century Beauty and Engaged Activity In contrast to the bored denizens of Victorian portraits, a survey of mid-to late-eighteenth-century portraits of ladies reveals a tendency toward

Postscript

177

subjects who manage to appear much more engaged — with viewers, with their tasks or accomplishments, and with their environments. Though boredom was doubtless a fact of life for eighteenth-century women of the middle class and higher, painters and models alike seem less invested than their Victorian counterparts in presenting that state of mind as beautiful, acceptable, interesting, or worthy of analysis. Instead, part of these eighteenthcentury subjects’ beauty stems from their clear signs of physical and/or psychological involvement in the modeling process or their womanly accomplishments. For example, Jean-Marc Nattier’s Manon Balletti (1757) depicts a woman whose beauty is generated by her youth and quiet dynamism. Mademoiselle Balletti’s light blue dress is low cut and ornamented with a freshly cut rose, and two small pansies or violas trim where her translucent veil is attached to her hair. Her posture and costuming are not far afield from those depicted in portraits of the next century, with her figure depicted from just below the bust, her shoulders squared to the viewer, and her head turned just slightly to the viewer’s left, but her expression is miles away from that of a Pre-Raphaelite stunner or Victorian high-society lady. A slight smile touches her lips and is carried through in the apples of her cheeks and the tilt of her eyes. Rather than appearing abstracted and vacant, Mademoiselle Balletti is engaged and engaging. The daughter of an actress and the onetime fiancée of Casanova, Mademoiselle Balletti was married a few years after sitting for this portrait to a successful architect, cementing a social rise and, in the process, managing to embody both types of female model expected in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century portraiture. Nattier’s portraits of titled women of the French court similarly offer ladies who seem, even when in postures of semi-repose, enlivened and connected. Successful eighteenth- and nineteenth-century portraitist and landscape artist Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat (approximately 1782) likewise differs from the depictions of women popularized in the Victorian period by its understated (yet unmistakable) energy and purposefulness. She depicts herself from the hips up, against a background of a classically stylized sky. Her pose, especially the positioning of her hands, may be self-consciously “graceful,” but the overall effect truly is one of grace and elegance. Dressed in mauve silk with a silky black wrap twining around her arms and a low, white, ruffled neckline accenting her fair and unadorned chest and neck, Vigée-Lebrun’s costume creates a general look of artfully unstudied beauty. The hat she mentions in the title of her piece complements the effect: though “casual” in its materials (straw and fresh flowers), its symmetry and beautiful s-curves, not to mention the subtly rakish curving feather plume piercing the crown at a perfectly balancing

178

Postscript

spot, complete the mood of pleasingly artificial naturalism. Vigée-Lebrun’s paintbrushes— actually tipped in pigment to show they are more than props— and artist’s palette, both held in her left hand, attest to her active involvement in a pursuit that, to a point, was considered acceptable and attractive in a lady, considering that it was time-consuming and productive in a purely aesthetic way. Vigée-Lebrun’s facial expression continues the impression of lively interest. Her eyes, though lightly shaded by the brim of her straw hat, look directly into the viewer’s and are neither heavy-lidded nor glazed over, some of the symptoms of boredom we are now quick to detect in portraits of women from the next century. Her mouth is lightly parted and gently smiling, suggesting an eagerness and curiosity notably absent in the PreRaphaelite and other Victorian subjects. The gently flushed skin of her face similarly imparts an energy and activity (if only vascular) to her expression that is in marked contrast to her often-pallid Victorian counterparts. Unlike most other models/subjects, Vigée-Lebrun can exercise complete control over her presentation and appearance, and she has taken pains to represent herself as beautiful according to eighteenth-century norms. If she were to paint herself in the late nineteenth century, however, would her audience find something amiss in her seeming engagement and barely latent activity? To be found beautiful, intriguing, or representative, would she not, like Veronica of Rossetti’s Veronica Veronese, need to divorce herself psychically from the viewer and physically from the tools of her art? The celebrated Marquise de Pompadour, in François-Hubert Drouais’s portrait Madame de Pompadour at her Tambour Frame (1763–64), is, like Vigée-Lebrun, a model of active, engaged, accomplished beauty. Though she was the best-loved mistress of Louis XV, her popularity and trend-setting status seemed to stem at least partly from her own reputation for quickwittedness and aesthetic, musical, and literary talent (or, at a minimum, her capacity to appreciate and sponsor the talented). Thus, she is depicted by Drouais surrounded by testaments to her industry and skill as well as manifestations of her taste and wealth. The pink silk drape spilling in the background on the left side of the composition seems necessary only as a splash of color echoing the tones in Madame de Pompadour’s face, as the richness of the scene is easily established by the subject’s wardrobe and furniture. Her gown is a study in fine fabrics and well-chosen trims, with yards of floral silk accented by cascading ecru lace at the neckline, elbows, and hem and coordinating wide, multicolored striped ribbon bows. Her attention to detail doesn’t stop there, as Drouais allows glimpses of her silver-beaded slippers. Hand carving, gilt trim, and hand-painted details proliferate in the room, even on the theoretically more utilitarian embroidery frame.

