Moralizing Women: The Expression of Belief in the Victorian Novel

Abstract

This dissertation examines the longstanding critical distaste for didactic literature and the marginalization of certain Victorian women novelists' work for its overt moral, religious, and political commitments. Exploring women's particular relationship to novelistic didacticism, I show that authors like Ellen Wood, George Eliot, Elizabeth Missing Sewell, and Sarah Grand consciously used didactic forms to address the risks of expressing belief in fiction and challenge stereotypes of the moralizing woman writer. Victorian women novelists faced difficulty avoiding charges of moralizing; while entering the public literary sphere brought charges of vulgar self-display, any counter emphasis on didactic aims brought related charges of moral vanity. Either way, women supposedly failed to embody the figure of the spontaneously inspired, unselfconscious artist celebrated by ethical and aesthetic discourse of the period. These novelists' experience of such constraints, however, prompted remarkable insights into the problematic ironies inherent in such notions of artistic unselfconsciousness as well as alternative strategies for managing the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in the novel.

This project reveals that the modernist critique of Victorian moralizing had an antecedent in nineteenth-century religious tradition itself. Even more surprisingly, all the novelists I study, religious and secular alike, turn to religious forms--prayer in particular--to rethink authorial self-consciousness and the limited possibilities for expressing moral, religious, or political belief in literature. Conceptualizing prayer as an address to an audience between self and other, they cultivate an authorial voice that is neither overly (vainly) self-conscious nor impossibly unselfconscious. Their didacticism thus involves more than the artistically simplistic, morally presumptuous aim of saving the reader; instead, the engagement of the reader and the author with the novel's complex modes of moral self-consciousness allows them, willingly (after an extensive acknowledgment of the risks involved), to save each other.