If we think of the Victorian-era orphan as male, he is Oliver in Fagin’s den of thieves or Pip shivering in a graveyard, or ten-year-old David being told on his tenth birthday that his mother is dead.
“There was no real need to tell me so,” writes David the narrator. “I had already broken out into a desolate cry and felt an orphan in the wide world.”
But what if the orphan is female? Jane Eyre comes at once to mind, and Dickens’s Little Nell. I wouldn’t think immediately of Becky Sharp—we don’t get much of her childhood in the novel, and Thackeray also tells us she never really was a child, by which comment he surely means that she has always been sharp and savvy, adept in the ways of the world. Still, Becky is first encountered as an orphan, living on sufferance at Miss Pinkerton’s Academy, not so different from the way the orphaned Jane lives with the Reeds.
Probably my mother’s story of incredible survival colors my thinking, but I would argue that the female orphans of Victorian fiction are generally tougher than their male counterparts. While Pip shivers, both Becky and Jane get on with what they need to do. Becky, as we’ve seen, is awesome in her resourcefulness and resilience. As for Jane, small and plain though she may be, it’s still the case that at every crisis in the novel from her first encounter with John Reed to her resistance to St. John Rivers’ proposal that she become a missionary’s wife, we feel her drawing strength from the one thing she can count on—herself. “Who in the world cares for you? Or who will be injured by what you do?” her own “Feeling” urges, when Rochester, revealed as a would-be bigamist, pressures her to stay on as his mistress. “Still indomitable was the reply, ‘I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.” In truth, it’s a stretch to see Jane as friendless. She has Bessie at Gateshead, Miss Temple and Helen Burns at Lowood, Rochester at Thornfield, the Rivers sisters at Moor House. But when these die or fail her or circumstances change, that bedrock self abides. And how different is this, really, from Becky Sharp? Becky—brilliant player of roles—might seem more to exemplify panache and wiliness and Jane sincerity, but both, as I perceive them, have the constancy of self-reliance. They move along, propelled by circumstances, not quite daring in Jane’s words to ask for liberty but seeking at least new servitude.
Jane and Becky both become governesses, perhaps the one respectable employment available in the 1840s to genteel women in distress. In fiction the governess like the orphan finds herself in an unresolved position. She has worth but needs it to be recognized. She’s vulnerable to possible mistreatment but also well placed to overcome her disadvantages. Jane Fairfax in Emma refers to the life of a governess as “the slave trade,” but for Becky and Jane it’s a “career open to talent,” to borrow that revolutionary phrase. Becky’s good French, her singing and her wit, Jane’s drawings, which express her almost vatic power as do her bold retorts to Rochester, help gain them their one possible prize. Both exemplify how the narrative of the nineteenth-century female orphan invariably merges—unless like Little Nell she dies in childhood—with the narrative of the heroine who must marry. The list expands from Becky and Jane to Esther Summerson, Dorothea Brooke, Isabel Archer, Clara Middleton, Laura Fairlie, Eustasia Vye, and Sue Bridehead—all orphans though not all introduced as children. But their orphaned (read unprotected) condition is relevant to the key task before them. “I must be my own Mama,” says Becky. She is speaking not in current self-help parlance of her need to “mother herself,” but of that to find her own husband.
But then aren’t heroines always more or less on their own when it comes to this task, even if they have living parents? Think, for example, of Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet or Anne Elliot. In the story of the young woman about whom Henry James says the novel makes that “ado,” parents, if not dead, are usually absent, tyrannical or foolish. Or if both parents aren’t dead, then one is, so that the heroine without a father lacks standing and protection and the heroine without a mother lacks guidance. Able to count only on herself, our young woman must muddle through, and the qualities she shows in choosing and winning a husband define for us who she is.
The whole of Jane Eyre builds to Jane’s marrying Rochester. Becky Sharp, on the other hand, has her series of campaigns, failing first with fat foolish Jos Sedley, then missing the chance to marry the master, Sir Pitt