Postscript

179

Madame de Pompadour is seated behind the ornate tambour frame, and more evidence of her style and application abounds. Her right hand pushes an embroidery needle through the taut fabric while her left hand waits— gracefully, of course — to pull it through underneath. Her pet dog stands on its hind legs, bracing on the tambour frame and peering attentively at his mistress and her work. Behind the gilt-edged settee on which she poses, an ornate book cabinet houses many expensively bound volumes that seem just haphazardly enough placed to suggest her actually having read them. To her left is a highly ornamented work table (featuring Sèvres plaques she helped popularize) housing more books and her embroidery threads and implements. Tucked between her voluminous skirt’s hem and the legs of the work table are what appear to be an art portfolio and a beautifully stained lute trimmed with feminine pink ribbon. (Ironically, all this activity is reputed to have been composed and painted posthumously, as her head was painted from life and inserted into the larger canvas later.) She is never at a lack for something to create, perform, read, or learn, the painting would have us understand. Madame de Pompadour’s expression is similarly engaged. She looks directly at the viewer and artist, and her head is turned only slightly to the side, giving her gaze personality but not coyness. Like Vigée-Lebrun’s, her eyes are wide open and absorbing. Her mouth is gently curving into a smile, and delicate pink tints in her cheeks continue the impression of her warmth and interest. Again, this is no disengaged, spiritless, or affectless subject. Even though she was suffering from — and soon to die of — tuberculosis, she seems to find her life far from tedious. Her feminine accomplishments, which seem to offer less than satisfactory mental employment for middleand upper-class women of the Victorian period, are fulfilling and important enough to her (and to her idea of herself ) that she wishes them to be showcased in what she knew to be her final portrait. The antithesis of boredom personified, she perhaps learned that as the king’s official mistress, she must generate and sustain interest in order to create and perpetuate power. Unlike Henry James’s stultifying bored, dangerous, and pitiless Madame Merle, though, the woman depicted on Drouais’s canvas seems genuinely invested in her accomplishments’ value for their own sakes.

The Beauty of Boredom As a final note of telling contrast, one of the most famous but controversial portraitists of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, John Singer Sargent, painted, in general, women who were assertively not bored, though

180

Postscript

they did often reveal psychological depths or character traits in their poses and expressions. Unlike some of their predecessors from the eighteenth century, Sargent’s subjects did not typically rely on props to show their engagement and connection to the world around them: contemporary critics complained that his female subjects seemed at times too inelegant, vulgar, or earthy in their miens, too knowing or self-aware in their countenances, which likely stemmed from his not conforming to the contemplative, lethargic, or almost flat expressions favored by Sargent’s contemporaries. Some of his reputation-shattering creations, such as Madame X (1884) and Isabella Stewart Gardner (1888), revealed perhaps too much about their subjects’ interior lives and characters for contemporary viewers’ tastes, but even his less sensational works, such as Mrs. Edward Darley Boit (1888), showed their sitters’ personalities via demeanors that were apparently too engaged for comfort. Alone in its possible depiction of boredom among his many works featuring women is Nonchaloir (Repose) (1911), which features his niece, RoseMarie Ormond, semi-reclining on a small sofa in his studio, swathed almost entirely in a dramatically bordered cream-colored satin shawl. The sole of one shoe is just visible under her hem, showing her legs are stretched across the seat of the sofa, though her voluminous light skirt and the shawl cascade down to the floor. Her unpinned dark hair and loosely woven fingers suggest restfulness, but the upward tilt of her chin as she rests her head across the top of the sofa’s back and the smudging darkness of her eyelines and eyelashes make it difficult to definitively discern whether she sleeps or merely muses, her eyes shuttered by half-lowered lids. (Sargent painted entire series of recumbent and semi-recumbent young women resting and sleeping, but typically they were depicted in the outdoors and were unquestionably asleep, reading, or playfully interacting with someone or something, such as Woman Reading in a Cashmere Shawl, Violet Sleeping, or Two Girls in White Dresses.) Though the shawl and Rose-Marie’s rich surroundings are sumptuous and visually interesting, they are treated in fairly light, blending, and complimentary tones, and it is her face and head, just to the left of the center of the composition, that truly arrest the viewer’s attention. The darkest elements of the painting — her cushioning cloud of hair and an inexplicably dark band of fabric under her jawline, presumably the high neck of her dress under the shawl — bring focus to a face defined primarily by dramatic darkness, from her strongly marked brows to her upturned nostril to the shadowy space under her top lip. Most intriguing, however, are her mysteriously smudged eyes, which may be gazing to the viewer’s hard right. If, as I believe, Rose-Marie is bored, surely an occupational hazard for even as seasoned a model as this artist’s niece, Sargent

Postscript

181

manages to imbue her boredom with a tranquility, depth, and ease that make this piece as refreshing as Leighton’s but perhaps even more closely approximating that free-floating potentiality of fluid boredom seen in Victorian literary characters such as Dorothea Brooke. Though totally covered except for her head and hands, through her posture and expression, the subject of Sargent’s painting conveys an unusual degree of freedom and informality that make the viewer’s interloping into this apparently unguarded psychological moment seem permissible and even instructive. Sargent’s Nonchaloir or Leighton’s Leider ohne Werte are perhaps the closest Victorian visual representations of the positive potential latent in women’s boredom, but the prevalence of bored-looking women, even those evincing the more solid- or constructed-appearing variety, attests to the period’s fixation on — and self-identification with — the psychological state. The images we have analyzed may not provide any concrete answers about boredom’s purpose, results, or even ethical, moral, or philosophical value, but they do attest to its perceived ubiquitousness and attractiveness in women of the Victorian age. The Pre-Raphaelites, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti foremost among them, surrounded their subjects with beauty and luxury and invested the women themselves (their “stunners”) with comeliness and readily apparent sensual appeal, all while often depicting these subjects as bored and disengaged, thus simultaneously commenting upon Victorian’s women’s habitual, everyday state (engineered by cultural and social values, training, and lack of opportunities) while equating their boredom and lassitude to desirability. Veronica Veronese and Fazio’s Mistress/Aurelia both project an intensely disconnected psychological mood while being offered by Rossetti as prime objects for viewer’s delectation. Leighton’s bored water-gatherer from Leider ohne Werte is also presented almost fetishistically for the audience’s titillation, what with her surprising flashes of skin and exotic dress, but the unexpectedly English echoes in her ostensibly foreign setting and situation create a context for his subject that makes her boredom not just an aesthetic choice but an invitation to speculation and less-superficial contemplation of her inner and outer life. Painters of the period outside the Pre-Raphaelite ideology investigated the cultural reality of women’s boredom as well. Helene Rouart and Potter’s piano-ignoring subject seem to offer women whose boredom is, thanks to suggestive backgrounds, more diagnosable as possibly the constructed, solid type that relates to frustration and disguised anger. Mrs. Ernest Moon has no props, activities, or pastimes she studiously ignores or demonstrably finds lacking, yet her tedium is marked. Given her wearing one of her accomplishments, an embroidery project that would have to have been

182

Postscript

painstaking and immensely time-consuming, and the occasion of the painting’s commission, her entering the state of matrimony, her lassitude seems a critique of her opportunities for mental and psychological engagement both prior to and since the solemnization of her marriage. Finally, Sargent’s intriguing depiction of his niece, Rose-Marie, in a state of possible fluid boredom, especially in the context of his oeuvre, negative critical response to which was often spurred by his subject’s projecting emotions and psychological states too far removed from boredom for Victorian tastes, suggests Sargent perhaps had an inkling of the positive potential, the latent power for self-knowledge and self-awareness, that could spring from a boredom that was genuine and active, not a mask or screen demanded by society or aesthetic principles. In his habit of swimming against the prevailing taste (or at least acceptance) of bored/beautiful women in his depictions of his portraits’ subjects, Sargent may have been attuned to this different vein of boredom when it surfaced in his niece. The emphasis on becoming an accomplished woman certainly didn’t diminish between the eighteenth century and the Victorian period — if anything, being accomplished was viewed even more pragmatically, as a marketable asset on the marriage front and as a safe way to keep women harmlessly occupied within the domestic sphere. Why then, the portraits and novels seem to question, are women perceived as more bored and less absorbed or interested in these accomplishments in the Victorian period? Have these prescribed occupations become insufficient through cultural shifts or has acknowledging or admitting their insufficiency (or one’s own) become less stigmatized and newly attractive? Perhaps the Victorian confluence of boredom and beauty is as much an unavoidable result of social realities for women and burgeoning awareness of individual psychologies as it is the natural evolution of Burke’s ideals of the small, smooth, placid, polished, feminine form of attractiveness. Today, boredom and the boring are seldom considered beautiful; instead, they are treated as anathema, the banes to happy lives, well-reviewed art, or top-selling literature. Happiness, though, like beauty, itself is devalued and less stimulating of interest when there is no variation, when no dips or valleys occur, when nothing rough can create thrilling contrast. Boredom, as Samuel Johnson seemed to recognize hundreds of years ago in Rasselas, is inescapable in human existence, and it certainly is unavoidable in the modern experience as well. Brontë, Eliot, James, and other writers and artists of the Victorian period cottoned onto an important and central truth about boredom, however: rather than a punishment or burden, boredom can be freeing and beautiful.

Works Citeddeti Adelson, Warren. “In the Modernist Camp.” Sargent Abroad: Figures and Landscapes. Eds. Warren Adelson, Donna Seldin Janis, Elaine Kilmurray, Richard Ormond, and Elizabeth Oustinoff. New York: Abbeville Press, 1997. Andres, Sophia. The Pre-Raphaelite Art of the Victorian Novel: Narrative Challenges to Visual Gendered Boundaries. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2005. Ankersmit, F.R. “Rococo as the Dissipation of Boredom.” Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art in and out of History. Eds. Claire Farago and Robert Zwijnenberg. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003. Astell, Mary. A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest. London: R. Wilkin, 1701. New York: Source Book-Collectors Editions, 1970. Auerbach, Erich. “The Brown Stocking.” Virginia Woolf: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Maragaret Homans. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993. 16–34. Austen, Jane. Emma. 1816. Ed. John Davie. New York: World’s Classics-Oxford UP, 1990. _____. Persuasion. 1818. Ed. James Kinsley. New York: World’s Classics-Oxford UP, 1990. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1999. Bloom, Harold, ed. Isabel Archer. Major Literary Characters. New York: Chelsea House, 1992. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Ed. Richard J. Dunn. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1987. Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim’s Progress. 1678. Uhrichsville, OH: Barbour Publishing, 1988. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and Other Pre–Revolutionary Writings. Ed. Adam Phillips. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990. Casteras, Susan P. Images of Victorian Womanhood in English Art. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1987. _____, and Alicia Craig Faxon, eds. Pre–Raphaelite Art in Its European Context. London: Associated UP, 1995. Chase, Richard. “Myth as Literature.” Theories of Myth: Literary Criticism and Myth. Ed. Robert A. Segal. New York: Garland, 1996. 47–66. Cohen, Monica F. Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel. New York: Cambridge UP, 2005. Court, Franklin E. “The Image of St. Theresa in Middlemarch and Positive Ethics.” Victorian Newsletter 63 (1983): 21–25. 183

184

Works Cited

Daugherty, Sarah B. “Henry James and George Eliot: The Price of Mastery.” Henry James Review 10 (1989): 153–166. Eagleton, Terry. “Class, Power, and Charlotte Brontë.” Critical Quarterly 14 (1972): 225–35. Edwards, Lee. “Women, Energy, and Middlemarch.” Massachusetts Review 13 (1972): 223–38. Eliot, George. Essays. Ed. Thomas Pinney. New York: Columbia UP, 1963. _____. Middlemarch. Ed. Bert G. Hornback. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977. Ellis, Sarah Stickney. The Daughters of England: Their Position in Society, Character and Responsibilities. New York: D. Appleton, 1842. _____. The Wives of England, Their Relative Duties, Domestic Influence, and Social Obligations. New York: D. Appleton, 1843. History of Women (1975): reel 202, no. 1337. Fischer, Sandra K. “Isabel Archer and the Enclosed Chamber: A Phenomenological Reading.” Henry James Review 7 (1986): 48–58. Fogel, Daniel Mark. Covert Relations: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Henry James. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1990. Fordyce, James. Sermons to Young Women. 3rd ed. corr. 2 vols. London: A. Millar and T. Cadell, 1767. History of Women (1975): reel 34, no. 220. Fraser, Hilary. “St. Theresa, St. Dorothea, and Miss Brooke in Middlemarch.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 40 (1986): 400–11. 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. Gisborne, Thomas. An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex. London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1797. New York: Garland, 1974. Greene, Graham. “Introduction to The Portrait of a Lady.” Oxford: Oxford UP, 1947. Bloom 28–32. Greene, Mildred S. “Another Look at Dorothea’s Marriages.” Literature and Psychology 33 (1987): 30–42. Gregory, John. Father’s Legacy to his Daughters. London: W. Strahan, T. Cadell, W. Creech, 1774. New York: Garland, 1974. Glen, Heather, ed. New Casebooks: Jane Eyre. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997. Gordon, Lyndall. Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995. Hardy, Barbara. Particularities: Readings in George Eliot. Athens: Ohio UP, 1982. Hirsch, Marianne. “The Darkest Plots: Narration and Compulsory Heterosexuality.” Virginia Woolf: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Margaret Homans. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1993. 196–209. Hochberg, Shifra. “The Vista from Dorothea’s Boudoir Window and a Coleridgian Source,” ELN 29.3 (1992): 41–46. James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady. 1881. Ed. Geoffrey Moore. New York: Penguin, 1986. Knight, Charmian. “Reader, what next?— The final chapter of Jane Eyre.” Bronte Society Transactions 23.1 (1998): 26–30. Kracauer, Siegfried. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Ed. Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. Leaska, Mitchell. Virginia Woolf ’s Lighthouse: A Study in Critical Method. New York: Columbia UP, 1970. Leavis, F.R. “The Portrait of a Lady Reprinted.” Scrutiny 15 (1948): 235–40. Bloom 32–37. Levine, George. “Isabel, Gwendolen, and Dorothea.” ELH 30 (1963): 244–57.

Works Cited

185

Lidoff, Joan. “Virginia Woolf ’s Feminine Sentence: The Mother-Daughter World of To the Lighthouse.” Literature and Psychology 32:3 (1986): 43–59. Lilienfeld, Jane. “Where the Spear Plants Grew: The Ramsays’ Marriage in To the Lighthouse.” New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf. Ed. Jane Marcus. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1981. 148–69. Losano, Antonia J. The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2008. Martin, Carol A. “George Eliot: Feminist Critic.” The Victorian Newsletter 65 (1984): 22–25. Mellor, Anne K. Romanticism and Gender. New York: Routledge, 1993. Mitchell, Sherry. “St. Teresa and Dorothea Brooke: The Absent Road to Perfection in Middlemarch.” The Victorian Newsletter 92 (1997): 32–37. Miller, D. A. Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981. Miller, Elsie. “The Marriages of Henry James and Henrietta Stackpole.” Henry James Review 10 (1989): 15–31. The New Oxford Annotated Bible. Ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Roland W. Murphy. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. Niemtzow, Annette. “Marriage and the New Woman in The Portrait of a Lady.” Bloom 104–118. Nightingale, Florence. Cassandra and Other Selections from Suggestions for Thought. 1860. New York UP Women’s Classics. New York: New York UP, 1992. Oliphant, Margaret. Rev. of The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine March 1882: 374–81. Bloom 10–15. Patmore, Coventry. The Angel in the House. 2 vols. London: John W. Parker and Son, 1854–56. Phillips, Adam. On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993. Polita, Jina. “Jane Eyre: Classified.” New Casebooks: Jane Eyre. Ed. Heather Glen. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997. 78–91. Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. U of Chicago P, 1984. Richardson, Samuel. Clarissa or The History of a Young Lady. 1747–48. Ed. Angus Ross. New York: Penguin, 1985. _____. Pamela or, Virtue Rewarded. 1740. Ed. T.C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. Rischin, Abigail S. “Beside the Reclining Statue: Ekphrasis, Narrative, and Desire in Middlemarch.” PMLA 111 (1996): 1121–31. Ruskin, John. Sesame and Lilies and The Crown of Wild Olive. New York: Century, 1901. Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. Indian Hills, CO: Falcon’s Wing P, 1958. Schrero, Elliot M. “How Rich Was Isabel Archer?” Henry James Review 20 (1999): 81–88. Scott, Ramsey. “Even the Hardy Boys Need Friends: An Epistolary Essay on Boredom.” Southwest Review 91 (2006): 550–567. Scudder, Horace. “The Portrait of a Lady and Dr. Breen’s Practice.” Atlantic Monthly January 1882: 126–28. Bloom 8–10.

186

Works Cited

Spacks, Patricia Meyer. Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. Svendsen, Lars. A Philosophy of Boredom. Trans. John Irons. London: Reaktion, 2005. Szirotny, June. “‘No Sorrow I Have Thought More About’: The Tragic Failure of George Eliot’s St. Theresa.” The Victorian Newsletter 93 (1998): 17–27. Tanner, Tony. “The Fearful Self.” Bloom 91–103. Tennyson, Alfred. “Mariana.” Victorian Poetry and Poetics. Ed. Walter E. Houghton and G. Robert Stange. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968. Thomas, Jeanie G. “An Inconvenient Indefiniteness: George Eliot, Middlemarch, and Feminism.” University of Toronto Quarterly 56 (1987): 392–415. Thompson, William. An Enquiry into the Elementary Principles of Beauty in the Work of Nature and Art. London: J. Johnson, 1798. New York: Garland Publishing, 1972. Tromly, Annette. The Cover of the Mask — The Autobiographers in Charlotte Brontë’s Fiction. ELS Monograph Ser. 26. Victoria, B.C.: U of Victoria P, 1982. Vanita, Ruth. “Bringing Buried Things to Light: Homoerotic Alliances in To the Lighthouse.” Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings. Ed. Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer. New York: New York UP, 1997. 165–79. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. London: Macmillan, 1899. Library of American Civilization 10563 (1970). Vicinus, Martha. Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1972. Vopat, Carole. “Becoming a Lady: The Origins and Development of ‘Isabel Archer’s Ideal Self.’” Literature and Psychology 38 (1992): 38–56. Warren, Jonathan. “Imminence and Immanence: Isabel Archer’s Temporal Predicament in The Portrait of a Lady.” Henry James Review 14 (1993): 1–16. West, Edward Sackville. “Books in General.” New Statesman and Nation 17 April 1943: 259. Bloom 24–7. Wiesenfarth, Joseph. “A Woman in The Portrait of a Lady.” Henry James Review 7 (1986): 18–28. Williams, Carolyn. “Closing the Book: The Intertextual End of Jane Eyre.” Victorian Connections. Ed. Jerome J. McGann. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1989. 60–87. Wollstonecraft, Mary. The Education of Daughters with Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life. London: J. Johnson, 1787. Ed. Gina Luria. New York: Garland, 1974. _____. A Vindication of the Rights of Men with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Hints. Ed. Sylvana Tomaselli. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader. 1925. New York: Harvest-Harcourt Brace, 1953. _____. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. New York: Harvest-Harcourt Brace, 1989. _____. To the Lighthouse. 1927. New York: Harvest-Harcourt Brace, 1989.

Index accomplishments, domestic and performative 20, 24, 26, 36, 43, 47, 70 (n. 24), 76, 81, 83, 90, 101–104, 113 (n. 9), 133, 136–137, 153, 164 (n. 8), 167–168, 172, 177–179, 182 activity/action, mental 14, 21, 35–36, 39, 44, 45, 53, 59–62, 72, 119, 138–139, 149–162; parenthetical 154–155; physical 14, 21, 39, 43, 44, 53, 59, 62, 72, 119, 135–137, 148–162, 174–175, 178 aestheticism 167–170, 172 Andres, Sophia, Pre-Raphaelite Art of the Victorian Novel: Narrative Challenges to Visual Gendered Boundaries 166–167 Ankersmit, F. R., “Rococo as the Dissipation of Boredom” 174 Archer, Isabel 13, 120–146, 154, 155, 158, 160–162 Armstrong, Nancy 16 (n. 10) art 166–182; in Jane Eyre 39, 45–47; in Middlemarch 75, 113 (n. 6), 115 (n. 34); in The Portrait of a Lady 132, 134, 143, 144 (n. 15), 145 (n. 16), 146 (nn. 28, 31); in To the Lighthouse 157–162, 164 (n. 14), 165 (nn. 17–18) Astell, Mary, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of Their True and Greatest Interest 24, 27 Auerbach, Erich, “The Brown Stocking” 163 (n. 6) Austen, Jane 63–64, 71 (n. 30), 108, 163 (n. 3) Bankes, William 153, 157–159 beauty 7–8, 12, 14, 16 (nn. 5, 9), 169–171, 173–175, 177–182; in Jane Eyre 20, 22–23, 30–33, 35, 36, 38, 40, 42, 46, 69 (nn. 4, 10), 72–73; in Middlemarch 72–117; in Portrait of a Lady 122–128, 134, 136, 138–140, 143, 144 (n. 14), 146 (nn. 24–26, 28); in To the Lighthouse 155–162, 164 (n. 11)

Bewick, Thomas, A History of British Birds 34, 39, 68, 70 (n. 17) Briscoe, Lily 153, 156–162, 166 Brontë, Charlotte 19–71, 149, 163 (n. 3); see also Jane Eyre Brooke, Celia 74, 117 (n. 49) Brooke, Dorothea 12, 72–118, 154, 155, 158, 160–162 Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful 7, 21–23, 30–31, 33, 49, 51, 57, 70 (nn. 11–12, 20–21), 113 (n. 4), 182 Burns, Helen 37–38 Casaubon, Edward 72–74, 85–95, 98, 101, 103–107, 109, 114 (n. 24), 115 (nn. 25–28, 36), 116 (nn. 41, 43), 132 Casteras, Susan, Images of Victorian Women in English Art 167, 170, 173, 175 Clarissa 25, 64 closure 15, 62–68, 108–112, 119 conduct literature 6–8, 21, 23–31, 68 (n. 3), 69 (nn. 4, 6–7), 70 (nn. 22, 24), 79, 80, 124–128, 156, 169, 171; see also Astell, Mary; Ellis, Sarah Stickney; Fordyce, James; Gisborne, Thomas; Gregory, John; Ruskin, John; Wollstonecraft, Mary Court, Franklin, “The Image of St. Theresa in Middlemarch and Positive Ethics” 78 Daniel Deronda 143 (n. 1) Degas, Edgar, Helene Rouart in Her Father’s Study 175–176, 181 domesticity/domestic sphere 5–6, 8, 53–54, 71 (n. 24), 72, 76, 78–79, 83, 92–93, 104, 106, 111, 128, 170, 174–175 Doyle, Minta 153, 157–159 Drouais, François-Hubert, Madame de

187

188

Index

Pompadour at Her Tambour Frame 178–179 Eagleton, Terry, “Class, Power, and Charlotte Brontë” 33–34 Edwards, Lee, “Women, Energy, and Middlemarch” 116 (n. 42) Eliot, George 72–118, 149, 163 (n. 4); see also Middlemarch Ellis, Sarah Stickney, The Daughters of England, Their Position in Society, Character, and Responsibilities 24, 26– 27, 69 (n. 4), 125 Eyre, Jane (character) 12, 19–71, 72, 155, 156, 158, 160–162 Featherstone, Peter 80–81 feminizing in Jane Eyre 66–68; in The Portrait of a Lady 145–146 (n. 24) fine lady 19, 29–32, 41, 47–48, 50, 52, 55, 57–58, 63, 73, 81, 82, 83, 92, 99, 101, 103, 109–112, 117 (n. 49), 123–128, 133–134, 137, 142, 146 (n. 26), 155, 160, 161; see also Victorian womanhood fluid boredom 10–11, 25, 27; in Jane Eyre 37–38, 41, 61–63; in Middlemarch 14, 72, 87–101, 107–109; in The Portrait of a Lady 122–125, 129–132, 135, 137–140, 143 (n. 1), 150; in To the Lighthouse 150–154, 156–162, 163 (n. 7); in Victorian art 174, 181–182 Fogel, Daniel Mark 163 (n. 1) Fordyce, James 6–7, 23–24, 31, 53; see also Sermons to Young Women Fraser, Hilary, “St. Theresa, St. Dorothea, and Miss Brooke in Middlemarch” 78 friendship 33, 39, 53 Gardencourt 120 Garth, Mary 81, 83, 108, 114 (nn. 15–16, 18–21) Gateshead Hall 19, 34–36 Gemini, Countess (Amy) 137–138 Gisborne, Thomas, An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex 24–26, 53, 69 (n. 7) Goodwood, Caspar 130–132, 134, 139– 143, 144 (n. 14), 145 (n. 24) governess 29, 33–34, 43, 48–50, 81, 158 Greene, Graham 141 Greene, Mildred, “Another Look at Dorothea’s Marriages” 115 (n. 28) Gregory, John, A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters 6, 24–25, 31, 70 (n. 22)

Gulliver’s Travels 39 Gytrash 43–44, 131 Hardy, Barbara 115 (n. 27) Hirsch, Marianne 165 (n. 18) Hochberg, Shifra, “The Vista from Dorothea’s Boudoir Window and a Coleridgian Source” 116 (n. 37) idleness 19, 27, 95, 121, 123, 131, 173, 176; see also inactivity; stasis “In an Artist’s Studio” 8 inactivity 5–8, 19, 30, 53, 96, 121, 131, 135, 152–153, 169, 174–176; see also idleness; stasis independence 50, 84, 96, 121–122, 126, 130, 145 (n. 18), 158 Ingram, Blanche 42, 46–51 inheritance 53–54, 59, 73, 113 (n. 10), 122, 133, 136, 146 (n. 30) isolation 37, 52, 95, 100, 122–123 James, Henry 119–147, 149, 163 (n. 5); see also The Portrait of a Lady Jane Eyre (novel) 12–14, 19–71, 149–150, 155–156, 158, 160–162, 163 (n. 3) Kant, Immanuel 7 Knight, Charmain 65 Ladislaw, Will 91–92, 98–101, 105, 107, 116 (n. 40) Leaska, Mitchell 164 (n. 14) Leighton, Frederick, Lieder ohne Worte 172–175, 181 leisure 55, 120, 121, 133–138, 167, 172; see also Veblen, Thorstein Lidoff, Joan 164 (n. 14) “The Lotus Eaters” 8 Lowick 90–91, 116 (n. 37), 138 Lowood Institution 36–42 Lydgate, Tertius 73, 82–85, 95, 97–99, 101–107, 110, 114 (nn. 21–23), 116 (nn. 38–39), 117 (nn. 44–45, 47–48) The Madwoman in the Attic 64–65 “Mariana” (poem) 5–8, 14, 15, 16 (n. 11), 91 “Mariana in the South” 8 marriage 27, 31–32; in Jane Eyre 13, 50–52, 57, 59, 63–68, 83–84, 115 (n. 29), 119; in Middlemarch 12–13, 80, 83–112, 114 (n. 23), 117 (nn. 46, 49), 119; in The Portrait of a Lady 119–143; in To the Lighthouse 154–162, 164 (nn.

Index 8, 12, 16); in Victorian art 171–172, 182 marriage plot 13, 15, 63–68, 86, 106–112, 119, 125–143, 155–162; see also narrative; traditional narrative action Martin, Carol 113 (n. 7) masculine woman 7 Mason, Bertha 51, 84 materialists 148 Measure for Measure 5, 15 Mellor, Ann, Romanticism and Gender 28, 30, 69 (n. 11) Merle, Madame Serena 132–134, 136–139, 146 (nn. 25–27, 29, 31–33), 179 Middlemarch 12–13, 72–118, 149–150, 152, 154–156, 158, 160–162; see also Eliot, George Miller, D.A., Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel 11–12, 61–68, 108–112 miscarriage 95, 104–105, 117 (n. 49) mistresses 46, 50–52, 54, 61, 70 (n. 23), 138, 158 Mitchell, Sherry, “St. Theresa and Dorothea Brooke: The Absent Road to Perfection in Middlemarch” 78 “Modern Fiction” 148–149, 162, 163 (n. 2) Molyneux, Misses 127–128 narratable 11–12, 61–68, 108–109, 120, 153–154 narrative 9, 11–13, 15, 59, 148–162, 166; see also traditional narrative action Nattier, Jean-Marc, Manon Balletti 177 Naumann, Adolf 75, 91 Niemtzow, Annette 141–142 Nightingale, Florence, Cassandra 145 (n. 19) nonnarratable 11, 13, 61–68, 71 (n. 27), 108–109, 119, 139, 140, 142, 154 novelty/newness in Jane Eyre 20, 36, 40–41, 43–46, 53, 124; in Middlemarch 102; in The Portrait of a Lady 124, 138 Oliphant, Margaret 141 Oliver, Rosamond 57, 66 Osmond, Gilbert 132–143, 144 (n. 15), 145 (nn. 23–24), 126 (nn. 25, 27–29, 31, 35) Osmond, Pansy 135, 138 patient drudge 29–32, 40–41, 43, 54, 56, 63–64, 67, 71 (n. 24), 85, 92, 95, 96, 100, 109, 122, 123, 126–127, 137, 144 (n. 13), 155, 160; see also utility

189

Patmore, Coventry, “The Angel in the House” 113 (n. 12), 125, 157 Pedersen, Glenn 164 (n. 14) peripatetic 43, 45, 52, 62, 99, 121, 124, 130–131 Persuasion 63–64 Phillips, Adam, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life 10–11, 15, 87–88, 99, 102, 105 physiognomy 46 Pilgrim’s Progress 64, 66 plainness 19–21, 25–27, 33, 35–37, 41, 47–49, 51, 56–58, 68, 77, 81–83, 86, 114 (nn. 14, 15, 20, 24), 137, 157–158 Polita, Jina, “Jane Eyre: Classified” 34 Poovey, Mary 31, 89 The Portrait of a Lady 13–14, 119–147, 150, 152, 154–156, 160–162; see also James, Henry Potter, Frank Huddlestone: Girl Resting at a Piano 168–169, 181; Nothing to Do 169 Pre-Raphaelites 166–167, 169, 177, 181–182 public sphere 73 Ramsay, Andrew 153, 155 Ramsay, Cam 151–152, 158, 163 (n. 7) Ramsay, James 151–153, 163 (n. 7) Ramsay, Mr. 151, 153–156 Ramsay, Mrs. 153–162, 164 (nn. 8–15), 166 Ramsay, Prue 154–155, 158 Rasselas 37–38, 182 Rayley, Paul 153, 157–159 red room 34–36, 52 Reed, Eliza 19–21, 24–28, 30, 32, 40, 42, 57, 68–69 Reed, Georgiana 19–21, 23, 25–26, 28, 30, 32, 35, 42, 46–47, 57, 68 Reed, John 19, 34 Richmond, William Blake, Portrait of Mrs. Ernest Moon 172, 181–182 Rischin, Abigail 113 (n. 6), 115 (n. 34) Rivers, Diana 52–54, 56, 58, 62 Rivers, Mary 52–53 Rivers, St. John 54–57, 64–68 Rochester, Bertha 51 Rochester, Edward Fairfax 43–54, 56, 58–60, 62–65, 67–68, 83–84 A Room of One’s Own 163 (n. 3); see also Woolf, Virginia Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 181; Fazio’s Mistress/Aurelia 171–172, 181; Veronica Veronese 169–170, 181 Ruskin, John, “Of Queens’ Gardens” 125

190

Index

Saint Theresa of Avila 77–80, 100, 116, (n. 41) Sargent, John Singer 179–181; Nonchaloir (Repose) 180–182 Scarry, Elaine 7, 16 (n. 3) Schopenhauer, Arthur 16 (n. 4) Sermons to Young Women 6, 23–25, 27, 69, 76, 80–81, 113 (n. 9) sexuality: in Jane Eyre 32, 50–52, 57–58, 66, 140; in “Mariana” 15, 16 (n. 11); in Middlemarch 76, 86; in The Portrait of a Lady 131, 140; in To the Lighthouse 164 (nn. 15–16); in Victorian Art 171, 173, 181 solid boredom 5–6, 10–11, 24; in Jane Eyre 35, 47–48, 52, 55; in Middlemarch 94–95, 102–108, 111; in The Portrait of a Lady 128, 130, 131, 135–140, 142, 150; in To the Lighthouse 150–152, 155–160, 163 (n. 7), 164 (nn. 8, 10); in Victorian art 181–182 Spacks, Patricia Meyer 9–10, 16 (nn. 6– 8), 69 (n. 6), 122, 144 (n. 7) spinsterhood 19–20, 29, 32, 63, 68, 71 (n. 32), 75, 81, 82, 86, 88, 99, 112, 114 (nn. 15, 21), 115 (n. 29), 122, 127, 130, 140, 144 (n. 13), 147 (n. 36), 156–159, 161 Stackpole, Henrietta 126–128, 130, 140, 142–143, 145 (nn. 17–19), 147 (n. 36), 158 stasis 5–7, 16 (nn. 2, 4), 30, 32, 38, 39, 43–44, 55, 62, 108, 128, 135, 141, 146 (n. 28), 149–153, 156–157, 159, 169–171, 174; see also idleness; inactivity Szirotny, June, “‘No Sorrow I Have Thought More About’: The Tragic Failure of George Eliot’s St. Theresa” 116 (n. 41) sublime 7, 22, 30, 33, 35, 38–40, 45–46, 58–59, 69 (n. 11), 70 (nn. 12, 13, 18, 20), 71 (n. 26) supernatural 35–36, 43–44, 52, 58–59 Tanner, Tony 141 Temple, Miss 38–40 Thomas, Jeanie, “An Inconvenient Indefiniteness: George Eliot, Middlemarch, and Feminism” 114 (n. 22), 116 (n. 43) Thompson, William, An Enquiry into the Elementary Principles of Beauty in the Works of Nature and Art 22–23

Thornfield Hall 42–52 time 5–6, 8, 15 (note1), 70 (n. 18), 91, 106, 120, 124, 134, 144 (n. 10), 152–154, 167 To the Lighthouse 148–165; see also Woolf, Virginia Touchett, Mr. 120–121, 143 (nn. 4–5), 146 (n. 30) Touchett, Mrs. 121–124, 126, 136, 139, 146 (n. 26) Touchett, Ralph 121–122, 124, 126–127, 134, 136–139, 143 (n. 4), 145 (n. 21), 146 (n. 30) traditional narrative action 12, 14, 60–68, 142, 148–162; see also narrative Tromly, Annette 71 (n. 31) utility 19–21, 23–24, 27–29, 32, 34, 37, 39, 43, 45, 53–60, 63–64, 68 (n. 3), 70 (nn. 14, 24), 71 (n. 29), 73, 75–100, 103, 106, 122, 126–128, 134, 137, 144 (n. 13), 156–161, 164 (nn. 8–9), 174, 176; see also patient drudge Vanita, Ruth 164 (nn. 12, 16) Varens, Celine 46, 50 Veblen, Thorstein, The Theory of the Leisure Class 133–134, 137–139 Victorian womanhood 6–7, 11–12, 14, 43, 102, 104, 113 (nn. 11–12), 124–129, 145 (n. 19), 166–182; see also fine lady Vigée-Lebrun, Élisabeth, Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat 177–178 Vincy, Rosamond 72–74, 80–84, 94, 98–99, 101–108, 110–111, 113 (n. 13), 114 (nn. 14–15, 19–21), 117 (nn. 44–45, 47–49) Warburton, Lord 121–122, 127–132, 139, 142, 145 (nn. 21, 24), 147 (n. 36) West, Edward Sackville 127, 141 Williams, Carolyn 65 Wollstonecraft, Mary: The Education of Daughters 28–29, 69 (n. 8); A Vindication of the Rights of Men 30–31, 56; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 29–32, 50, 52, 80, 101, 114 (n. 17), 115 (n. 33), 123 Woolf, Virginia 148–165; see also A Room of One’s Own; To the Lighthouse